Hi Brian,

Thanks for pointing us to your video. We thought we might alert you to another project that we have developed, Peep and the Big Wide World. The characters featured in the videos and hands-on activities for this project were designed to foster para-social relationships with children, motivating them to interact with the media over time and adopt the science practices and activities the characters model. PEEP has a unit on Shadows that you may find helpful for the work you are doing. 

http://peepandthebigwideworld.com/en/educators/...

And here is a link to a storybook with PEEP observing the moon.

https://mass.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/buac...

Hope you find these resources helpful. Marisa

Hello Jacqueline,

Simulating a storybook, The Story Emporium is a tablet app that children can use to program their own stories, along with accompanying hands-on activities and teacher scaffolds. The prototype app provides digital “story stickers,” images of characters, objects, actions, or locations, with accompanying text designed to reinforce reading. Children are able to program their own stories using a simple drag and drop mechanic to put the story stickers together to create a sequence of story components. When children press “play,” their story is read, music plays, and images and characters animate. We have created a prototype of a teacher version of The Story Emporium app, which provides integrated and just-in-time support. Highlights and overlays guide teachers through The Story Emporium app, providing information about how to support children's CT skills.

Unfortunately, we were just about to test the teacher version of the app when the pandemic hit so we weren't able to see first hand how successful they would be incorporating this technology into their teaching. The project has been informed by best practices from the NSF-funded Next Generation Preschool Math project for integrating digital touch-screen interactives into preschool classrooms, including how to prepare classrooms for: (1) digital learning (e.g., making the learning explicit); (2) collaborative and social experiences with technology (e.g., allowing for group play as well as individual play); and (3) joint-media engagement between children and teachers (e.g., enabling teachers to see struggles, commend efforts, encourage perseverance, and better understand each child as a unique learner) (Orr, Kamdar, Lewis Presser, & Vahey, 2015). Our use of interactive tablet technology also align with NAEYC guidelines, including: (1) balanced use of technology as part of the daily routine; (2) use of interactives that are active, engaging, give children control while providing scaffolds to ease tasks; and (3) use of technology as one of many approaches to support learning. Approximately 45 to 60 minutes per session is devoted to non-digital activities and 15 to 30 minutes per session to digital activities.

Let me know if this answers your questions. Thanks! Marisa

Marisa, thank you for the insight into the project. It sounds very promising. I can't wait to hear how the in-classroom testing goes once schools restart.

Thanks for the response, Marisa...great, let's try to chat sometime in the coming weeks. Feel free to reach out to me at: amsbary@email.unc.edu. Thanks again and enjoy the showcase!

Karen,

I just got my projects mixed up! My response describe what we did on prior projects to assess individual CT skills, but for this project we’re really interested in exploring computational literacy or how children use their CT skills to create stories. For example, instead of measuring whether children can assemble a set of picture cards in the correct sequential order (sequencing), the team is developing a task that require the use of multiple skills towards solving a problem. Again, happy to discuss further. Cheers, Marisa

Hi Chih-Pu,

Thanks for sending in your question! We made a commitment early in our project to work with early childhood centers that serve ethnically and linguistically diverse populations. This includes students whose first language is not English (FLNE). While there are individual differences in ethnic composition or percentages of FLNE learners across our centers, we are committed to ensuring that the diversity of our nation's urban preschool classrooms is represented in this research.  As we've described in some of our other posts, our latest rounds of classroom research have been delayed. As we move into working with more classrooms, we'll be able to share the demographic characteristics across our participating sites. But your question is definitely on our minds as we're working and gearing up to recruit additional sites for our future research!

If I understand your second question correctly, nearly all of the intervention's activities, whether done in large group, small group, or introduced via the app, are intended to generate dialogue with teachers and encourage collaboration between students. For example, during large group activities, children can all contribute to the creation of a story chart that models how the story follows a pattern using the available story elements. These activities suggest that teachers model the use of the story chart as children start to learn about the story patterns. In smaller groups, the teacher asks children to collaboratively contribute to the creation of the chart and to allow children to create their own stories using the same pattern.

If you have more questions, let us know. Thanks for chatting with us!

Heather

Hi Abigail!  Thanks so much for stopping by to learn about our project!  From our prior work, we know that many early childhood educators have never received training in computational thinking so this may be a first-time experience for them.  We want the instructional supports for the Story Emporium to be informative but not overwhelming. We understand how difficult it might be to absorb it all just through reading a lot of text. We want to think creatively about how to deliver these resources in ways that incorporate visuals and other creative methods for modeling the activities in action. In our next rounds of work, we want to make sure that the instructional supports are effective in giving teachers the guidance they need to emphasize CT in the context of literacy activities. We’ve already consulted with advisors, but we are excited to work more closely with teachers and training experts to explore the best ways to deliver this content.

Hi Heather! It's an interesting and frustrating puzzle - how to support teachers and move our research forward during this time of isolation. I'm sure you're right about CT being new to many early childhood educators - both what CT means and how to use it well in their instruction. And learning through a lot of text isn't an engaging or effective approach - as we know. Could technology help - virtual reality or some kind of immersive experience for teachers? Could the gaming world contribute? This challenge will be with us for a long time so solutions we find now will have a long life. Thanks for your work on this.

Hi Alison!  Thank you for chatting with us here in the Showcase. We agree that science would provide a tremendous opportunity for young children to practice CT. In our project work thus far, we've focused on math and literacy, as these are some the main content priorities of early childhood education programs. If you'd like to check out the work we've done for integrating CT into preschool math, you can check out our other video showcase project: https://stemforall2020.videohall.com/presentati...

The ultimate goal would be to carry our thinking on these projects forward to how CT could be practiced by our early learners across all of the content areas! 

Hello Ximena,

So glad you enjoyed the video and thank you for your kind words about our work. 

Regarding your question on how we are supporting ELLs, in our research, we are trying to uncover any aspects of activities that are tough for these students. Additionally, our work is being informed by another CT project EDC and WGBH collaborated on, in which we provided scaffolds for English Language Learners that allowed them to test out ideas, find problems, and demonstrate understanding without a lot of language. These included using symbols that show what to do, using hand gestures, allowing the manipulation of objects, and providing demonstrations.

We’re attempting to triangulate a bit with our assessment plan in our pilot study. We’re development a CL learning task and also using some existing preschool literacy measures to see how performance on the task corresponds to pre/post measures of children’s literacy.

Thank you for your question! Marisa

Hi Mike, Nice to see you virtually! Thanks so much for stopping by to check out our video; looking forward to keeping this work going!

Hi Danae! Hope you're doing well. It's funny - I think our paths just virtually crossed, as I was just watching and commenting on your team's video.  I really enjoyed the chance to see what you all are working on. And I totally agree - there is so much that we can learn from each other!

Hi Amy!  Thanks for checking out our project! It's so exciting to see all of the work happening across preK-12.  We'd love to hear more about your approach and what you're learning from your work in elementary classrooms.