Hi Abby, the cultural authentic practices are completely embedded within the curriculum and tied to the PBL arch in different ways. However, because they are all facilitated by the teachers, they require an understanding of what they intend to accomplish, what they require from the teacher as facilitator, and why. For example, this is the case of practices such as how to group students attending to diversity considerations, how to legitimize and value students' voices and choices in the process of problem selection, how to support students when exploring positives identities and paths in CS with a success-oriented outlook, etc. We do a combination of face-to-face training with the teachers before starting the program and before they begin each unit, and weekly teleconferencing meetings. The curriculum also has embedded notes and documents that alert the teachers when a "culturally authentic practice (CAP)" is taking place and what are things they should consider for that section or activity. Those will become available with the curriculum once it is finalized.

What a fascinating project! Can you share some of the design problems the students chose to work on that they found to be personally, socially or culturally relevant?  

Hi Jon. Problems have included poverty, bike safety, obesity, sleep deprivation, police brutality, water quality, to name a few. They are quite varied. Thank you for your question!

Thanks for your note, Bruce. We are in our final year of implementation and data collection, so we will spend the next academic year analyzing and summarizing results for publication. Additionally, we are looking to post a final draft of our curriculum at our website, so please visit the website in the next few months for updates.

Hi Jim, I can reply to the complex system dynamics portion of your question. We are studying the system at the classroom level as a set of interacting agents: students, teacher, classroom, school, administration & intervention team (us). Each of these agents is comprised of attributes, for example we look at a teacher's CS content knowledge, CS self-efficacy, CS pedagogical knowledge, teaching experience, etc. The complex system model connects each agent-attribute to those agent-attributes in the system that are most directly influenced by it as determined by literature, observation, surveys and interviews. While we attempt to use objective criteria, the determination of the most influential attributes and formulation of these connections - collectively "the model" - is still a bit of an art. We can represented this graphically as a causal loop diagram, which we have found in past projects is valuable to the research team in and of itself. It provides a shared vocabulary and common ground for discussing observations, research results and confounds. Network analysis can be performed to determine which attributes exert the greatest influence. This may be informative both for allocation of discretionary resources and the identification of key success (or failure) criteria when looking to implement the intervention elsewhere.

Hi, Quinn... thanks for your question. We have heard others inquire about and want to discuss a sense of incongruity between PBL and coding. Our research center and staff have been investigating and developing PBL curricula for 25 years, so we have come to understand that PBL provides us the pedagogical framework to make learning relevant for students, no matter the learning goals. We use PBL, and its associated strategies for problem identification and pursuit, to help students find engaging issues and challenges they care about. The iterative design and development of digital artifacts in our curriculum, that requires the content and skills the course targets, is in service to communicating and creating empathy for their problem or challenge.

As an example, student teams build a website to educate and inform the public about the issue they are investigating (e.g., water quality issues in their community, teen homelessness, public transit in their community, access to support services for mental health). Later they write code in a music production software (EarSketch) to craft original music to score a personalizing testimonial video that appears on their website. In another unit, students design a game to build empathy and advocacy for their issue by creating an AppInventer game for people to download and play on a tablet or mobile device. They use CS skills and knowledge to create these artifacts to engage the public and build understanding, empathy and action for the issue or challenge.

thanks Mike for getting back to me -- this helps me understand-- and cool way to integrate EarSketch here!

Thank you Douglas!

Hi, Kathryn... our attempt to integrate the cross-cutting concepts (XCCs) was really born from our background in science ed research. We have had NSF awards periodically over the last two decades to investigate a number of K-12 science learning questions and concepts, usually around project-based learning, inquiry, and design. When the XCCs emerged from the new NGSS, we (like others) spent a good bit of time thinking about teaching and learning of XCCs in science courses. But it occurred to our team that if XCCs are cross-cutting, then what are we learning about those concepts in other STEM domains? How might students learn with and about XCCs to understand (in this case) computer science? So, as we crafted our curriculum, we leaned heavily on the definitions and conceptions of the XCCs articulated in the NGSS. Then, we looked for places in the learning sequence where they could not only be highlighted, but also leveraged to better understand the topic or skill.

It turns out that both Patterns and Structure/Function often work in tandem. In science, patterns of occurrence, position, or behavior often signal causal mechanism or structure/function relationship (e.g., repeatedly observing down drafts and thunder might signal to an observer an approaching thunderstorm; AND they each suggest possible mechanisms, structures and functions at work within a storm cloud). So we use patterns to signal that structure function might be at work in coding. In a game or other digitally coded experience, students can look for repeated or predictable actions, objects, consequences (patterns) to signal that some structure/function in the code is operating.

This year was our first year implementing the Pattern-Structure-Function activities explicitly in the curriculum. We look to analyze, summarize and publish on the effort in the coming year.

Thanks, Kate. Some of my project colleagues can speak more directly to this, as they have shepherded our partnerships with school districts and the IRB requirements. But, in general, we have been working with Atlanta area and Georgia schools for more than two decades, in a variety of capacities. Our relationships with those districts has been mutually beneficial, and we are able to turn those past experiences into future partnerships. We have years of working with districts not only on projects, but on professional learning workshops and opportunities on our campus. Of course, we follow protocols established by the districts to seek partnerships on these types of grants, and we follow all IRB guidelines specified by GT and by the districts. Our track record and, more importantly, our rational/justification of the research helps our partners feel comfortable working in their classrooms and with their teachers/students.

Hi Jon. Thank you for your question. We did not used patterns as an explicit way to have students think about their problems (which were not always science related). However, when students built their resumes and incorporated the skills they were learning in class, we used the html resume activity as a framework for students to think about the code behind the formatting structures and the relationship to their communicative functions. I would say that is one way in which some of the curriculum authentic activities came together with the cross cutting concepts. I think patterns can be used effectively to help students identify characteristics that are part of systems or even social practices. In a way ethnomathematics does this. What is different about our project is that because students were allowed high levels of both voice and choice, the problems and issues they brought into the classroom varied greatly. I would have to think a bit more about the potential to make these explicit connections. I hope I answered your question. Thank you for the food for thought!