Hello Katie,
Thank you for your questions! Our collaboration with the schools and teachers has been largely organic, with Project Director Gary Scott spending a lot of time with the teachers to build trust and establish a working relationship in which the teachers are involved in the project as colleagues. It is helpful that Dr. Scott is a retired K-12 educator from LAUSD who spent most of his career in challenging inner-city school settings. Collaboration has been enhanced by active participation of the principal at Inland Leaders Charter School, Jason Jimenez, who is a graduate of the educational justice Ed.D. program at Redlands and a strong proponent of using spatial tools in K-12 education. The Spatial STEM+C project is an outgrowth of conversations among Dr. Jimenez, Dr. Scott, and myself over the past three years. At Lugonia Elementary School, the assistant principal, Honey Libao, is a former math coach for Redlands Unified School District and is a current graduate student in the educational justice Ed.D. program. She has been instrumental in aiding the pilot testing at that site. The teachers are developing the activities in collaboration with the project directors and staff. Our meetings primarily focus on documenting strategies that work, ensuring fidelity of implementation, and assessing spatial thinking, computational thinking, and mathematical performance.

Steve

Thanks, Steve. I was struck by your comment that meetings focus on documenting strategies that work. Can you give examples of some of the strategies that have been most successful? Is there a way for others to access your documentation of these strategies?

We are in the process of wrapping up the pilot period (first 6 months of the project) and documenting the activities that have been created. I will meet with Dr. Scott and come up with a preliminary list of activities. Our project plan is to produce an e-book for best practices and also share them from our project website (which is in development). Steve

Hello Irene,
Thank you for this great list of games! We have not been using these games in particular, but a few (e.g., Blokus3D and Labyrinth) would fit in with the activities we have been using. A player v. player strategy is integrated into some of the activities the teachers are using in their classrooms, including timed completion of spatial patterns and use of a collaborative game developed by Dr. Scott called Math-E-Motion. We are hoping to find connections among spatial thinking and computational thinking abilities and have a matrix of connections I’d be happy to share (unfortunately, our project website is a bit underdeveloped at this point-I plan to work on that this summer). One of our biggest challenges is assessing CT in the K-5 grades. We will be working on a pilot assessment this summer.

Steve

Hello Emily,
A good definition of computational thinking is provided by Google at https://www.google.com/edu/resources/programs/e... Computational thinking is a problem solving process that includes a number of characteristics, such as logically ordering and analyzing data and creating solutions using a series of ordered steps (or algorithms), and dispositions, such as the ability to confidently deal with complexity and open-ended problems. CT is essential to the development of computer applications, but it can also be used to support problem solving across all disciplines, including math, science, and the humanities. We feel that CT can be a precursor to some forms of mathematical thinking, but also a subset of mathematical thinking. An interesting discussion of CT in elementary education is going on at MSP Net: http://hub.mspnet.org/index.cfm/29088.

Thank you Gretal! We are very familiar with Dr. Sorby’s work and have integrated her ideas into our project. I haven’t yet viewed the webinar linked above, but will do so ASAP. I’m also sharing it with our project team.

In the field of spatial visualization it is hard not to be familiar with Dr. Sorby’s work! :-) I would really love to hear what you and your team think about the 8 hour spatial visualization intervention showcased in the link I shared! Thanks!

Hello Sue. Apologies for my delayed response! Our project URL is http://spatialstudies.redlands.edu/spatial-stemc/. It is a placeholder, currently. By the end of the summer, though, it should be populated with current news and materials generated by the project. Cheers. Steve

Yes. I voted for your project! I spend a lot of my time introducing GIS to faculty and students. Helping students understand the computational foundation of digital mapping software is a great approach. Cheers. Steve