Hi Margo!

Thank you so much for your excitement around this work -- we are so passionate as well! 

We too see this as a start in an important journey of computational thinking. Our approach begins with supporting the basic skills and using those skills to create computational artifacts. We see this project providing early "pre-coding" experiences that would equip children to engage in other developmentally appropriate coding experiences as they continue to grow. Our colleagues at PBS and public media stations around the country have developed workshops that use ScratchJr for early elementary, and so our work is designed to support children in advancing to this as well! We are eager to continue this work to better build that bridge into early elementary!

Thanks for your interest, Kathy. (Must be great having two preschool grandkids to try activities with!) To answer your questions:

Books and Songs Used in The Story Emporium

• Unit 1 (2 weeks): Old MacDonald Song
• Unit 2 (2 weeks): Pete the Cat: I Love My White Shoes (also comes in a Spanish edition)
• Unit 3 (2 weeks): The Gingerbread Man (a bilingual edition) plus two other variations on the story: The Runaway Tortilla and Catch That Pickle!
• Unit 4 (1 week) is different from the others: teachers have a choice of stories/songs to choose from. Each of the Story Sets we offer features three new stories or songs that share the same pattern. The Story Sets (there are six of them) include variations on Stone Soup, If You’re Happy and You Know It, and The Was an Old Lady, among others. Including the Story Sets allows teachers to tailor the curriculum to the interests of their students and also allows us the opportunity to present a diverse selection of books.

Age-Appropriate CT Skills

With teachers’ support, preschool children will begin to understand these core CT skills and how they relate to stories/songs:

• Decomposition: How a story/song can be broken down into story/song elements
• Sequencing: How story/song elements follow a certain order
• Pattern Recognition: How story/song elements repeat in a predictable way
• Algorithmic Thinking: How to use the story/song pattern (the step-by-step instructions, called the algorithm) to create a new version of the story/song by changing some of the elements
• Logical Reasoning: How the story/song elements are connected to one another in a way that makes logical sense
• Debugging: How to notice and correct a mistake in the story/song pattern

Supports for Teachers

In addition to the Lesson Plans, The Story Emporium offers teachers a video overview of the program, a five-step model on how the curriculum works, tips on using the app with children, suggestions for fitting these seven weeks into teachers’ existing curricula, a diagram showing how literacy and CT skills dovetail, and teaching strategies for dual-language learners and children with learning and thinking differences.

Thanks so much for your detailed response. I often worry about the support thr preschool teachers and their opportunirty for professional learning as many preschool children live in communities where the daycare staff are the ones working with our youngest leaners. I also wanted to share a new book I just found called "How to Code a Sandcastle."

Thank you for sharing the book, Kathy! 

We have that same concern for early childhood educators. Our hope with this project was that we could leverage what educators are already doing--reading and breaking down stories!--to support early CT skill development. Our amazing early educator partners and fantastic advisors also played a large role in shaping this project so that it would be feasible and embraceable. We're pilot testing now!

I can’t wait to find out what you find out through the piloting of the program. I have to admit that I am hoping that if students start having these amazing learning experiences as young children, they will be the ones demanding it as they continue through school. I hope they will learn to advocate for themselves.

Great question! We are conducting virtual pre- and post- child assessments in order to understand if and how using The Story Emporium activities and digital app support student growth in computational literacy. The assessment consists of two parts:

• Joint Story Retell (JSR) developed by Dempsey and Skarakis-Doyle, and (2) Computational Literacy (CL) Learning Task developed by the EDC research team. The JSR assesses children’s ability to recall key information from a story. After reading a story twice, children complete 10 cloze (fill-in-the-blank) items read by the researcher.
• The CL Learning Task assesses children’s computational literacy—their ability to recognize and produce story patterns. After reading the first part of a story to the child, the researcher asks the child to retell the story and to continue the story using a set of images related to the story for ideas.

We don’t yet have plans to follow student development and growth in the longer term, but that could be a valuable direction for this work to take!

Thanks so much for your comprehensive response!  I love the assessment tool you're using - it seems very in depth. It sounds as if you guys are going to capture some great data. Good luck with your project and thanks so much for your work with young children.

Thanks, looking forward to sharing our results!

Thanks so much for raising these important points, Margo! Too often we see that technology and media are distributed in classrooms without the professional supports that teachers need in order to successfully integrate resources in developmentally appropriate ways that support learning and are based in research.

