Hi Perrin, nice to see you here! I think we probably do things similarly to your work. We generally do a combination of email blast recruiting and trying to spread word through educator and admin networks. As I'm sure you know, word of mouth goes a long way in Maine. It is all generally self selection though to help make sure everyone participating is really excited about being part of the work. We're hoping to bring on some new schools this coming year so if your school is interested let us know!

Thank you for your feedback. I was interested to see in your video and read from your comment, that one-on-one coaching was beneficial as a strategy to support PD. As we look to continue our work and expand our community, we are considering peer support/coaching as new teachers work to integrate CS/CT into their content. Thank you so much for sharing what you have learned!

That sounds like a great strategy! Is there a good way we can keep up with your work? We have wrapped up our project and are in the analysis/writing phase but would love to see how your work continues. 

Our website is probably the easiest way at the moment but we're always happy to connect via email. We would also be really interested to read your publications once they're shareable! We are also entering the writing phase and will hopefully be able to share those soon. Is there a place where you have documented your one-on-one coaching process that we could reference? It would be great to build our model off of what you've learned. 

Thanks for sharing your site! My email address is: zitsi.mirakhur@uky.edu. If you'd like to send me a note, I'd be happy to share our forthcoming research brief (which will include some information on the one-on-one coaching process) with you.

In our Earth Science module, we incorporated Scratch Programming into continental movement and "debugged" an issue in the coding that had the subcontinent of India in the wrong position in the Pangea formation.  The students had to apply their content knowledge of where India should be and use CT skills to fix the coding of the India sprite. They were engaged and collaborated, and applied their new programming skills in an extension project that represented evidence of continental drift. Thank you for your interest!

We collect data on student engagement through student surveys, and teacher interviews. The interviews were designed to get insight into content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge and were semi-structured to allow for other themes to emerge. Thank you for your interest in our project!

I look forward to hearing/reading your results in the future!  Thank you for sharing more about your data collection and a focus of the analysis.

Thanks for sharing your video! Our project is a research-practice partnership so groups of teachers and researchers worked together to identify science content within three broad science content areas (life, Earth, and physical science) that the groups could envision enhancing through CT integration. Considerations for the groups included finding content that all of the teachers in the working group were planning to teach in the coming year and being able to envision meaningful enhancements for the science content using the elements of CT that we introduced through our project. So it was a creative and a practical process. Thank you for your interest!

Hi Aditi, the topics we chose were collaboratively decided upon and came about for a few different reasons. We worked with teachers from several different districts with different teaching roles so we focused on topics that all of the teachers in a content area addressed. We also looked for topics that we knew students struggled with and where CS may be able to support the science learning. For example, understanding the theory of plate tectonics can be a pretty abstract topic for students and grapples with scale which we have found to also challenge students. This seemed like a place where some modeling work (in our case using Scratch) could support students as they learn about how plates move. And realistically, we also wanted to make sure the topic was exciting enough for our teams to work on for an extended period of time. 

Our research was approached from an exploratory perspective. We're interested in the potential of CS and Science integration to support learning of both content areas and we're trying to identify some of the supports that are helpful for teachers as they try to do this in their classrooms. We are still pretty early in our analysis phase but we can certainly share more once we're further along. Some of the things we have found to be important for this work is having a strong support community and in addition to providing time and space to try things out and just explore what options are available, both in terms of topics to explore and the technology that is involved.

Very helpful! Thanks for sharing. Look forward to learning more about the work!

Hi Marina and team! I'd love to connect and learn more. I've been doing research around integrating science and CT at the middle and high school levels at Northwestern and now at MIT. There are a lot of exciting parallels between the work, so I'd love to talk. Give me an email address to reach out to and we can connect? 

Hi Aditi, That sounds great! You can reach us at Marina.Van@maine.edu and Laura.Millay@maine.edu - thank you!

Hi Eric, The framework we used for computational thinking was of computational thinking as a set of concepts and approaches that could be used to enhance learning in the middle school science classroom. Teachers in our project found it helpful to make these concepts and approaches explicit in the classroom, as a kind of touchstone to help students recognize and generalize some of the strategies that they or their classmates used in learning science and computer science concepts. I think that same process - of having students work through using aspects of computer science to learn science content (for instance, programming robots to explore motion in physics) and then reflecting as a class on the ways that computational thinking (for example, decomposition) contributed to the learning process - could also be useful in high school. The poster we used to support classroom discussion about computational thinking was adapted from www.barefootcomputing.org. One thought I have about how/why it was useful for teachers and students to refer to the poster is that the process of reflecting on an activity or learning process and breaking it down into parts and naming the parts, is itself a computational thinking strategy that can be empowering for participants. There is something useful in the basic idea that complex activities can be broken down into identifiable, repeatable parts - or that a participant can choose to tweak/debug a portion of an activity and begin to turn it into an algorithm to make the process more smooth and effective. I think it's potentially empowering for students of all ages and also for adults to draw connections between our own activities and learning processes and processes that are at the core of CS. Thank you for your interest!

Hi Eric, Thanks for your interest and questions. I've been working with the Life Science teachers in our project, and I think some of the approaches they took for integrating at the middle level are very transferable to high school and beyond. We focused on integrating CS and CT into several lessons of an ecology unit, including one that had students using simulation models to explore predator-prey interactions. CT comes into play when students explore the factors that influence the model, tinkering with different parameters to see what happens, spotting patterns, making predictions, and evaluating results. With students who are more comfortable with coding, you could challenge them to change the program to include a new variable. Even just understanding the structure of the computer simulation model and what each part does aligns with decomposing problems and understanding algorithms. I'll let others from our team speak to Earth Science and the computational thinking framework.

Good morning, Eric. In our Earth Science module, we incorporated Scratch Programming into continental movement and "debugged" an issue in the coding that had the subcontinent of India in the wrong position in the Pangea formation.  Students had to apply their content knowledge of where India should be and use CT skills to fix the coding of the India sprite. They were engaged and collaborated, and applied their new programming skills in an extension project that represented evidence of continental drift. Two years ago when we started this work there were many ideas and directions we considered going in, including data collection in the field with sensors and the use of CODAP data on earthquakes to provide evidence of plate boundaries. I believe there are ample opportunities to include CT/CS in Earth Science. Thank you for your interest in our work.