Abstract: Computational thinking is an widely-concerned and important concept in current international computer community, and it is an important issue which needs to be researched by current computer educational. It has been wildly researched and discussed by many domestic and overseas scholars in computer community, academic and philosophical circles on this subject, although there are some positive results, but the differences are still widely remained. Firstly, according to the clues in time and the characters of the formation of computational thinking, a method of phases was proposed by the article basic on its infancy, foundation and chaos period, it widely analysed the calculation of the formation and development process of the computational thinking and gave a panoramic view of the evolution process of computational thinking. Then, it illuminated the key content of the computational thinking, including the conception, the principium, the application of the computational thinking in education, and it summaricd the computational thinking. Based on the existing research results, we made a vista of the future research direction of the computational thinking and its challenges.

Key words: Computational thinking, Computing disciplines, Scientific computing