Can computational thinking reduce marginalization in the future Internet?

Maths is presently regarded as the key driver that underpins Science, Education and Technology (SET) skills. In spite of significant studies, investment and efforts, math skills and widespread enthusiasm for SET remain elusive. In South Africa's disadvantaged communities, poor quality maths teaching and poor maths performance, both legacies of past political engineering, further fuel marginalization. Computational thinking is a new characterization of some specific procedural thinking, abstraction, problem solving and organizational skills that are finding their way from computer science programs into other fields. The paper describes our refocus of content in BingBee, a SET skill-building kiosk project targeting disadvantaged communities. As we shift to emphasize computational thinking more explicitly, we speculate that these skills could complement, and perhaps eventually displace, some elements of maths as the dominant driver of SET. The confluence of better tools, open service interfaces, and the rapid spread of handsets and devices into marginalized communities is an opportunity to build more widespread computational thinking skills. This could in turn facilitate a future Internet which is more inclusive, and in which users are able to create their own services.