Thank you, Dave! Yes, our work included co-designing classroom lessons and activities with preschool teachers and parents. It's been an iterative process and we are still working on revisions/improvements. They include hands on experiences that engage children in playful learning (e.g., art, building, story telling) as they engage in CT and mathematics/science. They involve play dough stations, map navigation, organizing dramatic play areas such as the grocery store, among others. We plan to make an initial set available via an upcoming website so that teachers can download them and give them a try. Our plan is to continue this research and development work as well; we are hoping to grow a library of lessons and activities that cover a broader set of CT and STEM skills and practices and continue to learn from teacher and families. 

This exploratory work also allowed us to better understand what teachers and parents may value and need in terms of support as they engage children in CT. We have started to sketch some ideas for PD. For now, we are working on some infographic and instructional videos, but we are hoping to tackle this is earnest in an upcoming grant. 

That's a great question, James. This initial exploratory work allowed us identify candidate CT skills and practices that show promise for supporting early learning, and involved co-designing activities and digital resources to promote a subset of them. Our goal is to continue this R&D work to generate a broader set of resources that teachers and families can use to integrate CT in early childhood. In doing so, we hope to work with more educators and families and conduct larger field studies to better understand what are implementation successes and challenges, and inform the development of resources to support adults (teachers and families) as they scaffold children's learning. We are exploring innovative uses of technology (e.g., online guides to support face to face PD, blended coaching models, micro-credentials) as we plan for this next phase. 

Thanks, Michael. Indeed CT skills are important across many disciplines. This work in fact, drew on related work we did on prior projects at the middle school level in the SF Bay Area including at San Francisco Unified School District.
The VELA NSF project (csforall.sri.com; NSF#1543062) involved designed unplugged and digital non-programming activities for middle school, and that work was influential in the early conceptualizations of activities (suitable for preK learners) in this project.

Thank you for your kind message, Jody. I really enjoyed your team's video as well, and learning about your work around equity and inclusivity.

Hello, Jaymee, and congratulations on becoming a mom! I am a mom of two young children and love the idea of introducing CT and STEM in playful ways as well. Young children are naturally interested in understanding the world around them and thrive during learning experiences that allow them to explore and test ideas in an authentic and fun way. 

Our work around problem decomposition (PD) is yielding very interesting findings. We found that our team was able to co-design various activities to promote PD. For instance, parents were able to identify routines (getting ready for school/bed, packing for trips) as opportunities to decompose tasks. They also identified home activities such as cooking as promising in that regard as well. Educators also identified art activities (such as the play-dough one mentioned in the video which integrates math) and storytelling activities that integrate science as opportunities to promote PD. An interesting observation we noted during co-design is that many of these activities were already happening in classrooms and homes, but the actual decomposition was done by adults and shared with children. In our pilot studies, lessons involved engaging children in the decomposition process themselves. Our emerging findings indicate that children were indeed able to decompose many tasks and problems. However, we have also found that assessing PD to make inferences of children's learning is hard. In part this was due to the fact that many of the PD assessments developed required verbal responses (and young learners are learning language simultaneously). Items that involved manipulatives but involved simpler tasks (to ensure they were brief) were not complex enough for children to see the benefit of decomposition (and hence engage in it). This is something we are working to explore further. 

Regarding our partnership: We created a multidisciplinary team at the proposal stage. Many of us had worked together on other projects, and what brought us together was the interest in STEM/CT and a desire to engage in research-practice partnerships to develop resources that addressed the strengths and needs of the diverse populations of families served in public preschool. I would be happy to talk more about our process. We are also working on a few manuscripts and I recently wrote a blog sharing some of the lessons learned over the years: https://digitalpromise.org/2020/02/06/co-designing-powerful-innovations-with-teachers-and-families/

Thank you for your work!  I hope you will publicize your finding that adults often did the decomposition of the problem themselves.  We found something similar with adults working with first and second graders in planning a play. The adults often did the planning in advance, before even being with the children.  They left the child with just the chance to implement the adults' plans. So the children didn't have the opportunity to learn to plan in this activity that was meant to be a planning task.  It's worth making this issue known.

