Selecting Examples for CS Courses: The Case of a Computational Thinking MOOC

H ow should computer science educators choose examples for the courses they teach? This question was a fundamental question for us when we were developing a MOOC on computational thinking that targets a variety of populations. One of the biggest challenges we faced was choosing appropriate examples, since (a) the chosen examples had to foster learners’ acquisition of thinking skills used in problem-solving processes, and (b) they had to be imparted using distance-learning tools. In this paper, we share the criteria we formulated for choosing such examples and demonstrate them with three main examples used in our course.