Hi Elizabeth - thank you! We are also intrigued by your work, as it seems we share a position that computational thinking practices can come in many forms. We anchored our design for these activities around two main ideas: play and material familiarity. We started by encouraging playful engagements with familiar materials using a simple prompt like "Make something that moves." We offered the teachers familiar tools and materials, but also introduced a few new and unfamiliar processes for processes for manipulating them. As they began to explore mechanisms and material arrangements, questions emerged. Their objects would behave in ways they found surprising and interesting. In the spirit of play, we encouraged them to continue exploring what they found interesting. And in doing so, some disciplinary questions began to emerge. 

We are hopeful that familiar materials and simple combinations of rules (e.g., like 4-bar linkage systems, or cams and followers) offer opportunities for teachers to explore the intersection of making and the STEM practices/content they are charged with teaching. 

As we invite students to the workshops to be co-learners with teachers, we hope that playful computational making together will lead to interesting ways of exploring the roles and relationships teachers have with each other in STEM!

 

Hi Brian -- we're traveling some pathways that might be parallel and even overlapping and I'd love to learn more about your project. Here at Texas State University (San Marcos) my team is also working with open ended computational making, trying to identify practical learning elements that can help teachers design and enact activities that build computational fluencies in their classrooms. Based on the video I'd say we're following similar trajectories, except that my team's focus is on PK-4 teachers and students. Thanks for this very interesting work.

Hi Sean! I would love to learn more about these elements. Teachers will begin co-designing lessons/activities for their classrooms with us next year. We anticipate to build heavily off what happened in the first two phases of our work together, but going into classrooms poses new kinds of challenges. It would be great to build from work others are doing in this area. Looking forward to seeing more on your project - sounds like fun stuff!

You likely have your own materials but this maker lesson planning form might be useful as you head in that direction. It is adapted from BIE PBL resources and we are still tweaking it to fit the needs of our teachers.

Hi Shelly - thank you for sharing the link to your framework! It does seem like there are strong relationships between aspects of our work. One of the particular areas of focus for us is where, and in what ways, do disciplinary questions emerge in computational making? And, what do teachers and students do with these questions? Have these conversations come up with your pre-service or in-service teachers? Given that most of them are getting licensed in content areas, I assume? 

That is a great question Brian. Currently many of the disciplinary ideas are built into the projects by the teachers who use making as an innovative vehicle to approach standards based content.  It is interesting to consider the disciplinary questions that emerge as students and teacher build and create. We are a fairly new program and are just getting some of the research going. This will be a perspective to consider. You can see some of the discipline specific maker-centered lessons that our preservice teachers have created at: https://maker.uteach.utexas.edu/lessonbank

We will have more up soon as we have just had another set of teachers complete the program. 

Exciting stuff, Shelly. Thanks for sharing the lesson bank, I'll be sure to share that with our teachers. And, we look forward to seeing more of how your work unfolds! Good luck.

We see DCMPs operating at the intersection of computational thinking, disciplinary practices, and characteristics of making and making spaces. Yes, there is a great deal of overlap with computational thinking practices. We drew heavily from that literature. However, we wanted to extend current descriptions of those practices to include the artistic, expressive, and material focus of making (which your work does well!), and the places where disciplinary questions emerge in making. This is motivated by two things, (1) we wanted to see where the roots of computation connect to making, borrowing from work on Making Grammars by Terry Knight and colleagues at MIT, and (2) we wanted to foreground the exploration, inquiry, and discovery that happens in making, and to explore how computational ideas and practices happen in this kind of work.

As we’re working with teachers, they are challenging us on the DCMPs in their current form, which is great, as one goal for the project is to continually reconstruct their definitions based on the work. For example, they wonder whether “Defining and decomposing a problem” shouldn’t be “finding and decomposing multiple problems,” as they feel like there are large scale problems - e.g., the thing they want to make - but then there are a number of smaller, integrating problems that emerge in making. For some teachers, this reminds them of doing mathematics, where their might be one problem on the table, but solving it requires exploring many sub and related problems. We've taken to expand the ways of thinking about problems as identifying, decomposing, and transforming problems - in ways that are ongoing and integrated into multiple aspects of the work.