Baker-Sennett, J., Matusov, E.L., & Rogoff, B.  (2008).  Children’s planning of classroom plays with adult or child direction.  Social Development, 17, 998-1018.

Thank you for your note, Barbara, and for sharing your study! We are in midst of writing about these findings, so reading about your study will be very helpful. Thankfully, findings from our recent field study seem to suggest that adults are willing and able to facilitate children' decomposition, if reminded/guided to do so (and the importance of doing so). How to embed this into PD and curricular/learning materials themselves will be important to further investigate. I'd be interested to know if you have any suggested strategies based on your work/findings.

Thanks, Ximena.  We did not try to intervene with these adults.  However, we noticed that this tendency to do the planning before involving the kids was more characteristic of adults with less experience in teaching situations.

Hi Paul-- thanks for your comments and insights on your work at the college level.
Your question on our focus on the preschool age group is an interesting one - and takes us back to the genesis of this exploratory project! This work grew out of a couple of other ongoing/prior research experiences. Some in the project leadership (Ximena and Phil) had just completed a successful collaboration on the Next Generation Preschool Math and Next Generation Preschool Science projects, while others in the leadership (such as myself) were working on integrating CT into math and science at higher grades of K-12. Xime and Phil's experiences with early learners on the NGPM and NGPS projects (and the activities they designed for those projects) suggested that there was potentially fertile integration of CT into early STEM activities that we could explore. Interesting the HeadStart Early Learning Outcomes framework also points to teaching children problem solving and reasoning. All of this pointed to us coming together to explore if such mutually supportive integration between STEM concepts and CT could happen for our youngest learners in PreK, what productive entry points there are, and how these map to goals for early learners.

And indeed, we did find many interesting entry points!

We did make a point of designing a project that included teachers and care-givers throughout, as well as including home and school settings -- all to ensure that whatever we designed fits well into the natural lives of young learners..

Hope this helps :)

Thanks for your response! I'll definitely be thinking more about CT and how it can be its own gateway to engaging in science.

Thank you for your note, Jill. It's great to get so many encouraging messages about our early learning focus.

Partner families were identified/invited through our partner preschool programs. These preschool centers served predominantly families from underserved communities and also included large proportions of families from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. We worked closely with them to recruit and select families that would represent this diversity.

Participating family members were part of the co-design meetings, where everyone came together to engage in a series of design workshops. Our initial meetings involved discussing roles and highlighting the value that all perspectives bring to design. We purposefully brought imperfect "seed ideas" generated by researchers to discuss and discard or improve together. This helped everyone feel more comfortable brainstorming imperfect ideas for areas that are emerging in the field (e.g. as CT is in early learning). After prototypes were designed, families tested these activities at home and met with us to discuss revisions and iterations. 

Does this help? I'd love to hear ideas of what has worked on your end when partnering with others to co-design.

Thank you for the note, DeLene. We are fortunate to work with teachers and parents, and often, we all learn a lot along the way. During our co-design work with teachers and parents, the team identified routines (e.g., getting ready for school, cooking recipes) as tasks that naturally lent themselves to be broken down into distinct sub-tasks (e.g., get dressed, eat breakfast, put on coat/shoes or mix water and flour, and then add vanilla). Building activities with playdough and blocks were also identified as good candidates to be tested during our pilot studies. While these common routines and activities were identified as good starting places to design decomposition tasks, teachers and parents also noted that many common routines are often decomposed by the adults and shared with children, as you suggest. For instance, teachers and parents would provide the steps to follow when getting ready for bed and making a dish. Therefore, as part of our design and iteration process, the goal became to identify routines and activities in which children could feasibly be invited to decompose themselves, with support from adults. Teachers and parents acknowledged this would be helpful for children, but did express skepticism regarding whether children would be able to do the decomposition themselves. During the pilot study, we found that children were indeed able to break larger problems or tasks into steps or subtasks. While children needed support from adults, they were excited and capable of engaging in the decomposition. With scaffolding, children decomposed the problems/tasks in various ways. They used picture cards to show the different components of a common routine (e.g., getting ready for bedtime) and made books to tell the story of the different subtasks involved in breaking down that routine. They also engaged in making art and playdough creations; for instance, they decomposed the steps to make a pretend pizza (e.g., make the dough, the sauce and the cheese, then put it all together). These activities provided opportunities for children and parents to engage together and allowed children to practice decomposing problems.

