Ways of Thinking in Informatics is a 6 ECTS university course that is mandatory for all first-year students of Informatics bachelor studies at TU Wien. It was conceptualised by Chris Frauenberger and Peter Purgathofer in 2015, and is part of the degree programs since winter semester 2017. It was inspired by »The first five computer science principles pilots«, re-interpreted through the lens of European scientific traditions. This page describes the content and organization of the course as well as our experiences from organizing it.
To get a first impression, you might want to watch our short overview video. You will find a detailled description of our context, inspiration, the curricular embedding, discussion and reflections in our CACM article »Ways of Thinking in Informatics« that was published in July 2017.
You will find this page to be work in progress. We are continuously improving sections, also reflecting the transitory nature of most areas of informatics. We chose pubpub for this site because it allows discourse not only around articles, but down to paragraphs and words, so we invite you to contribute. To this end, we included »Calls for discussion« at the end of each chapter, but we welcome whatever input you want to give.
Thank you!