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An important bridge between the humanities and science is critical thinking.

By developing students’ critical thinking skills and creating opportunities for them to practice critical thinking while at RIT, they can be in a better position to consider the long-term impact of their design decisions.

Teaching the skills and knowledge to operate in a highly competitive environment allows for the opportunity to challenge thought and decision making.

Critical thinking and data provide a way to distance yourself form your biases and examine problems more rationally.

By probing how we think about thinking, we become better at making good decisions rapidly.

Introducing students to the concepts and practices of applied critical thinking in their first semester at RIT is important for creating an early understanding that ACT is an expectation RIT community members have of one another.

A critical thinker benefits from a clarity and an objectivity that helps strike the right emotional tone and lead an individual toward a positive outcome.

The ability to self-critique and self-correct one’s own solutions before acting on them is important in any field.

In computer science we deal with many different algorithms to solve different problems, but it is very important to understand which algorithm is appropriate for a given problem.

We use a wide variety of activities to encourage students to draw connections among topics and to examine how they learn. 

This ability to create the failure of the design is more important than having it succeed.

Taking the time to learn from each other and recognize what types of problems are being solved and in what ways can make you a better thinker and solver within your discipline.

The best part of my job is to encourage overwhelmed students to think first and click second.

Students spend a majority of their life outside the classroom, surrounded by opportunities to hold what they’re learning academically up to the complexities of their lives.

Ideally students begin to see that their ideas only get better and more viable as they adapt them to critique and concerns from different points of view.

I love the diversity and variability that goes with tackling large scientific problems.

Students learn it’s not about the end result, but the process they took to get there.

Critical engagement with a given topic is the first step in any creative process, from the design of a research project to a video game.

At every opportunity, I try to put students in the role of an industry professional approaching the problem.

Education should and can be a stimulating collaboration between knowledge seekers. The outcome can be a brilliant success or a dismal failure, but the learning and thinking process is always instructive for the participants.

The key to success is to realize that every solution and development impacts people in expected and unexpected ways. Questioning various perspectives and assumptions, hopefully, leads to better solutions.

The concept of critical making is oftentimes limited to the creation of physical components but in reality, it covers any way of turning abstract thoughts into organized elements that can be experienced by oneself and shared with others.

To me one of the greatest benefits of a college education is the accumulated experience one gets in critical thinking across all the courses they take regardless of the specific curriculum.

Critical thinking for an organization needs structure and facilitation, opportunity for dialogue, occasional conflict and lots of communication. 

Learning never ends—it is a life-long process.

Through students’ educational journey, they will encounter a rich diversity of knowledge, beliefs, and opinions that may be congruous or incongruous with theirs.

When they are faced with a system design, students must think critically to first decompose the system into functional units and then draw from their toolbox to identify the correct components to meet the function of that unit.

Applied critical thinking is a necessity for those to consider and offer honest perspectives on controversial topics that matter to them in today’s world

People with critical thinking abilities are readily adaptable when they face situations in which there are no clear-cut answers.

Critical thinking is the stepping back and seeing the big picture that enables the generation of new knowledge, making scientific progress without a roadmap.

Critical thinking involves patiently sifting through permutations of possibilities to discover a best course—not just best in a mean/average sense, but taking into account how robust a choice might be to unexpected developments.

If you can’t define, analyze and critique games you can’t learn to make good ones, you can just hope you hit it lucky by accident.