Theme: Connecting with Computing: Raising Awareness, Engaging Community, and Creating Student Agency.
Quote:
"We were taking field trips. We're going to competitions. They're happy. We didn't win competitions, but they enjoyed it. You know, we went on college tours and it's all about exposure. We even did some hackathons. No clue what stuff was. But they went. It's awesome. You didn't win it, but you were in the room. And that's the best part. You were in the room and people know you.”
Strategy 1:
Organize community events like Hackathons. Get local vendors or colleges involved. Go on college tours. Get students involved. Ask parents or volunteer to speak about their technical/STEM careers.
Resources:
Hack Club
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Strategy 2:
Run a coding after school program or a club to get more students involved. Some programs offer free tutorials, guides, volunteers, and sometimes, even funding to help support the program. The coordinator doesn't have to be technical, just interested in facilitating and supporting students. Look for platforms that offer students Mitch Resnick's idea of "low floor, high ceiling, and wide walls". It's simple enough for anyone to start tinkering and creating ("low floors") but also sophisticated enough to add complexity to the program ("high ceiling"), while allowing for a broad range of creative outcomes ("wide walls").
Resources:
Girls Who Code
Tech Kids Unlimited
Black Girls Code
Technolchicas
Some Reflections on Designing Construction Kits for Kids
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Quote:
“My students are not only not only able to connect to the curriculum in a much more tangible way, but they can also relate to me as their instructor in a better way because it's not just me force feeding them information. It's not just me standing as the sage on the stage, so to speak, but it is me engaging them and by helping them to make connections between the world in which they live and the world in which others live. So it also builds in that additional factor of empathy where my students can be able to say, oh, this is how the issues in the bushfires in Australia, even though it's literally on the opposite side of the globe. But it's how would you be in this scenario, how would you feel just because technology has enabled so much communication and dissemination of information in the split second? Oh, wow. You can see actual pictures of dying wildlife. And we can see people's homes being abandoned. And we can see smoke in New Zealand, which is like a distance from Boston to Florida. Like we can actually see that because technology enables that. And instead of the opportunity to make those connections on their own, just with me, being a facilitator is a very, very impactful way to communicate that relevance. And for students to be able to connect with the curriculum on a much deeper level.
Strategy 3:
Use current events, media coverages, images, and videos to communicate and disseminate information and how students can be impacted and have a deeper connection with what's happening around them. If discussing COVID19, use data from the media to create a virus simulation, and analyze, compare, or critique the information.
Resources:
Code Break 5.0: Simulations and Data with Bill Gates
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Strategy 4:
Use social media as an entry point to open discussions and exploration of algorithms, filters, likes, and news feed. How do you decipher if the news you're receiving is real? How does social media decide what content it wants you to see? How does it run ads or promoted posts and how does that affect people's views and opinions?
Resources:
News and America's Kids: How Young People Perceive and Are Impacted by the News
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Quote:
“They are simulating a megabucks lottery draw. And so they're creating. I think it's a loop of twice a week. There's the drawing and it's for 52 weeks...You're looping through one hundred and four different weeks of mega-bucks drawings. And the students are making everything in this project. So they're making the drawing simulator. They're making the tester. And then within the drawing simulator, there's a play back and forth between arrays that hold the collection of numbers and then the collection of winning numbers. And then there's array lists that hold the different drawings each week. And so students are dancing between those two different ways to collect data lists and array lists and arrays. And then they're also dancing between looping. They're sometimes calling a method that's in the same class as the tester class. Other times they're calling a method through the object that they made in the tester class that is simulating the mega-bucks lottery. It's very real because the tester class in a way is like the gas station or the stop and shop where people would go to buy the lottery ticket. And then the class itself is the drawing itself. And so there's real meaning for why certain data like the winning lottery ticket might be a private data member that not everybody should be able to access. Because if you're at the gas station, why wouldn't you access that private winning lottery number? So it's very authentic. It's very cool. There's a lot of ways they can extend it so they could calculate probabilities. By the end, they realize lottery is not a winning investment, which is, you know, as far as big picture stuff, you know, I feel like a really great take away. And as I said, it's just a really authentic application of all the class design stuff, all the structures, a lot of the object stuff. And it's challenging and it forces students to often talk to each other and also to me to get their way out of it.”
Strategy 5:
Project-based learning is when students inquire and attempt to solve a real-world problem or complex question. Students have time to collaborate, research, investigate, and produce a meaningful product. Offering project based experiences and connecting it with cross-content curriculum can engage students and build a deeper meaning to the problems they notice around them.
