Abstract:

The modern society requires creative thinking personalities with adequate thinking in rapidly changing conditions. Due to the rapid evolutionary nature of computer science, lifelong learning becomes even more important. Equipping students with critical and creative thinking skills is very important for computer science area and can make learning more effective. Both critical and creative thinking skills can be taught by offering explicit courses on such topics or by development important skills as part of the content of various courses in computer science or computer engineering programs. Teaching critical skills along with course content may be more appropriate than transferring the subject knowledge. Some topics may provide a very natural way to teach critical thinking skills.

Many strategic educational programs conclude that It is important to give a high priority in any educational system to the Improving the quality of students’ thinking. The aim of the entire Computer science and engineering degree program is to teach the involved students to think critically. Every course in computer science field demands students to clarify their thoughts sufficiently so that those thoughts to be expressed in a form that a computer can carry them out. The various programming courses comprehend different algorithms knowledge and mental model making abilities. In this paper, we describe our efforts through algorithmic problems solving on a topic from an introductory course in a typical computer science graduate program to infuse critical thinking skills into the course contents. The critical thinking analysis led us to propose a set of algorithm problems corresponding to the relevant element of the critical thinking structure. With this paper, we introduce some algorithmic tasks so that force the students in computer sciences to broaden their critical thinking skills and mental model making abilities.

Keywords:

Computer science education, critical thinking, algorithms, learning sequence, problem-solving skills.