Computational Problem Solving in Plethora

Many educational endeavors address the challenge of developing approaches, tools and platforms for introducing computational problem-solving skills, often referred to as computational thinking, into the school system. Plethora, a game-based platform, teaches the concepts and skills of computational problem solving, by means of graphically attractive logical challenges that are expressed in a natural language. It was developed at the Weizmann Institute of Science, in collaboration with The Israeli Center for Educational Technology. Plethora is used in schools across Israel and was selected as the leading tool for national school-level cyber competitions. In this panel, we will explain our approach towards computational problem solving, show how it is implemented with Plethora, present the scientific basis of Plethora, and finally show how Plethora can be extended to discuss computational models of scientific phenomena.