Computational thinking in the EPFL curriculum
A transversal skill for all students
Pioneering the movement towards the integration of computational thinking in its curriculum, EPFL introduced in 2013 the course “Information, Computation and Communication (ICC)”, which was operated by the School of Computer and Communication Sciences. The course got a major refresh in 2018 when the practical elements of application through programming were merged with computational thinking. By means of this course, EPFL implemented a new vision of fundamental education of scientists and engineers, in which mathematics, physics and computational thinking were the three transversal pillars necessary for any student to be prepared for their further training in their disciplines. A MOOC opens up this content to the world.
The transversal skill of computational thinking is reinforced in the disciplines through specific courses (see EPFL courses filtered for “computational”) at three levels:
Bachelor courses such as computational physics or computational chemistry.
Master courses such as computational linear algebra, computational quantum physics, or computational photography.
Specific programmes like the data science master and minor or the minor in computational neurosciences.
More specifically, the integration of machine learning approaches in courses across the programmes was investigated by Alexandre Alahi and Mathieu Salzmann. Their inventory database can be consulted here.
EPFL set up an infrastructure to support teachers and students towards more computational thinking in disciplinary courses. As part of a Swissuniversities project in the program “Digital skills”, the Center for Digital Education (CEDE) implemented the “Jupyter Notebooks for Education” project. Jupyter Notebooks are interactive documents that combine code, equations, visualizations and text. The project provides technical infrastructure and support as well as pedagogical support in the form of consultation, workshops, teacher community animation and a collection of educational notebooks. Teachers can request financial support through the DRIL (Digital Resources for Instruction and Learning) fund.
Complementary to the work of broadly implementing computational thinking in the curriculum, the accompanying research follows three strands:
- As part of the project “Jupyter Notebooks for Education”, the Center for Digital Education collaborates with teachers to measure the impact of educational notebooks on teachers’ practices as well as on students’ learning processes and outcomes, both with regards to computational thinking and disciplinary understanding. Notebooks as tools to develop computational thinking for non-EPFL students are also explored in other projects (e.g. Farah et al., 2020).
- The ethical dimension of working with data-intensive applications and information systems is explored empirically as part of the project Jupyter Notebooks for education. Complementary to this, a project based in the BeLEARN digital education hub is testing teaching material on deepfakes as a way to develop ethical computational thinking.
- Computational thinking is often measured by means of self-assessment which is methodologically problematic especially with novice learners, or by means of ad hoc instruments like exams. The main problem with most computational thinking assessments for adults is their lack of evidence of validity. A team of the Center for Learning Sciences LEARN therefore developed and empirically validated an instrument to assess computational thinking among adults (Lafuente et al., 2022).