Our research team would like to know

1. What is your current perspective of how elementary school students are taught to code?
2. What are the skills an elementary school teacher needs before trying to teach coding?
3. What resources (e.g., Scratch, robots) do you believe is the most useful for elementary school teachers who are trying to teach coding?

This is an exciting project.  Through your video, it looks like students love it.  I am wondering what reaction you got from teachers when this was first proposed and how you worked with the more reluctant teacher.  Thank you.

I am curious — is coding required in elementary grades in Ga.?    I definitely think it's great for teachers to have the chance to learn this stuff.  

My own preference would be for the teachers, once equipped with this knowledge.  to work in the context of a learning trajectory that pays attention to computational ideas as they emerge in non-computer-related tasks, in the early grades, and gradually move towards actual programming (and robots are a great medium for that!) in middle school.  

Coding is not required in Georgia. Fortunately, we are working with a school district superintendent who has the desire to increase all k-12 student’s exposure to coding. Plus, the school district’s Content Specialist has been working to expand opportunities students have for learning computer science content and to have hands-on experiences with robotics. The teachers participating have a wide range of teaching responsibilities ranging from STEM-specialty classrooms to social studies. So I am happy to see that the school district is working hard to bring CS into no-Computer related classes

Hi! 

This project sounds fascinating. Can you please speak more to the kinds of scaffolds teachers needed to implement what they learned in your class into curriculum they teach every day? Did you develop lesson plans with the teachers? 

I ask because your work is extremely relevant to our work (http://videohall.com/p/1124)! 

Thanks! 

Kinnari 

The participating teachers enroll in a graduate level course that we teach on campus. Assignments are structured in a manner that the teachers will have a lesson plan by the end of the course. This coming fall semester, members of the research team will act as instructional coaches and help each teacher implement the lesson plan.  This is our first time teaching the course; so we look forward to see how this fall works.

Is the coding content connected to the mathematics or science content of specific grade levels? Is it used to support and/or deepen existing content in terms of the concepts/skills/topics of the grade? If so could you give us an example?

We are designing the CALC approach with the philosophy that coding is relevant to the learning practices outline in the elementary school standards.  If this design is successful, this approach will support the learning of coding by providing teachers with a formal, structured means to · trace the growth of students’ understanding, and misunderstanding, of ideas (in this case coding) as they form, · facilitate students’ use of evidence, not opinion, to select a solution among multiple solutions (suc as different sequencing of the code), and · help each student realize she/he, as well as others, is a legitimate participant in the activity of developing, assessing and implementing an idea (e.g., coding of a robot).  So, the project focuses on collective argumentation to connect learning practices and with less emphasis on connecting coding content to mathematics or science content. 

This project has just completed using our initial concept of the CACL approach. So our activities are focused on the re-design of the approach. This re-design will be used during the next academic year.

I was very curious about the second research question that what are the skills an elementary school teacher needs before trying to teach coding? Could you share more about your research study and methods? Also, what would you think is the right level of coding project to give to the teachers in order to develop their skills and strengthen their confidence. 

The project has just completed othe class taken by the teachers and are currently analyzing the data.  So the skills the teachers need have not been identified as of the time of this response.  Entering the project, we had a concept that the teachers need skills in argumentation and those skills need to be adapted for coding.  This fall we will follow the teachers as they implement our concept and we will collect the knowledge needed to see if the concept is correct.  I am sorry that this response is not directly answering your questions but it's the best I can provide given the stage of the study

It is a really exciting project. We would like to explore similar approach of PD for teachers. I have some questions: When the teachers sign up the graduate level course on campus, does the instructor have any problems of accommodating various teacher's background in coding? Also, since teachers are usually very busy, can they commit enough time to this course which I assume coming with quite a bit reading and assignments? Thanks! 

This seems like a very interesting project and one that I look forward to seeing more information from in the future. When introducing coding in the elementary school, do you find a push back from teachers who do not wish to introduce coding or feel that this might replace another subject area? Also, will the students be introduced to a number of different recourses to code? Could a combination of multiple approaches work to better introduce students to coding?

We have not had push back. We even had teachers develop lesson plans for content areas outside of STEM.   Our focus is on reasoning skills and learning approaches that will not lock coding into its own category but as a learning approach that is applicable across disciplines.