So, we hope our work is complimentary with other computational thinking frameworks. And, we hope to explore some of the disciplinary specificity expressed in how these practices unfold in making. 

Angie - you raise a really important question, thank you. We have heard from our collaborating teachers that opportunities within their districts to have sustained conversations about pedagogy, content, and practices across grade levels--K through 12--are limited.

 

We originally imagined the project for high school teachers. However, teachers and leadership in our partner school districts pushed us to broaden that scope. We included middle school teachers in our recruitment process, and wound up with elementary school teachers too! These wonderful lower-grades teachers offered the input that talking across grade levels would be useful, and we're just beginning to see what could come of this. But, we think this issue deserves a lot more attention... sounds like a great future direction!

 

Thanks for the question, and for pushing our thinking.

I am interested in following you and your work, as well as sharing it as a resource for other educators. Where is the best place that I can direct people when sharing this project and possibly future work around the topic?

Hi Angie - thanks for your interest! We are just getting the project website up and running: https://remakingstem.terc.edu/

 

There is not a lot of content there currently, but we are building it out as we speak! So please check back soon.

Hi Karthik - thanks for the great question, it is inline with some of the ideas we're currently grappling with. We agree that a lot of great learning happens in "mistakes." Some have framed this through the lens of "learning through failure," however, borrowing from Shirin Vossoughi, Paula Hooper, and Meg Escudé's work, we've shifted our ways for talking about this with teachers. They have taken to calling their iterations "drafts," which frames their work as ongoing, exploratory, and generative.

 

Two partner teachers were recently working on pop-up cards with embedded circuits that lit LEDs when the cards are opened. One teacher remarked that they had generated "dozens" of drafts as they went about exploring mechanisms for connecting circuits through cutting and folding paper. In reflecting on their work, what they really discovered was less of an emphasis on actually making a card, and more of an emphasis on seeing what they could do within this scope of work: when folded paper meets circuits. I share this to raise the point that "mistakes" can sometimes suggest that our goals in making are to get it right, or to do it well. There is a common framing that we "fail often to succeed sooner." And we're trying to challenge that a bit by saying "just try it," because whatever happens will be something you can learn from. Perhaps the unexpected results can illuminate new challenges or ways of doing things. Ways that weren't anticipated, or that have seemed ridiculous before trying them.

 

As facilitators, we've worked with the teachers to think about these ideas of "just trying it," because it leads to the making processes being both exploratory, and grounded in learning about tools, materials, and ideas in STEM. When we encourage iteration as a practice -- many drafts, and lots of "just trying it" -- we create a playful tone to the work, where whatever comes of our attempts to assemble rules and behaviors is something we can learn from, and build on in the next revision. We see that as a fundamental element of computational approaches to STEM, for example, how one builds and refines computational models that help us understand particular phenomena or relationships in question.

Got it. I agree with your approach. The challenge is figuring out if learning is happening in the mind of the learner (both teachers and their students). In such contexts - what would be proofs of learning? Transfer learning (abstraction) is one of the hardest things (Bill Gates at some point remarked). For children - are their different levels of abstractions? How could we understand this - surely they get excited and they are doing things in an environment that affords and encourages play. I agree whole heartedly.

Hi Jan! We are fortunate enough to share an office with Andee, and some of our team attending the conference. We have already begun to explore some of the connections between Math in the Making and our work. As we share in the video, our partner math teachers have been wrestling with questions about how, and where, the math appears in their projects. Is it critical to the design, as they found with building a system of planetary gears, or can we use math to explore how objects function? These questions are rich, and we are talking with Andee and others about them. 

 

As we move this kind of making work into classrooms, these questions become even more important. Math teachers feel a lot of pressures, both on their pedagogy and from the curricular demands. And yet, one teacher told me last night that he has no problem mapping these kinds of activities to the standards he needs to teach. His concerns are more in how this kind of thing happens with 1 teacher and 28 students! Hopefully, between the work we're doing, and the great insights offered by the Math in the Making group, we'll have some interesting classroom examples to share sometime in Phase 3 of our project. 

 

Thanks again!