Thank you for starting the discussion, Michael. 

IMPACTS

You're right the video focuses more on the LinCT community of young adults and teachers and we didn't present much on the boarder impacts yet. Ideally, we'll be back next year to share more :)

In addition to the growth on the part of the participants in the program, we are looking for how participating (preservice) teachers go on to integrate making technology and computational thinking in their classrooms, thereby impacting all of their students. Excitingly, we have also started to hear of organizational level changes. For example, both of the universities from which we draw our preservice teachers are eager for these experiences and are building off of LinCT to provide more training for their teachers (grant proposals, new classes, and ideas are in process.)

CONTENT

Through programs such as App Inventor, Scratch, Stencyle, and 3D Printing, participants are exposed to new technologies, build their own understanding, and come to see how to incorporate technology into their classrooms in order to help their students become creators of rather than just users of technology.

Along with content training around technology software, sessions address computational thinking, growth mindset, STEM equity, and social justice all of which become threads for reflection throughout the program experience.

Thank you Thomas, this is Aki who facilitates many of LinCT projects meetings with youth and preservice teachers. Scratch and App Inventor are helping us to understand concept (pattern, algorithm, decomposition, Logic...etc) of computational thinking through creating computational thinking approaches, such as creating actual hands-on project, debugging, collaborating, and etc. One thing I have been noticing that Scratch and App inventor projects we are creating, our LinCT female participants shows their perseverance to complete their projects and that is a part of CT approach to problem solving. I would refer to research and evaluation team to pull some quote from participants how they feel about multi-generational learning! Personally I observe multi-generational learning are creating amazing learning opportunity for high schooler as well as college students (age range of 20-40) They are learning from each other developing high schoolers leadership skills, preservice teachers are practicing listening skills as well as understanding different perspective of getting involving with students and how people learn. They learn and work side by side and making strong team together for 2 moths in training time, after that 2 months of learning together, they can use their team skills in summer camp teaching and classroom assisting together. Our activities are ice breaker, team builder, content training, tech training, equity practice, video making, website making, etc. 

Bridging formal and informal education has been an exciting endeavor for us and we think there may be something here that other informal institutions could consider replicating. As we continue to collect our research and evaluation data I hope that we can come out of this project with a model to share more broadly. A couple of elements that I personally find important are:

• Our museum educator team has an opportunity to learn from the pre-service teachers and what is new in the teaching field with regards to strategies and pedagogy (for example, it has been over 10 years since I completed my MEd and I would suspect there are new things I can learn about the field from our pre-service teachers and partners).
• St. Kate's and Metro State are two of the most diverse schools in the Twin Cities - partnering with them helps us to met our goals of becoming a more diverse staff and bringing this important perspective to our team and to our audiences.

Let me know your thoughts, and thank you for your post! Kathryn

Great question Bernadette! Our evaluation team is taking the lead on assessing student learning of CT but we have been working as a larger team (including our museum educators and pre-service teachers) to make personal sense of CT and where we see that across all of our SMM learning experiences.

A primary resource we are using for creating our assessments is from Scratch: http://scratched.gse.harvard.edu/ct/index.html

Also, I have found these two articles to be really helpful for grounding us in understanding what CS, CT, and Coding are:

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2015-12-02-compute...

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2016-08-06-what-s-...

What is really cool about engaging in this work with the larger museum team is that the whole team is excited about this work and digging into understanding these concepts and how they show up in our programs. In a group meeting two months ago we realized we do a lot with CT and now we have the language to go along with our learning experiences.

Let me know your thoughts, and questions, Kathryn

Thanks for the links, Kathryn!  And how exciting that the CT concepts already show up in your programs.  I would love to read any writeups you have that map your activities to the CT concepts.  Very cool!

Thank you Sarah! So excited about co-presenting with you at ASTC this year!

Thank you Anna for your comment and question! As you saw in the video Vanessa has certainly brought her learning and experiences with these programs to her student teaching practices. This was really exciting for me to see and a bit of an unexpected result to see in her student teaching - this means she is also impacting the classroom teacher and school she is at for student teaching! The project did not have the timeline or capacity to follow our pre-service teachers into their future classroom so again, really cool to see this in a student teaching setting.

That all said, we are working with our LinCT pre-service teachers to develop school year learning experiences that the museum will bring to the classroom setting. Using our residency model we have piloted 3 technology based residencies this school year, reaching over 1,000 classroom students. With the resounding positive feedback from the classroom teachers and their students this will be permanent programming going forward into the 2017-18 SY and beyond!

Let me know your thoughts, and additional questions, Kathryn

Thank you Shona for your comment! It has been such a great honor to partner with the KAYSC in this deep way through LinCT and as you know, I am just continually impressed with the young women on our LinCT team.

Thank you for your comment and questions Christine! There are several ways we are reaching communities that are traditionally underrepresented in STEM:

1. Metro State and St. Kate's are the two most diverse universities in the Twin Cities - partnering with them has provided an opportunity to work with diverse teacher candidates.
2. Partnering with the Kitty Anderson Youth Science Center at SMM has allowed us to reach female youth that might not traditionally access SMM and STEM learning.
3. We are piloting our programming in Minneapolis and St. Paul Public schools - in particular, we are reaching schools that have a high percentage of free/reduced lunch students, as well as, a high percentage of students of color.

Your second question is a really interesting question - I will have Aki and the eval/research team respond to that inquiry on Monday.

Thank you again, hope you are well, Kathryn

Hello Christine,

Thank you for your positive comment and meaningful question. I am going to try to answer to your second question "Have you found that younger LinCT participants become student leaders in their own classrooms?" I have been facilitating LinCT youth for one year. As you might notice in our video, youth mention that they learn to be them and open up for voicing more in our community and beyond. I do not have too much encounter with their classrooms, but your question made me want to ask them that and reflect with them! They have been wanting to lead workshops using technology, and they are always excited about creating spaces for other girls to be enter to STEM filed, such as they lead table activity at museum floor, partnering with Scratch Jr teach at TUFTS university to run family workshops in community library, and some youth have asked me to help them to create after school activities at their own school. 

Once again, thank you very much for asking that question, I am sure I will be paying more attention to what they are doing in their own classroom at their school this year!

Thank you for your suggestions Anna, we are certainly hoping to continue this work!