Authors’ Response: Keeping the “Computation” in “Computational Thinking” Through Unplugged Activities

The commentaries provide useful questions and responses that help us understand better how unplugged activities serve as scaffolding to engage students in computer science. They help us to consider how activities relate to computational thinking, particularly by connecting the scaffolding in the activities to the limits of computation. This in turn helps us to navigate the somewhat disputed boundary between activities that clearly use computation as it occurs on physical devices, and metaphors that could potentially be misleading.