Thanks for pointing me to your video. It is a powerful program and I would love to learn more about it. 

Hi Sarah. The Everyday CS website (http://everydaycomputing.org/) has a few sample lesson plans. You can request access to other lessons here: https://www.canonlab.org/actionfractionslessons. Once we are done with our implementation study, we will host all the lessons on the Everyday CS website. Until then, we are being a bit more controlled in this dissemination. 

Hi Jennifer, assessing students' computational thinking competencies is a major focus of the LTEC-2 project and we have approached this challenge by building off of cognitive theories about how students develop computational thinking (CT), as represented by different CT learning trajectories. Using these learning trajectories as a starting point, we then used an evidence-centered design process to develop assessments that allow students to demonstrate their CT knowledge, skills and abilities. We are currently in the process of testing, refining, and validating these assessments with students that participated in the project. 

Both interesting questions.

Our multi-institution collaboration originated based on the expertise in the different sites. University of Chicago brought extensive mathematics and curriculum development experience (via Everyday Mathematics textbook series), and Maya Israel has extensive research experience with students with disabilities and technology. I joined UChicago right as the project began, and I have experience with researching computer science learning and developing CS curriculum. So between these three sets of expertise, we had what we needed. When we got further in the project, the second NSF grant, we added UIC for their assessment expertise. We meet often and move responsibilities around as peoples' interests and expertise morph. 

We have done classroom observations and teacher interviews, but we don't have specific written measures for engagement for the students.

Really nice blend of skills on the team!

Can you talk about how the research component has has added to the development and evolution of your project?

Our vision is that mathematics instruction could change in two ways (though others can weigh in on other perspectives). First, we're able to provide virtual manipulatives that give another way of students interacting with those manipulatives. They can sit down with fraction circle pieces themselves, then they can program the computer as to which pieces to pick up and how many to place. This shows an animation and helps them make connections between the denominator and the size of the piece. In addition, we provide ways they can think about the rules associated with mathematics. For comparing fractions, we have them express how they compare fractions with like denominators or fractions with like numerators, hoping they notice the different rules involved.

Sounds great! I love your idea of "virtual manipulatives" which can be so much more diverse than the traditional manipulatives in math learning context. And, the very diversity may invite conversations around unit fraction and its relation to the sizes of sprites that are being used. I am excited to learn more about this in the coming years! All the very best! 

Great questions! We are in the process of analyzing the data now and have multiple sources of data -- some from students' responses on paper and some from students "thinking aloud" as they work through the assessment items. I can speak more about what we learned from the responses on paper, but maybe Maya or others can comment on the think aloud results.

After coding/scoring the paper responses we've learned that the items do indeed vary in terms of difficulty, with some being able to be answered correctly by a majority of students and some being more difficult. In addition, some of the items were more predictive of students' overall score, indicating that they can discriminate well between lower and higher performances. This seems to be true across a variety of items that test different content/learning trajectories. Although we can make these statements about the items in general, we did not use an experimental design that would allow us to separate out the effect of items' format on students' performance (doing so would have required varying the item format while holding the content constant and would have meant students had to complete many more assessment items).

Re: "If children struggled how did you determine if the struggle came from math, CT or both?" We approached this in two ways. First, we attempted to minimize struggles from math by using content that was learned in prior units or years. Second, we sometimes had to build the coding/scoring rubrics to allow for isolating math errors so that they did not negatively influence the judgements of students' CT proficiency.