Thank you. 

Thank you for taking the time to view our video and share your comments, Stacey. Our team worked on developing a series of developmentally appropriate assessment tasks – brief, playful, and hands-on – aimed to draw inferences on children’s learning of the target CT skills explored in this study – these included abstraction, problem decomposition, algorithmic thinking (sequences and repetition/loops) and debugging. We designed item formats suitable for young children (3-5 years old), which included selecting a response by pointing, indicating, or embodying a response; using hands-on manipulatives to demonstrate a response; providing an open-ended verbal responses to a picture prompt; and providing a verbal response to a verbal prompt (which was only done if necessary). For example, when targeting problem decomposition, items included a birthday party scene where children were asked to decompose the large task of planning a party into smaller, more manageable tasks or block building tasks where children were invited to break the problem and assign a task to the assessor and a task to themselves (in order to complete the task more efficiently). Some items that targeted abstraction involved sorting and labeling common materials for a purpose, such as colored blocks to build a tower or toy vehicles to place in a group based on observable characteristics. Our team just submitted a manuscript describing our process and sharing some emerging findings. We look forward to sharing it soon!

Thank you, Jessica, for your kind words. These are excellent questions! I'd be happy to talk.

We haven't done any CT work beyond preschool. But I know there is a lot of work and excitement about other STEM areas (e.g., science) during birth to three. I have a good colleague, Daryl Greenfield, who is working in this space and I'd be more than happy to connect you both. 

Regarding children with disabilities, we haven't formally investigated this but in our overall design we consider UDL. Having said that I can see some of the activities that emerged may be very inclusive while others may pose challenges for children with motor or verbal disabilities. This would be a really direction for future work. 

Thanks for the helpful response, Ximena! Our project has connected with Daryl Greenfield - he is doing such amazing work related to early science learning and I think we will be seeking his expertise as we move forward. I'd love to talk further about your work/our work sometime in the coming weeks!

Thank you, Christopher. That's our hope; that introducing math, science, CT on early will increase children's interest and engagement with STEM later on. The benefits go beyond that, I think. Math, science (and we are trying to investigate CT), when designed appropriately, provide a great opportunity for children to be playful and learn skills that will help them engage in learning more broadly. 

Our study didn't measure interest but we did collect math, science and CT child learning outcomes, and we also conducted classroom observations. We are currently analyzing observational data and really look forward to sharing what we learn about children's engagement. 

Your question is a great one; we have learned a lot about RPPs and continue to do so every time we engage in this work. I would say one of the biggest challenges are making sure everyone is working under the same assumptions regarding goals and getting the team to be comfortable enough with design tensions (which are inevitable). To tackle this first one, we have designed learning blueprints that articulate learning goals. Working and iterating on these as a team helps ensure we are all working under the same assumptions and toward the same goal. When tacking the second, we have that it's really key (and challenging) to create a space where everyone feels comfortable and safe sharing, but also willing and open to hearing other perspectives and change course as needed. Being able to meet in person and often helps and so does discussing roles and the unique expertise everyone brings to the table. What have you found most challenging? Are there any good lessons you've learned. We'd love to hear them. 

Cindy, always so nice to hear from you! I just watched your 1st grade science video and I loved it. It would be great to connect soon. For another project focused on 3D science in preschool, we have developed some units around shadows and I'd love to think about the alignment across preK, K and 1st grade. 

Yes, the question about whether a broader set of CT skills are better align to the abilities and interests of young learners is a good one. I'd be interested to hear more about your project integrating CT with science in later grades. We explored both the connections with math and science and found the opportunities/synergies were different. We found connections with some of the science practices, regardless of disciplinary content. Have you found something similar? Or different?

