I am creating a course called Computational Thinking in Our World to first run at Ryerson University in January 2013.
It is a broad-spectrum course that will introduce students from across the university to how programming is increasingly providing the underpinnings to the systems that make up our technological world, including having them program simple versions of those systems. The hope is that this will give them a better sense of what is going on around them, what issues that raises, and thereby make them better and more-informed citizens.
One of the major challenges, of course, is how to make this accessible to a variety of students who not only have never programmed before, but may not have strong math skills. Like it or not, math is a pretty key part of many of the systems we're interested in. It's likely we'll be using a version of Scratch augmented to facilitate the calculations necessary for the lab component of this course.
