Catching up on the announcement of Wolfram Language v14, something interesting appeared in The Story Continues: Announcing Version 14 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica by Stephen Wolfram, published on January 9, 2024.
The workflow is typically as follows. First, you have to conceptualize in computational terms what you want. (And, yes, that step requires computational thinking—which is a very important skill that too few people have so far learned.) Then you tell the LLM what you want, and it’ll try to write Wolfram Language code to achieve it.
And just like that - we are off to learning (about) computational thinking.
Definition
Per University of York: Computational thinking (CT) is a problem-solving technique that imitates the process computer programmers go through when writing computer programmes and algorithms.
Stephen Wolfram defines Computational Thinking as “formulating things with enough clarity, and in a systematic enough way, that one can tell a computer how to do them.”
Further Exploration
Wolfram often times (and in the links below) discusses the broad application of computational thinking – not just in physics but across various domains. He, of course, emphasizes the transformative power of the Wolfram Language in enabling & teaching computational thinking.
Links
- How to Teach Computational Thinking—Stephen Wolfram Writings
- How to Think Computationally about AI, the Universe and Everything—Stephen Wolfram Writings
- How to Teach Computational Thinking—Stephen Wolfram Writings
- Computational Thinking Courses: Wolfram U
- Frontiers of Computational Thinking: A SXSW Report—Stephen Wolfram Writings
- What We’ve Built Is a Computational Language (and That’s Very Important!)—Stephen Wolfram Writings
- What Is a Computational Essay?—Stephen Wolfram Writings
- Just Published: Adventures of a Computational Explorer—Stephen Wolfram Writings