I find it’s always hard to define big ideas like. But to me “computational thinking” boils down to logical and analytic thinking. :)

Yes, we more or less concluded that it is the process rather than the artifact that determines if it is computational thinking, i.e., if critical/logical/analytic thinking was involved in the creation/analysis of the computational artifact.

That’s a great suggestion. For this project, we wanted to get the teachers’ perspective on what they thought would be relevant and interesting problems for their student population.
It would be interesting for comparison if we design a study where students get to work together to design their own problems – a great follow up proposal :-) Recruitment could potentially be a problem; if we get the same population of kids that usually come for summer computer camps, we may not see a large variety of interesting problems.
For this project, several teachers did use the CS Unplugged activities in their class. It is notable that the science group did not. We will push this summer’s cohort to include more of these activities in class.

Thanks! As part of the training, we adapted materials from Mobile-CSP (http://www.mobile-csp.org). It used App Inventor as the platform. This online course is used as an exemplar for the CS Principles course. The teachers liked it because they could create mobile apps. However, because they were not teaching a dedicated CS class but rather adding the SPARCS lessons to existing classes, they felt unable to devote the time needed to introduce the App Inventor material to their class. Instead, many of them used other resources such as Scratch, using Scratch Cards (https://scratch.mit.edu/help/cards) as the online resource.

Thanks for the suggestions! Our evaluator observed most of the classrooms and was impressed with the enthusiasm and energy of the students in engaging with the lesson. We will know more when we get the results of the teacher focus groups in a few weeks.

I believe that there is a computing attitudes survey on the STELAR website which we could have adapted for middle schoolers. Unfortunately, restrictions from several of the school districts we worked with meant that we could not collect data from the students directly. Getting district approval is something we plan to work on for next year, though maybe only for some bigger districts.
Thanks for the reference on theories of interest development!

The Exploring Computer Science curriculum is meant for a semester or year-long dedicated course in CS. Our goal is to be able to get lessons into existing STEM courses. We are adapting a few ECS lessons from Units 1 and 2 in our summer PD this year. In addition, we are looking at materials from Bootstrap and GUTS which our math and science teachers can incorporate into their classes.

Hi Barbara, for the summer student academy, we asked our teachers to bring a few students each. We encouraged them to be diverse but did not set explicit requirements. In the end, it was 60% boys and 40% girls.