The four pillars of computational thinking from the CBSE CT & AI curriculum, each with a simple real example.
The four pillars
- Decomposition — break a big problem into smaller parts. Planning a class party? Split it into food, music, decoration, invites.
- Pattern recognition — spot what repeats. Every party needs a budget and a time — that's a reusable pattern.
- Abstraction — ignore the unnecessary detail and keep what matters. A map leaves out every tree and shows only the roads you need.
- Algorithm design — write the ordered steps to solve it.
Why it matters
These four skills let you solve any problem the way a computer scientist does — and they work far beyond coding, in maths, science and daily planning.
Activity: take "get ready for school" and decompose it into 5 steps, then find one pattern you repeat every morning.