Linking Budgeting with Computational Thinking Pedagogy: Program Theory, Performance, and Budgeting

The pedagogy involved with preparing and delivering an analytically based course must contend with a number of important limitations or challenges. The challenges/limitations include needing a context for the use of the analytics being taught; others include where best to embed analytic courses in degree curriculum, determining content and delivery along with a number of additional limitations. A context can be created for these courses by establishing a base of usefulness of the course content and how it relates to other courses and to professional applications. However, one useful approach for a budgeting course is to put the analytics in a context of production and performance. These two significant elements of any problem-solving organization finance and budgeting process are significant features of teaching a course in budgeting. The article presented here is an illustration of a context-based approach along with features of pedagogy based in computational thinking which can be used to operationalize course elements while overcoming other salient limitations for analytic courses. The exemplar of a budgeting course is posed as an example.