Hi, Ximena! I'm working with Cindy on our science curriculum, and my primary charge is to struggle with just the very questions you've posed about CT. As a general guiding principle across several projects, we've taken an expansive view of CT, including aspects of data analysis, modeling, and systems thinking under the CT umbrella along with the ones you've outlined in your video. 

In our earlier work, we came to the conclusion you allude to: that different disciplines offer stronger opportunities for different aspects of CT. Between mathematics and science, at least in the early grades, we found that mathematics is more naturally aligned with algorithmic thinking, programming, and debugging, while science more naturally aligned with modeling and data. Problem decomposition and abstraction could be seen in both disciplines but might look pretty different.

In the early grades, for example, since mathematics is largely about learning how to operate on numbers, the connection to algorithmic thinking (and therefore programming) is pretty strong. Our colleagues Paul Goldenberg, June Mark, Kirsten Reed and others are leveraging this connection to revise the Think Math! Curriculum to use programming as an additional tool/language for deepening math concepts. Maya Israel, Diana Franklin, and colleagues are doing similar work.

In science, data and modeling are so central, they each occupy their own practice in NGSS distinct from CT (despite our desire to keep them in the same tent). Digital models, for instance, have been finding their way into elementary science activities for quite a while. Our approach is to develop digital models that closely align with hands-on activities in the classroom (much as you describe in your video), and to explore how to help students make connections between what they do on screen as representative of real life phenomena (and not just a game world unto itself).

Discussions around the purpose and use of models lead nicely into consideration of abstraction, though when it's best to introduce that term and the concept to young children is debatable for sure. We've chosen not to focus on making connections between designing and performing experiments and CT components related to problem decomposition, algorithmic thinking, and debugging. While they are related, the goals of designing an experiment and writing a program are quite different, so the processes for decomposing a problem, for instance, could look very different. It can get tricky for sure!

Thank you for thoughtful questions, Marley. Yes, our work involved co-designing activities that families can do at home and we are planning to make those available publicly soon. We are also working on some video material to support parents as they engage in these kinds of activities. 

You raise an excellent point. We, adults, often struggle letting children process and experience productive struggles themselves. What we found ultimately helpful was calling these challenges out explicitly and transparently in activity and lesson documents for educators and parents. And I have to admit that we weren't completely successful (our observation work indicates it was challenging still); in fact, this final stage of our work involves iterations to resources to address this very issue. We'd welcome any ideas you may have to share. 

I think it is certainly tough - and one that I haven't mastered, either! It's so tempting to snatch something away and do it yourself. I think you're right that calling out these challenges and making them explicit is a great place to start. In doing so, you are highlighting something that parents or educators might not even realize they are doing. Typically this is something that home visitors can be really helpful with. I wonder if you are able to collaborate with a home visiting program in some way? I've also found that parents (or teachers) might feel like they are trying to impress the observer, or show that their child can do the activity "correctly". By explicitly calling out this kind of scaffolding as beneficial, you can help counter and redirect that well-meaning (but ultimately not helpful) behavior. 

That is a great idea, Marley. Home visitors are able to build rapport with families over time and this rapport builds the kind of trust that is necessary to discuss challenges openly. 

Thank you, DeLene! We've been really inspired by the parents/families. They really embraced the co-design process as time went by. Their involvement allowed us to think about what was feasible and meaningful from the very start.

Hi Mia, I loved watching your video! We will be posting our activities soon--both key hands-on activities and our technology in the App stores. It will be great to discuss if/how our activities can fit into your existing project!

Thanks Heather for your kind words! Hope you and your team are doing well, as well!
It is indeed wonderful to see all these videos that showcase our projects!
I agree- it's great to see this various projects and approaches to introducing CT to young learners. Discovering common threads and common ideas reinforce our collective work!
The idea of having families in the loop makes it powerful and more meaningful - many have commented on this as a particularly powerful aspect of working with students -- early learners, especially -- but also elementary aged children. Communicating these ideas to parents, care-givers and teachers in effective ways are things we are actively discussing and working on as we close this initial exploratory project and focus on dissemination and communication.