Although a robust, formal professional development program was outside the scope of this particular project, we worked closely with teachers and expert advisors during formative phases to better understand teacher familiarity, experience, and comfort with (1) key content areas of CT and narrative development, and (2) the pedagogical approaches to using technology to build on and enhance hands-on learning opportunities. Drawing on what we learned from these early phases, WGBH developed multiple types of teacher supports (e.g., introductory videos, a teacher version of the app). EDC then conducted additional rounds of testing and expert reviews that elicited feedback on the value and usability of these educative components, specifically around how well they prepared and supported teachers in implementing the content.

What we found is that teachers value concise introductory materials that define key aspects of the content and that make explicit how the intervention’s approach and resources support the key content areas. We also found – not surprisingly – that teachers benefit from revisiting explanations of the key content in each lesson plan and also from seeing the rationale for how activities and moments within individual lessons support children in engaging with each content area. As a result, WGBH integrated educative components that do just this into all lesson plans. (Interestingly, the teacher version of the app ended up being less helpful than we had expected—having to switch between a student and teacher versions made for a clunky experience.) As Borgna describes above, the final intervention includes a video overview of the program, a five-step model on how the curriculum works, tips on using the app with children, suggestions for fitting these seven weeks into teachers’ existing curricula, a diagram showing how literacy and CT skills dovetail, and teaching strategies for dual-language learners and children with learning and thinking differences.

Thanks, Quinn! We are really excited about the potential for this approach to support preschool children with early CT development! There is so much to continue exploring!

Hi Kelly--

Thanks for your interest in the resources. We're not ready to distribute them right now, but I've got your email and will let you know when they're available.

Hi Kathy-- As I mentioned to Kelly (above), we're not yet ready to distribute the resources, but I will be sure to let you know when they're available.

Thanks, Zohreh! We look forward to sharing after we've tested.

Thanks for your interesting reflections, Sean! I wanted to respond to your question about how The Story Emporium app works and its relationship to the off-screen activities.

The overall goal of The Story Emporium is for children to learn to break down a repetitive story/song into smaller elements, to recognize that it has a predictable pattern, and to use that pattern to (1) retell the story or to (2) create a new version of the story by replacing some of the story elements in the pattern. For example, in the original Gingerbread Man story, the Gingerbread man encounters a pig and runs away to avoid being eaten. To make a new story,  a child may change the story elements so that a chocolate chip cookie (new character) encounters a monster (another new character) and runs away to avoid being eaten. 

Once children understand the model, they practice it in small groups through both hands-on and digital activities. Transferring knowledge between the hands-on activities and the app helps promote a deeper understanding of the CT skills.

• Mini Story/Song Charts (paper): Children create one row of the pattern using picture cards. The first time they do the activity, they retell the story. The next time, they practice replacing some of the picture cards to create a new version.

• The Story Emporium App: This gives children a new way to practice what they've learned from the Mini Story charts and other hands-on activities. They use the same pattern they’ve been working with to create stories in the app--but the app gives them a wider range of story elements to choose from. Then the app plays back their story, complete with narration and sound effects. It also allows children to debug their stories if they want. For example, in Old MacDonald, a child might decide they’ve made an illogical choice (combining a cow with a "cluck, cluck" chicken sound instead of “moo, moo”)—the app let’s them go back and change that. (We also allow children to intentionally make wrong choices, if their aim is to make a funny story (for example, a dog saying "roar, roar!").
  
  

I should also mention that the app features six different digital stories with different settings, characters, and narrators: two stories are based on the Old MacDonald song (In the City and On the Farm) for Weeks 1 and 2; two are based on the Pete the Cat story (Messy Stepping and Messy Rolling) for Weeks 3 and 4; and two are based on the Gingerbread Man (Runaway Gingerbread and Runaway Treats) for Weeks 5 and 6. In the final week, children have a choice of any of the six stories.

Hi Sean!

Thanks so much for your comment! I wanted to add also that in all of our research around young children's use of technology, it is clear that technology is just a part of the learning. Hands-on materials and different modes of exploring the same content are essential. We have also seen that when hands-on and tech are very closely connected, there is beautiful transference of knowledge across platforms. Sounds like you're seeing the same things! Exciting! We're excited to share our findings after our pilot testing completes this summer! :)