Ari,

Excellent concept. The idea of students becoming familiar with and understanding the power of computer coding at a young age will give them such a leg up in future years and open doors to exciting careers in many areas. Nice job!

Hi Sarah, 

Thanks! The framing of the students as interns builds on previous work creating and researching digital engineering internships, where middle school science students work as interns in a virtual engineering firm (Futura--the same firm in the video here). 

We've found that the internship approach is helpful in a number of ways: 1) By contextualizing the coding that students (as interns) do in a workplace environment, we hope to shift perceptions of what real CS workplaces are like, and the applications of coding work. 2) The internship puts students at the center of the action--as interns, they receive work direction from a project director, and collaborate with their intern colleagues (peers) to complete their work; 3) the teacher acts as Internship Coordinator, which enables the teacher to play a role of "guide on the side." This enables science teachers--many of whom have had little or no previous coding experience--to feel more comfortable learning alongside their students. This approach supports a central project goal--to build capacity of teachers to support integration of CS education in science courses.

Here is the Digital Engineering Internship STEM showcase video from 2017 if you're curious to learn more: https://multiplex.videohall.com/presentations/941

Best,

Ari

 

Hi Dave, Thanks for your interest! We've done extensive piloting of the Coral Restoration unit and are developing both it and the Air Quality lesson sequence as publishable curricular units--complete with teacher guides and educative materials--for middle school science classrooms. We expect to see the Coral-focused unit released with Amplify Science sometime during the next academic year (timing TBD). We are hoping to see the Air Quality unit released in the following year (2021/2022)--we have done a round of piloting with it, and we were all set to run a larger research trial of it this spring when COVID-19 hit. We will be running that research effort in the fall instead. Perhaps there is a way your group can get involved with the fall pilots--let's stay in touch!

Thanks Jennifer! Students use pair programming throughout the unit, which many in the field have employed to support collaborative work. Through iterative piloting of the curriculum units, we also learned how critical it is to go beyond pair programming. We designed the lessons to feature explicit instruction, norms, and routines to support collaboration. Both of the units also feature intentional collaboration structures that support peer discourse and collaboration--in particular, students use a Critiquing Code discourse routine as they code, where they work together to analyze and improve their code throughout the units. 

Hi, and thanks! To develop the professional learning resources, we worked closely with our partner district in Washington state, who have been early implementers and leaders in bringing CS education into K-12 schools and integrating CS in core curricula. We developed a professional learning workshop that was conducted in person with participating teachers, as well as a PL website with resources for teachers to access to support them while they were teaching. Teachers were also able to reach us directly while implementing the lessons for additional support.

Thanks Sarah! The team developed the visual interface by building off of available block libraries and then creating custom components (like highlighting lines of code as they are executed, creating an intentional rollout of code blocks to reduce cognitive load as students build their understanding, and developing differentiated resources within the coding tools). 

Couldn't agree more, Rebecca--time is a scarce resource with the ambitious demands placed on science classrooms to meet the NGSS. The Coding Science Internship units enable students to deepen their understanding of the integrated science concepts and provide a deep dive on science and engineering practices (like Using Mathematics and Computational Thinking,Developing and Using Models, and Analyzing and Interpreting Data). Both units also engage students in learning about Engineering concepts. The science and engineering content is integrated with the CS content--coding is framed as a tool for doing science. 

From our experiences in a variety of classrooms, we know that students have a wide range of coding experience. You're right that the Coding Science Internship units could certainly be a good fit for some upper elementary classrooms. Please feel free to email me at akrakowski@berkeley.edu if you want to discuss further!

Thank you! I appreciate your response. I will be in touch! In the meantime, please take a moment to check out our video regarding our work as Master Teaching Fellows at CUNY-CSI. We focused on uncovering students' naive theories this year and the variety of ways we can construct correct meaning.

Thanks Janice!

Hi Michael, Thanks for the questions! We are exploring curricular implementation and the impact of specific instructional moves through observations, daily teacher logs and a daily student engagement survey (using an instrument from ActivationLab.org, which is predictive of student learning gains). We should have early findings about implementation from our Coral Reef unit ready to share sometime this summer; research on the Air Quality Data unit (originally scheduled for this spring) is being delayed to the fall. Please stay tuned!