Information Technology Education

I wanted to follow up on how computer science works together with different fields (in this case, earth science) to reshape our understanding of the world through the use of innovative technology that in turn leads to new ways of seeing, thinking, decision-making, and ultimately, acting. We started off with Greg Asner's TED talk about how technology has changed how we can view the earth. I then asked the students to reflect on this talk by identifying the science and engineering practices at work. "Computer science can change our view of nature.  It found out that male lions hunt at night in deep forest instead of what we thought that they sit around for food.  One main thing is that we have lot of rainforest species problems, fire, drought, goldmining and deforestation.  But we have hope.  We can help this by obtaining, evaluating, and communicating information that is important to park managers so they can make some important decisions like where to use fire. ...

Walk down the hall of any elementary school and you will see students decked out in "Rainbow Loom" bracelets - basically mini-rubber bands woven together on a plastic loom.  As you can see from the picture above, they come out looking like a rainbow and kids are making them into bracelets, necklaces, rings...you name it.  How are these like coding? "Coding:making a rainbow loom bracelet.  It is like that because in rainbow loom, if you put the rubber band in the wrong way, the bracelet will fall apart.  It's the same with coding.  Also, in programming you can make the computer do anything.  In rainbow loom, you can make any color bracelet.  In programming, you can make patterns and in rainbow loom you can make patterns.  That is how they are alike." Here's one more coding analogy based on her experience with Blockly and Scratch: "Coding is like reading the rules for a game.  Missing a rule in the game might ruin the entire game, just like mis...

Analogies are a great way to check for understanding of concepts.  We've been looking closely at all kinds of analogies in English Language Arts, so I thought to myself, "What a great way to see how deeply my students understand and view coding."  I wanted to see if they could apply coding principles outside of coding (decontextualize) to see how well they really "get" the thinking and process of coding itself.  In a nutshell, students were to come up with an analogy for coding along with three supporting examples. "Coding: A baby learning to take steps because when a baby learns to walk, it starts slow and small.  If it goes too fast or big, it will fall down.  The same with coding - if you start going fast, your program will fall apart because you're going too fast.  Also, if you take big steps, you will miss a step and starting big can you mess up.  Once a baby falls down and with programming, once your program falls, you can get up and try again....

We had a class discussion today about computer science and investigated answers to questions like: What is computer science? Why is computer science important? What do computer scientists do? How do computer scientists help us? How do they change the world around us? What science and engineering practices (NGSS) do computer scientists use in their job? With the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) recently released, we have been connecting the science and engineering practices to what we do in class. 1.  Asking questions and defining problems. 2.  Developing and using models. 3.  Planning and carrying out investigations. 4.  Analyzing and interpreting data. 5.  Using mathematics and computational thinking. 6.  Constructing explanations and designing solutions. 7.  Engaging in argument from evidence. 8.  Obtaining, evaluating, and communicating information. Here are some responses from my third and fourth graders: "I learned about coding and co...

With some of the students fairly proficient with Scratch, I went to LearnStreet to set up a Javascript (JS) course with learn, practice, and project tutorials.  Here are some of their initial reactions to my questions: How does Scratch compare with Javascript?  What are the similarities and differences? "I think they're kind of the same because when you're doing Scratch, you're trying to program something to do something and JS, you're trying to program too.  But JS is different, because it gives you specific things to do.  JS is probably harder than Scratch because in Scratch, you can pretty much make it do anything you want and it's pretty easy because you're just dragging blocks, but in JS, you need to spell right and do everything exact.  With both of them, you have to think about, 'what would happen if...' but in JS you have to think that more strictly." "For example, on Scratch, you can just drag a plus block, while with Java, you ha...

After solving the debugging challenges available on Scratch, we were ready for our next challenge.  This time, my students were now 'Scratch' programmers receiving a 'job' assignment in the form of a project.  Instead of solving others' debug-its, they were now going to create their own debug-challenges based on a set of criteria and constraints. "I feel that when you're given constraints, it kind of makes your mind think better because it means you can't just make it any kind of debug-it, but a specific type of debug-it.  They're harder when you have constraints because you have to think of a way that you'd be able to make it do that.  For example, Mrs.Mak gave me an assignment to create a 'list' on Scratch and each item disappearing when the cat did the exercise.  And there were lots of things that I could have done, but it wouldn't have exactly met the constraints.  So I had to get every last block correct to meet the constraints....

This past summer, I had the privilege of being selected to be the instructor at Arizona State University's School of Engineering first ever robotics program outreach for an all-girls group.  Fifty middle school girls from all over the greater Phoenix area gathered at the engineering student center for a week filled with robotics programming and challenges using NXT Mindstorms, visits and talks with various schools of engineering, and mentoring by engineering undergrads and grad students.  It was no doubt a life-changing and empowering experience for each and every girl there.  Most had never touched a robot before let alone program one.  By the end of five days, all experienced the success and were inspired to explore future options in science, engineering, and computer science.  Mission accomplished! Marble Run Comparative Neuro-anatomy Programming Maze Challenge

I always like to have my students watch the video below from Code.org and reflect on its meaning and significance as applied to their exposure, practice experience with coding.  What I have shared here are some musings from 8 year olds... "I just started coding and it is like a new world! It is amazing because you get to almost go into someone else's brain and teach them based on how they think. I learned that computers are actually pretty dumb but the people who program them can make them do almost anything! Just start small and if you get into it, grow  big, big and  bigger.  It really involves skill though, it's not just some game that you get addicted to, it's almost a student and you are a teacher. It even helped me think of how I can improve when I learn because the computer's mistakes seem hilariously dumb but that is only because I am smarter. I sometimes make mistakes like that and now I know that if you learn how someone else thinks, you can show them alm...

Paper presented remotely to Slovakia at the International Conference on Emerging E-learning sharing about our district's initiative - "Coding is Common to the Core"

Started the class on Lego Mindstorms this week.  Their first challenge was to program the bot to move in a straight line from point A to point B, marked by tape.  I asked them lots of questions about how they are going to know how to program the bot, how far to make the bot go and how they would program distance to be traveled... Before you knew it, they took out rulers to measure the total length between point A and point B.  Once they had that figured out, they had to think about how to translate that into the program.  They had the options of:  time in seconds (which they were tempted to choose), rotations, degrees... Here's what happened 'in their words'... "So the boys wanted to choose 'seconds.'  I chose 'rotations' because you can't always rely on 'seconds.'  So when you're using rotations, you would measure how much one rotation is and then measure how much it is in inches or centimeters.  When we did that, it was easy to mix the...

We are also working with NXT Mindstorms.  Students are learning by starting with basic challenges. The first one was to have the robot travel in a straight line for a certain distance.  Now they are working on having the robot travel in a square... "I think robotics is fun and interesting because sometimes you need to guess and check and other times you need to figure it out.  You need to really make sure everything would be perfect because if you put one piece of program that doesn't work, you could make the whole thing not work.  For example, if you made it turn too far by accident, you will make it go in a triangle shape instead...so it would have been successful if we were trying to get it to make a triangle, but we weren't." "I think robotics is fun and challenging because it's not like you just go to the computer and say, "OK robot, you have to move in a square."  You really have to plan it out.  One challenge we are facing with the square cha...