Computational
Thinking
Thinking
This computational thinking skill involves removing unnecessary detail so you can focus only on what is important in a problem.
What is abstraction?
When planning a new attendance-tracking system, teachers, IT support, students, and administrators all qualify as this group whose needs must be considered during development.
Who are stakeholders?
To allow employees to securely access an organization’s internal network from home, a VPN typically relies on two key technologies: one to encrypt data, and one to authenticate users.
What are tunneling and encryption?
This OS technique determines which process runs next, often using strategies such as round robin, priority-based, or first-come-first-served.
What is scheduling?
This data structure contains methods such as isEmpty(), resetNext(), and getNext(), and allows an algorithm to step through all stored items one by one.
What is a Collection?
This term refers to breaking a complex problem into smaller, more manageable parts that can be solved independently.
What is decomposition?
A systems analyst shadows employees as they perform their daily tasks to understand inefficiencies in the current workflow.
What is direct observation?
Network congestion and signal quality are two examples of these variables that can impact how quickly data travels across a network.
What are factors that affect data transmission speed?
When a process is temporarily halted because an external event such as a keyboard input or hardware signal requires immediate attention.
What is an interrupt?
A ← [12, 7, 25, 9, 31]
DEF FUNC():
FOR i ← 0 TO length(A)−1 DO
IF A[i] = target THEN RETURN i
END FOR
RETURN -1
What is a linear search?
A complex system is analysed and broken into five separate routines: input validation, data cleaning, sorting, formatting, and report generation.
This illustrates how this computational-thinking concept increases clarity and reduces redundancy in program design.
What are sub-procedures?
A designer maps how data moves between processes, showing inputs, outputs, and data stores.
This diagram is one of the standard tools used to represent system requirements before implementation.
What is a data flow diagram?
This technique reduces file size so that information can be transmitted more quickly over a network.
What is compression?
This technique repeatedly checks a device to determine whether it requires service, often wasting CPU time if no event has occurred.
What is polling?
Printers waiting for jobs, customers online in a queue for tickets, and processes waiting for CPU time all illustrate this First-In-First-Out data structure.
What are some examples of queues?
A logistics system considers running real-time package tracking, payment processing, and fraud detection at the same time.
Although doing this might speed up user experience, the team rejects it because shared database access increases the risk of inconsistent records under heavy load.
What are the considerations with concurrent processing?
Developers create a simplified, early version of a new ticketing system so clients can evaluate the interface and functionality before full development.
What is a prototype?
This network security mechanism uses rule-based filtering, but may also inspect packet headers, enforce port restrictions, and log suspicious activity to prevent unauthorized access attempts at the network perimeter.
What is a firewall?
To avoid keeping an entire program in RAM at once, the OS divides it into fixed-size blocks and loads only the parts currently needed.
This technique is a key component of virtual memory management.
What is paging?
FOR i ← 0 TO n−2 DO
FOR j ← 0 TO n−2−i DO
IF A[j] > A[j+1] THEN
SWAP A[j], A[j+1]
ENDIF
ENDFOR
ENDFOR
What is a Bubble Sort?
A payroll algorithm calculates end-of-year bonuses, but must first detect cases where employees joined mid-year or took unpaid leave.
Identifying these unusual cases demonstrates what key planning requirement in algorithm design?
What are exceptions?
An analyst performs interviews and does some observations, finding out that a train ticketing kiosk has unclear error messages, tiny buttons, inconsistent navigation, and poor feedback when a payment fails. What key concept do these failings fall under?
What is usability? (usability problems)
This networking device determines the optimal path for data packets by consulting special tables, forwarding traffic across different networks, applying network address translation when required, and enforcing segmentation between subnets—all while operating at OSI Layer 3.
What is a router?
In a multitasking system, the CPU rapidly switches between multiple processes, giving each one a small window of execution so that they appear to run simultaneously.
This type of loop continues running only while its Boolean condition remains true, making it useful for tasks such as input validation or reading data until a sentinel value is reached.
What is a WHILE loop?