While studying, look for the activity icon for: • Vocabulary terms with e-flash cards and matching activities. • Starter files for hands-on examples and other exercises. These activities can be accessed at www.g-wlearning.com/informationtechnology/1773 Computational Thinking I n July 2018, the US Department of Energy (DOE) announced the world’s most powerful supercomputer at that time. The Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory was capable of processing 200 petaflops, or 200,000 trillion calculations, every second. It was the most powerful computer in the world, yet it could do nothing without a computer program. Summit could process exceptionally quickly, but it could not determine what to process with- out a human writing instructions for it. For all its speed and complexity, Summit was still incapable of original human thought. Computer programming is like a superpower. As the programmer, you con- trol the behavior of a computer and make it do anything you say using its built-in instructions. Organizing these built-in instructions into computer programs is a human endeavor called computer programming. Thinking like how a com- puter works is called computational thinking. It takes computational thinking to translate human ideas into computer instructions. R eading Prep The opening pages of the textbook generally provide a preview of the text and how the material will be presented. Before reading this chapter, review the intro- ductory material that appears before Chapter 1. How can this material help you understand how to use this text? College and Career Readiness CHAPTER 1 Sections 1.1 Computational Thinking 1.2 THINK Copyright Goodheart-Willcox Co., Inc. 2