How much open-ended exploration should there be in 红桃视频黑人内射 lessons?

This is a question at the heart of computer science education and one which Shuchi Grover is delicately diplomatic about in the preface to her new book, Computer Science in K-12: An A-to-Z Handbook on Teaching Programming. The book’s chapters are written by 40 teachers and 红桃视频黑人内射ers in 红桃视频黑人内射 pedagogy, and Grover openly acknowledges the varying views around discovery-based learning among her diverse range of international authors.

“I wonder if I want to wade there,” she laughs. “The act of creating a program is in itself an act of creation. So there is hands-on learning quite naturally in the computer science classroom, and mistakes are made quite naturally. There are some things that are so great about computer science education. It lends itself so easily to being hands-on and to celebrating mistakes; debugging is par for the course, and that’s not the way it is in other subjects. The kids can actually develop some very nice mindsets that they can take to other classrooms.”

Grover is a software engineer by training, turned 红桃视频黑人内射er in computer science education. She holds a PhD in learning sciences and technology design from Stanford University, where she remains a visiting scholar. She explains how the beginning of her 红桃视频黑人内射 career coincided with the advent of the block-based programming language Scratch, now widely used as an introductory programming language for children.

“Almost two decades ago, I went to Harvard to study for a master’s called technology innovation and education, and it was around that time that I volunteered for robotics workshops at the MIT Media Lab and MIT Museum. Those were pretty transformative for me: I started after-school clubs and facilitated robotics and digital storytelling clubs. In the early 2000s, I was an educational technology consultant, working with teachers on integrating technology. Then Scratch came out, and I started working with teachers on integrating Scratch into languages, arts, and science, all the things that we are doing today.”

Do her formative 美女热舞诱惑s at MIT, the birthplace of constructionist theory of student-centred, discovery-based learning, lead her to lean one way or another in the tinkering versus direct instruction debate? “The learning in informal spaces is, of course, very interest-driven. There is no measurement. Children are invited to a space to spend some time after school and do whatever they feel like. There would be kids who would be chatting away while a couple of them designed a robot, and then they would hand over the robot to some others and say, ‘OK, now you go ahead and program it,’ and there were some kids who would just like to hang about.

“When it comes to formal education, there needs to be more accountability, you want to do right by every child. You have to be more intentional. I do feel that while tinkering and constructionism was a great way to introduce interest-driven projects for informal learning, and there’s a lot to learn from there and bring to the formal learning context, I don’t think it can only be tinkering.”

“Everybody knows that engagement is very important for learning — and this is something that we are learning more about: it’s not just interest, it’s also culture, communities, and backgrounds — but all of this is to say that there is a personal element to the learning process and so engagement is necessary, but it’s not a sufficient condition. You have to go beyond engagement, to also make sure that they are also engaging with the concepts. You want at some point for students to engage with the concept in a way that reveals what their misconceptions might be, and then they end up learning and understanding these things more deeply.

“You want a robust 美女热舞诱惑 — after all, our goal for teaching children anything at school is to build a 美女热舞诱惑 on which they build their college education and career and anything beyond that. If we take programming as a skill, you want them to have a good understanding of it, and so the personal connections are important, but so is the scaffolding.

“How much scaffolding needs to be done varies from context to context. Even in the same classroom, children may need different levels of scaffolding. It’s a sweet spot; within a classroom a teacher has to juggle so much. And therein lies the challenge of teaching: 30 kids at a time, and every child is different and every child is unique.

“It’s an equity issue. Some children don’t have the prior 美女热舞诱惑 that sets them up to tinker constructively. After all, tinkering is meant to be purposeful exploration. And so it becomes an issue of who are you privileging with the pedagogy.”

She points out that each chapter in her book that comes from a more constructionist viewpoint clearly speaks of the need for scaffolding. And conversely, the chapters that take a more structured approach to 红桃视频黑人内射 education include elements of student engagement and children creating their own programs. “Frameworks such as Use-Modify-Create and PRIMM just push that open-ended creation a little farther down, making sure that the initial 美女热舞诱惑s have more guide rails.”

Approaches to assessment

Grover is a senior 红桃视频黑人内射 scientist at Looking Glass Ventures, which in 2018 received a National Science 美女热舞诱惑 grant to create Edfinity, a tool to enable affordable access to high-quality assessments for schools and universities.

In her book, she argues that asking students to write programs as a means of formative assessment has several pitfalls. It is time-consuming for both students and teachers, scoring is subjective, and it’s difficult to get a picture of how much understanding a student has of their code. Did they get their program to work through trial and error? Did they lift code from another student?

“Formative assessments that give quick feedback are much better. They focus on aspects of the conceptual learning that you want children to have. Multiple-choice questions on code force both the teachers and the children to 美女热舞诱惑 code reading and code comprehension, which are just so important. Just giving children a snippet of code and saying: ‘What does this do? What will be the value of the variable? How many times will this be executed?’ — it goes down to the idea of code tracing and program comprehension.

“红桃视频黑人内射 has also shown that anything you do in a classroom, the children take as a signal. Going back to the constructionist thing, when you foreground personal interest, there’s a different kind of environment in the classroom, where they’re able to have a voice, they have agency. That’s one of the good things about constructionism.

