Research of Computational Thinking Empowering Medical Students

EasyChair Preprint 10133

Abstract

In this age, Computational thinking has become the third major way of thinking alongside theoretical and experimental thinking. "Computing technology" has been widely used in all aspects of the medical field and has become a necessary supporting tool for the development of modern medicine. For medical students, the ability of computational thinking plays a crucial role in basic research, clinical diagnosis, and treatment in the future. However, medical students learning primarily depends on experimental thinking and lacks computational thinking education. This article proposes three different ways to train students' computational thinking. First, by taking computer courses, students can better understand how computer scientists think about things as well as the basic concepts of computational thinking from a theoretical and practical perspective so as to cultivate students' computational thinking. Secondly, when using the IMindMap, the software drawing mind maps, students can directly progress their thinking in the process of divergent thinking. Third, through modeling and programming, students use mind maps to abstract problems, organize and draw flowcharts of their creations, and then start modeling and completing system design with the help of Scratch software. Then, combined with real and concrete medical cases, MATLAB and Python enable students to apply computational thinking in practice. Finally, the current study proposes a hybrid curriculum based on MOOC+ Small Private Online Course (SPOC) to create a kind of learning environment suitable for computational thinking. So far, two rounds of experiments have been conducted and this approach has shown positive effects. However, there are some issues needed to be addressed in the future.

Keyphrases: BLENDED COURSE TEACHING, MATLAB, MOOC, computational thinking, medical students, online learning

@booklet{EasyChair:10133,
  author    = {Jia Rui Si and Yu Shan Huang and Liang Yi Yang and Yuan Xue Liu and Jia Wei Liu},
  title     = {Research of Computational Thinking Empowering Medical Students},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 10133},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2023}}