Thanks for your questions, Brian. On the teacher side, our central partner district is the Lincoln Public Schools, which has won a national award for their CS curriculum. Teachers participating in AIR@NE get access to that curriculum and curricular materials, in addition to using some of the grant funding to purchase classroom robotics and other hardware. By working with the teachers in cohorts, we are trying to create professional communities around teaching computer science, to provide ongoing support for teachers. On the student side, most schools had time for "computers" in their schedule (rotations like music, art, PE, computers), and have replaced that with computer science time. Teachers in rural districts have had more flexibility with finding time to incorporate CS lessons each week.

Hi Cathy, thank you for your interest and questions.  I will help answer some of your questions. (Hi Wendy, please correct me if I get these wrong!)

1.  Yes, our participants are from around the state of Nebraska.  

2.  We don't actually partner with state-agency stakeholders per se.  But we do work with school districts, ESUs, and we regularly keep state Department of Education informed. 

3.  We are not including high school teachers/benchmarks as outcome goals.  But one of our master teachers is a high school teacher.

4.  Yes, we are connecting the graduate courses with a K-12 supplemental endorsement in teaching IT.  We are also in the planning process of further strengthening such a connection with K-12 CS teaching endorsement

 

Thanks,

 

Leen-Kiat

Leen-Kiat - thanks for the answers and for the work! Can't wait to see what you all learn.

Cathy

 

Christine--many but not all of the teachers who applied to our cohorts were already teaching CS, but some were going to start teaching CS  after the summer courses. With the applications, we worked with our school partners to review and accept them. We mostly were able to accept all applicants who were or would be teaching CS, who had the support of their school district to participate.

The team teaching is something we have been doing in courses at UNL since at least 2000. We built the current project on the infrastructure of past math-science partnerships that had a model for summer courses for inservice teachers that created instructional teams of faculty, K-12 teachers, graduate students, etc. So, this wasn't something new; the Colleges of Education, Engineering, Arts and Sciences, and School of Natural Resources have all had classes with this format. Faculty members appreciate creating and co-teaching courses with K-12 teachers; it helps to draw connections between the graduate course content and teaching practices with the K-12 world.

Wendy,

2000 is amazing -- it sounds like the faculty have had a long term and productive collaboration.

Our research team has learned so much from the practitioners. As one example, our CS pedagogy course development was really led by the practitioners who had been teaching CS K-12 for a number of years; no one on our PI team has taught CS at the K-8 level, so the practitioner partnership has been invaluable in developing that course and supporting the participants. One of the evolutions of our project has been the coding language we use in the CS course, moving from Python to Javascript; our practitioner partners were less familiar with Python, and we've all learned a lot by having two different languages to compare from the instructional team side. 

Several additional things learned from the practitioners:

1.  Design our courses in the summer such that CS and Computational thinking (CT) concepts learned in the morning are reinforced in the afternoon when pedagogy, resources, modules, etc. are taught.

2.  Cater to teachers' different needs -- as teachers come from different school districts with varying demands, it is important to address them individually.  A lot of office hours during the summer workshop helped; listening and collecting their feedback helped; adjusting our workshops during the academic year helped.  

3.  Be persistent.  Our research team would regularly follow up with teachers to do the classroom observation or collect required data.

Rafaella, our curriculum is built around code.org, but goes deeper since those lessons aren't enough to stretch into a full K-8 curriculum when students have regular CS courses. We use blockly and robotics heavily with the younger grades, but also focus on unplugged activities to teach concepts like conditionals, loops, functions, and sorting. We have aligned our efforts with the CSTA standards. Although our teacher participants are K-8, we also connect the material to high school (CSA/CSP) so the K-8 teachers can see where these concepts are going.

Hi Raffaella, we would be happy to discuss via a Zoom meeting if you would like, so as to find out more specifically what you are looking for.  We do have our day-to-day schedules of topics for the 2-week summer workshop, and then the schedule of topics for each of the five Saturday workshops during the academic year.  We also have survey instruments that we use and observation rubrics.  

Thank you, we would love to have a Zoom conversation. Let's connect via email to find a time - my email is rborasi@warner.rochester.edu

Shad, like you, we use Scratch Jr. and Scratch in elementary grades, as well as Blockly. The curriculum uses code.org as a central feature, but builds onto that. All the elementary grades feature unplugged lessons and robotics. Teachers have a wide variety of robotics, but dash/dot for elementary and cue for middle level are there, as are ozobots, sphero, micro:bits.