Backing bright ideas, such as Google, has built Stanford University professor and University of B.C. alumnus David Cheriton a fortune estimated at $3.1 billion, but to him that's beside the point.

"It's an exciting existence," Cheriton said of the job at Stanford he refuses to give up.

The money, however, helps him support educational initiatives he is passionate about, such as UBC's efforts to expand the teaching of computational thinking as a problem-solving discipline, which Cheriton is backing with a $7.5-million donation.

On one side, $7 million of the contribution will be used to support a research chair in computer systems in the department of computer science, its first endowed position.

More importantly, however, $535,800 will go toward the creation of a first-year course in computational thinking, which UBC intends to open to as many students outside of computing science as possible.

Cheriton described computational thinking as the methodological way computer scientists go about solving problems and designing systems. "There is a discipline (to) thinking about things, of approaching problems, of how you organize information that's valuable for people outside of computing," Cheriton said.

For example, a computer scientist designing a "fault-tolerant" system always creates at least two ways of completing a task, so there is always a backup in case something goes wrong.

"When you're in computing, you're dealing with that, day in and day out," but it is a methodology he has also applied in the investments he has made and other aspects of his life.

UBC president Arvind Gupta added that researchers at the university have increasingly become aware that the systematic way of computational thinking has much broader applications.

"We used to think that biological science was very divorced from the quantitative sciences, including computer science," Gupta said. "Now, we understand that thinking about the challenges facing medical sciences, pharmacological sciences, really can be addressed with the computational mindset."

Gupta added that the university wants to open up the new course to as many other disciplines as possible, including the social sciences. The goal is to start offering it in 2016, and he said they will draw on Cheriton's ideas to continue developing its curriculum. "The gift is phenomenal, we're so pleased with it," Gupta said. "And the engagement with professor Cheriton is also very meaningful to us."

Cheriton is famous for seeing the brilliance in the algorithm devised by grad students Sergey

Brin and Larry Page to tease organization out of the chaos of the Internet, and backing them with $100,000, along with coinvestor and tech billionaire Andreas von Bechtolsheim. (Cheriton and von Bechtolsheim had been partners in other successful start-ups, including Granite Systems.)

And Cheriton has a soft spot for Vancouver, where he was born, and UBC, where he spent two years as an undergraduate and three as an assistant professor between 1978 and 1981 before heading to Stanford. Previously, Cheriton donated $2 million to the Carl Wieman Science Education initiative in 2010.

Cheriton added that the new course goes along with his theory that institutions have to "rethink what we mean by education."

"I see students in my classes looking things up in real time with Google when I talk about some person, some event, or some technology," he said. "So, clearly our role as educators is not to pump information into their heads, because they have it in their hands."

Education then needs to be about teaching critical thinking and problem solving, "and computational thinking is an important element there," Cheriton said.

depenner@vancouversun.com

Twitter.com/derrickpenner

With file from Tiffany Crawford, Vancouver Sun