On the 11th of April, ten countries joined their computational brainpower to explore each other’s vision on Computational and Mathematical thinking. What started as a little chaotic conversation, after 30-45 minutes this conference found it’s a voice. We started with a Skype call to Paul Drijvers from the University of Utrecht. I love a chaotic start of a conference. :-)

With the dedication I come to expect from experts in education; we started to map our contexts and developed posters. Each country had a short presentation, with a colorful and diverse slide deck (to be added later here), we got a glimpse on the internal workings in a country on computational and mathematical thinking. I’ll wait until the slide decks have been published to give a detailed account. However, a few fun facts;

  • Norway doesn’t have a subject called it/computer science/informatics.
  • The ComputerBasedMath.org initiative presented great teaching materials.
  • Every country is struggling with computational thinking and how to embed it in other subjects or even offer it as a separate subject in the lessen table.
  • Alec Titterton from Wolfram shared a great resource! Wolframe projects for the Raspberry Pi.

Paul Behan had a great question to stimulate our brain.
How to calculate the most efficient route for a frozen food delivery company after Brexit? With a nondirectional graph and a simplification of a map. Many aspects of computational thinking went into the problem-solving. Great fun!

The meeting ended at the national railway museum with an excellent dinner in the ‘first class waiting room’ and a guided tour in the museum. I’ve added a few pictures below of the museum, looking at pictures of people presenting is quite dull. The first picture reminded me of a kind of robot. :-)