Thank you, Irene for your question. As part of the project, the students are given the choice to select a topic that is relevant to them personally, socially, or culturally, so the project is authentic and motivating to them. Currently, the range of themes selected by the students is quite diverse. Many of the STEM connections in our program are embedded within the PBIL practices and the students’ learning experience. When students engage in researching, developing and iterating the research on their topics within their computer science course, they are reinforcing STEM learning practices that exist in other STEM courses they might be taking in school. Also, another goal of our project is to reinforce the connection between computer science skills and practices and three of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) crosscutting concepts (CCs): structure and function, patterns, and systems and system models. Our hypothesis is that integrating these CCs into the PBIL units could improve both computational thinking and science learning by increasing cross-disciplinary connections and promoting conceptual abstraction.

Hi Katie. Thank you for the question. We do ramp up the computational thinking over the two semester course. We start with a soft introduction using familiar tools like presentation and video production software. This helps situate the students as they explore the topics they will work on for the semester, and gives us some breathing room to talk about general digital technology concepts. We move into Web design after that using Google Sites, where we transition from drag-and-drop type web design into HTML. As we explore the technology, the students are able to create and manipulate meaningful technical products that promote their own agency with respect to their topic of interest (e.g. creating a website that informs others or advocates for their topic).

Next we move into EarSketch and music, where students become very engaged. Students love making music!  We leverage that excitement to explore core coding concepts like data types, conditionals, loops, etc. Finally we move into mobile app development, which reinforces those core concepts while letting us go even deeper, exploring object oriented design, user defined functions, and event-driven design.  

Thanks for sharing. This is a thoughtful progression. I know the field really emphasizes that CS/CT is more than just using technology tools, and sometimes I think in our scramble to expand students' conceptions of CS, we lose opportunities to build on what they already know. I like the way you're thinking about familiar tools as providing some "breathing room."