Fostering computational thinking in engineering education: Challenges, examples, and best practices

Computational Thinking is a core capability for most engineers. The term summarizes a set of skills needed to transform real-life challenges into problems that can be solved with the help of a computer and to apply computer-based solutions to questions at hand. This mindset is fundamental to almost every engineering task. However, teaching Computational Thinking is a great challenge for educators worldwide. In designing and implementing university curricula, one has to take an increasing number of arguments into consideration. Technological progress requires the design, creation, and analysis of increasingly large and complex systems. Engineering working environments and tasks demand interdisciplinary teams and close communication between involved groups. In designing engineering curricula, these factors need to be considered and the necessary skills must be implicitly or explicitly developed. This paper highlights three examples of classes and projects aimed at enabling students to develop and increase Computational Thinking through systematic introduction of computational tools. From these successful case studies, the paper derives six best practices for fostering Computational Thinking in engineering education. A review of several examples is given, that are used to highlight and extract best practices. This provides a comprehensive overview of the relationships and simplifies the application of the aforementioned principles to course and curriculum designs.