Hi Heather, good to see you! Yes, effective communication to parents and teachers is key. One aspect that we focus on is noticing how CT can relate to things that are already common (such as getting ready for bed) but adds the dimension of the child taking some ownership/responsibility (e.g. having the child propose the different tasks and the sequencing of the tasks, and discussing when the child's order may be problematic, such as putting "brushing teeth" before "bed time snack"). We would love to talk with you about what you are finding as well!

Hi, Heather! Thank you for watching and stopping by here. I watched your video as well. Very exciting to hear you all have similar findings. You've explored some CT skills and practices we haven't yet explored, so we are excited to learn from you all. I recently read your paper and found it very useful. We definitely need to try to re-schedule our meeting at WGBH.

I think Shuchi and Phil already answered your question, but the one thing I'll add is that you raise an important question regarding the relation to problem solving. I do think CT offers strategies that ultimately help children problem solve and tackle challenges. I think linking it to problem solving is OK, as long as one discusses how CT includes unique problem solving strategies/approaches. This is, of course, challenging you do. Some of these CT skills/practices (in ECE  at least) are strongly linked to other STEM areas and disciplines (e.g., engineering). This is something we are hoping to continue working on; defining, providing examples, etc. We'd love to think more about that with your team. 

Sure is! Good to see familiar faces in the discussion as well :) Thanks for watching, Jeremy!

Yes Jeremy, good to see you too! Thanks for commenting!

That's a good question, DeLene. I think we're probably most proud of the partnerships that were formed to conduct this work and co-design resources. 

I agree!  The concepts developed in this project seem very well designed to build the computational thinking of preschoolers.  I would also like to know what the teachers share about their involvement in this project. 

Chris and DeLene, thank you for your thoughtful questions about teacher engagement. As you note, we did observe enthusiasm amongst children as they explored the different activities and teachers shared similar observations -- we completed post-implementation interviews with teachers and overall they expressed having fun with the CT activities, and found that children in their classrooms were often engaged and interested. For instance, a set of activities that promoted abstraction included sorting different objects for multiple purposes, which teachers identified as successful/promising as children connected to skills they already know (sorting) and extended their learning (sorting and categorizing by different and more complex characteristics, for a given purpose). Teachers also reported that including everyday routines, like Getting Ready for School, was a helpful way to present tasks/problems, which was a familiar context that helped children to engage in learning about decomposition. Across all of the activities, teachers tended to modify lessons to meet the needs of their children and often to provide more time/opportunity to practice new concepts. In fact, most teachers expressed they would have benefitted from more time to introduce and engage in the lessons – sometimes spreading lessons across multiple days and other times to repeat lessons to provide more practice. In such cases, teachers pointed to particular algorithmic thinking activities focused on sequencing (providing/following directions) which they observed to sometimes be more challenging. Teachers also expressed wanting to continue implementing the CT activities,  and suggested providing more books, more activities and brief PD videos that could provide models of lessons. So, there is much more work to be done. And we are excited about that!

Thank you, Traci, for your kind comments and for encouraging to share more about our findings around problem decomposition. We are very excited to publish these and other findings. We have submitted some scholarly publications and are also actively exploring other dissemination mechanisms to reach a more diverse audience. We welcome your recommendations!

Hello, Karen. Yes, I think there are definitely challenges in terms of time/space in the curriculum/day. Our approach was to explore ways in which CT could be included/highlighted in what's already happening in preschool classrooms/homes and to explore the integration with math and science. We found there is potential for both of these approaches, but of course there are challenges as well. For instance, integration is complex. Designing activities that focus/weight both the math/science and the CT(rather than tackling it on) is not easy. We have made a lot of iterations to ensure this is the case and we are still working on it. 

Thank you for sharing your site! You include so many useful resources (teachers find videos like the ones you include very helpful). And I agree that librarians and other educators in schools are often well positioned to promote integration across domains. It would be great to think about how these kinds of efforts could be embedded in school/system wide projects. Maybe we can chat about it in the future?

Thank you for your kind words and encouragement, Michael.