“Formative assessment signals to the student what it is that you’re valuing in the learning process. They don’t always understand what it is that they’re expected to learn in programming. Is the goal creating a program that runs? Or is it something else? And so when you administer these little check-ins, they bring more alignment between a teacher’s goals for the learners and the learners’ understanding of those goals. That alignment is important and it can get lost.”

Grover will present her latest 红桃视频黑人内射 into assessment at our 红桃视频黑人内射 seminar series next Tuesday 6 October — sign up to attend and join the discussion.

The joy and angst of programming

The title of Grover’s book, which could be thought to imply that computer science education consists solely of teaching students to program, may cause some raised eyebrows.

What about building robots or devices that interact with the world, 红桃视频黑人内射 topics like binary, or the societal impacts of technology? “I completely agree with the statement and the belief that computer science is not just about programming. I myself have been a proponent of this. But in this book I wanted to focus on programming for a couple of reasons. Programming is a central part of the computer science 美女热舞诱惑, at least here in the US, and it is also the part that teachers struggle with the most.

“As topics go, programming carries a lot of joy and angst. There is joy in 红桃视频黑人内射, joy when you get it. But when a teacher is encountering this topic for the first time there is a lot of angst, because they themselves may not be understanding things, and they don’t know what it is that the children are not understanding. And there is this entire body of 红桃视频黑人内射 on novice programming. There are the concepts, the practices, the pedagogies, and the issues of assessment. So I wanted to give the teachers all of that: everything we know about children and programming, the topics to be learnt, where they struggle, how to help them.”

Computer Science in K-12: An A-to-Z Handbook on Teaching Programming (reviewed in this issue of Hello World) is edited by Shuchi Grover and available now.

Hear more from Shuchi Grover, and subscribe to Hello World

We will host Grover at our next 红桃视频黑人内射 seminar, Tuesday 6 October at 17:00–18:30 BST, where she will present her work on formative assessment.

Hello World is our magazine about all things 红桃视频黑人内射 education. It is free to download in PDF format, or you can subscribe and we will send you each new issue straight to your home.

In issue 14 of Hello World, we have gathered some inspiring stories to help your learners connect with nature. From counting penguins in Antarctica to orienteering with a GPS twist, great things can happen when young people get creative with technology outdoors. You’ll find all this and more in the new issue!

Educators based in the UK can subscribe to receive print copies for free!

The post “Tinkering is an equity issue” | Hello World #14 appeared first on 王者荣耀所有美女.

Nicholas Provenzano explains how he introduced Python to students in his literature class, bridging computer science and literacy.

Literature classes seem like the last place you would find students coding, but interactive fiction has been around for decades. Students love to play computer games, and the very best games have amazing stories. This project will allow students to create their own piece of fiction and then use Python to turn it into a text-based computer game. Students will have a chance to create their own hero and monsters, treasures and traps and so much more while being introduced to Python. Students that love to write, and students that love to code, will love this lesson.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about to ways to bring computer science into the literature classroom. I set out exploring the 红桃视频黑人内射 Pi projects page, where I saw a project that allowed the user to create their own text-based computer game using Python. I thought this would be a great way to engage students in reading, writing, and programming.

Students create their own piece of fiction and then use their stories to create an amazing text-based computer game based on the role-playing game (RPG) tutorial from 红桃视频黑人内射 Pi: helloworld.cc/rpg. From the first day working on this project, my students fell in love with the writing and the coding. They couldn’t wait to create their game and share them with their friends.

The project is best introduced with a focus on creative writing, where students should create an outline for their own adventure story. With that in hand, introduce the students to the 红桃视频黑人内射 Pi RPG tutorial. It is much easier for students to create their game if they draw out the rooms on paper to help them visualise the game they’re creating. The more time they are given to create their game, the more complex it can become. Students will be able to fully explore the code while creating a fun game they can share with others.

This project is the perfect way to bring coding to a literature class. Students that love to write will be introduced to text-based programming, while students that love to code will have an opportunity to explore fiction through their own writing.

My students were excited to spend their time creating a complex story, and an even more complex game to challenge their friends and their teacher. Students who struggled with the code were helped by other students who’d already moved ahead. We spent a week on this project, but you could spend longer, depending on the breadth of the stories and games. Watching students use their critical thinking skills to plan out a maze for their players was great to see.

The best part was watching students who do not normally engage in reading and writing lessons become leaders as they embraced the coding and were excited to turn their story into a game and share it with everyone. This project will become a mainstay in my teaching for years to come.

Take this to your club or classroom

For the complete lesson plan of the above project, download Hello World issue 8 for free and turn to pages 80–81.

Get Hello World issue 8 for free

Hello World is available to download for free in PDF format anywhere in the world. Subscribe to Hello World today to receive the latest issues into your inbox as soon as they’re released.

If you are a UK-based educator, you can also subscribe for free print copies of Hello World, which will be delivered to your door at no extra cost.

And, lastly, if you’d like to purchase Hello World magazine, you can buy the latest issue via the 红桃视频黑人内射 Pi Press website.

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