Thank you for taking the time to watch this video! Our team would be interested in your feedback, especially in regard to the following: 1. Are you using or are aware of a similar approach to using "decoding" or interpreting the disciplinary ideas and processes embodied in code for math/science learning? 2. Have you used or are aware of assessment metrics or indicators that students are connecting a. science & code; b. math & code; and, c. math & science through code? Feel free to comment on any other aspects of the project that you have questions about.

Hi Aditi, this is an interesting idea. If I understood it correctly, students are given both a physical phenomenon (i.e.: water filtration) and a computer program describing that phenomenon (btw, are you using scratch?), and they have to arrive to an understanding of how the code does model the phenomenon. Is this correct? So they are not directly engaged with actual coding, it's more like debugging the give program to understand how it works?

Thank you for sharing your work and I appreciate how the idea of decoding blossomed from the challenges associated with collaborative programming during the last year. This reminds me of how the WISE program (web-based inquiry science environment) integrates of computational thinking (not necessarily coding) and science/math concepts (e.g., photosynthesis). One thing I appreciate about the WISE curriculum is that it integrates interactive graphs and figures to enhance student’s understanding (or a type of “decoding”?) of what is happening computationally. Do you think that might serve as an approach towards moving towards the most sophisticated kinds of decoding?

Thanks for sharing your work. This looks like a great way to connect coding to real world problems. If you're looking for an extension problem set after your students go through the water filtration, it looks like modeling a dialysis machine would fit well. Similarly, you need holes in a membrane sized appropriately to allow smaller waste molecules to pass through but prevent larger red blood cells from passing through.

 

Thanks for sharing your work. This looks like a great way to connect coding to real world problems. If you're looking for an extension problem set after your students go through the water filtration, it looks like modeling a dialysis machine would fit well. Similarly, you need holes in a membrane sized appropriately to allow smaller waste molecules to pass through but prevent larger red blood cells from passing through. 

Hi Aditi, thanks for your video and great to learn about your "decoding" approach. I especially appreciated the researcher-practitioner partnership sensibility of your work, and that you managed to get some data with students even during a pandemic! I am thinking about your question -- (a) who else is doing decoding? Asked this specifically, nothing comes to mind. But more generally, I think you are asking "is anyone exploring how connecting multiple representations helps students to learn mathematics" -- and within that frame, there's a lot of research that could situate and inform your work. I'm a fan of Hiebert's suggestion that what it means to "make sense" of mathematics is to "make connections" especially across representations. In the SimCalc work I did (ask Eric), I came to think of the valuable space for making connections as having two dimensions - visual (simulations) vs. linguistic representations (code) and familiar vs. formal representations. Visual-formal=a graph or a bar representation of ratio | Visual-familiar=a phenomena | Linguistic formal = code | Linguistic familiar = a story or explanation. Really supporting students to make all four types of connections takes time, but I believe it does result in deeper learning. Is this helpful? Is it generative for anything you might do or try?

Hi Jeremy, good to see you here, and thanks for watching our video! I like the idea of thinking about sense making in math as connecting across representations along the two dimensions you mention. Our RQs are situated around investigating how students come to "see" the mathematical relationships/processes embedded in the linguistic-formal, and I can see how the tools we're using to support them in that work could be described as visual-familiar, linguistic-familiar and even visual-formal.

I do think though that in this project, we're giving special status to the linguistic-formal (code) as a representational form that can support bridging math and science learning. My question to the audience was to ask if others were doing a kind of connecting math+science learning.

I am familiar with the SimCalc work - a lot of the work coming from the Kaput Center really grounded my theoretical and methodological understanding of how to think about and study the role of technologies in learning :)