The Computational Thinking Workshop Supports Students’ Critical Thinking for Cendekia Muda Bandung Junior High School Teachers
On Friday, June 21, 2019, Community Service was conducted by School of Computing lecturers at the Cendekia Muda Bandung Junior High School. This service took the form of a Workshop with the theme Computational Thinking to Support Students’ Critical Thinking for Cendekia Muda Bandung Junior High School Teachers. The participants were 31 people consisting not only subject teachers but also attended by leaders (Principals, Vice Principals, Foundations, Admin, and IT department). This shows the enthusiasm of the school to know, understand, and prepare a new thinking approach to welcome the industrial revolution 4.0 based on the development of rapidly changing information technology.
The workshop consisted of two activities to introduce and provide training in computational thinking at the junior high school level. The purpose of this workshop is to enrich the teaching methods of junior high school subjects using the computational thinking approach. This presents its challenges, not only for workshop presenters but also for workshop participants because these computational-based thinking patterns are tried and studied to be applied to non-computational fields. The first session material is the introduction of computational thinking, which contains definitions, backgrounds, and four main components, namely: decomposition, pattern recognition, abstraction, and algorithm. The second session was a workshop in the form of training in the application of computational thinking for application to five different junior high school subject groups.
The application of computational thinking for non-computational subjects is suitable for types of problem-solving assignments. Based on the evaluation of the workshop to participants, there were variations from the results of the initialization of the application of computational thinking to the subjects of the Natural Sciences-Mathematics, Religion, Language, Social Sciences-Citizenship Education, and Physical Education, Sports, and Health (Sports)-Craft. Not all computational thinking components can be applied in existing subjects. Also, some components have been used without referring specifically to existing computational thinking components. With this service, the lecturer team consisting of Dana S. Kusumo, Veronikha Effendy and Donni Richasdy hoped to enrich thinking methods in general subjects in junior high school. The community service was also assisted by laboratory assistants Database, Multimedia, Motion, Tel-C, and RPL-GDC in the Faculty of Informatics (put in the black box team).