Resources:
Teacher's Guide to Project-Based Learning
"We were taking field trips. We're going to competitions. They're happy. We didn't win competitions, but they enjoyed it. You know, we went on college tours and it's all about exposure. We even did some hackathons. No clue what stuff was. But they went. It's awesome. You didn't win it, but you were in the room. And that's the best part. You were in the room and people know you.”
Strategy 1:
Organize community events like Hackathons. Get local vendors or colleges involved. Go on college tours. Get students involved. Ask parents or volunteer to speak about their technical/STEM careers.
Resources:
Hack Club
----------------------------------
Strategy 2:
Run a coding after school program or a club to get more students involved. Some programs offer free tutorials, guides, volunteers, and sometimes, even funding to help support the program. The coordinator doesn't have to be technical, just interested in facilitating and supporting students. Look for platforms that offer students Mitch Resnick's idea of "low floor, high ceiling, and wide walls". It's simple enough for anyone to start tinkering and creating ("low floors") but also sophisticated enough to add complexity to the program ("high ceiling"), while allowing for a broad range of creative outcomes ("wide walls").
Resources:
Girls Who Code
Tech Kids Unlimited
Black Girls Code
Technolchicas
Some Reflections on Designing Construction Kits for Kids
----------------------------------
Quote:
“My students are not only not only able to connect to the curriculum in a much more tangible way, but they can also relate to me as their instructor in a better way because it's not just me force feeding them information. It's not just me standing as the sage on the stage, so to speak, but it is me engaging them and by helping them to make connections between the world in which they live and the world in which others live. So it also builds in that additional factor of empathy where my students can be able to say, oh, this is how the issues in the bushfires in Australia, even though it's literally on the opposite side of the globe. But it's how would you be in this scenario, how would you feel just because technology has enabled so much communication and dissemination of information in the split second? Oh, wow. You can see actual pictures of dying wildlife. And we can see people's homes being abandoned. And we can see smoke in New Zealand, which is like a distance from Boston to Florida. Like we can actually see that because technology enables that. And instead of the opportunity to make those connections on their own, just with me, being a facilitator is a very, very impactful way to communicate that relevance. And for students to be able to connect with the curriculum on a much deeper level.
Strategy 3:
Use current events, media coverages, images, and videos to communicate and disseminate information and how students can be impacted and have a deeper connection with what's happening around them. If discussing COVID19, use data from the media to create a virus simulation, and analyze, compare, or critique the information.
Resources:
Code Break 5.0: Simulations and Data with Bill Gates
----------------------------------
Strategy 4:
Use social media as an entry point to open discussions and exploration of algorithms, filters, likes, and news feed. How do you decipher if the news you're receiving is real? How does social media decide what content it wants you to see? How does it run ads or promoted posts and how does that affect people's views and opinions?
Resources:
News and America's Kids: How Young People Perceive and Are Impacted by the News
----------------------------------
Quote:
“They are simulating a megabucks lottery draw. And so they're creating. I think it's a loop of twice a week. There's the drawing and it's for 52 weeks...You're looping through one hundred and four different weeks of mega-bucks drawings. And the students are making everything in this project. So they're making the drawing simulator. They're making the tester. And then within the drawing simulator, there's a play back and forth between arrays that hold the collection of numbers and then the collection of winning numbers. And then there's array lists that hold the different drawings each week. And so students are dancing between those two different ways to collect data lists and array lists and arrays. And then they're also dancing between looping. They're sometimes calling a method that's in the same class as the tester class. Other times they're calling a method through the object that they made in the tester class that is simulating the mega-bucks lottery. It's very real because the tester class in a way is like the gas station or the stop and shop where people would go to buy the lottery ticket. And then the class itself is the drawing itself. And so there's real meaning for why certain data like the winning lottery ticket might be a private data member that not everybody should be able to access. Because if you're at the gas station, why wouldn't you access that private winning lottery number? So it's very authentic. It's very cool. There's a lot of ways they can extend it so they could calculate probabilities. By the end, they realize lottery is not a winning investment, which is, you know, as far as big picture stuff, you know, I feel like a really great take away. And as I said, it's just a really authentic application of all the class design stuff, all the structures, a lot of the object stuff. And it's challenging and it forces students to often talk to each other and also to me to get their way out of it.”
Strategy 5:
Project-based learning is when students inquire and attempt to solve a real-world problem or complex question. Students have time to collaborate, research, investigate, and produce a meaningful product. Offering project based experiences and connecting it with cross-content curriculum can engage students and build a deeper meaning to the problems they notice around them.
Resources:
Teacher's Guide to Project-Based Learning