This is a guest post by Miranda Dalton. Miranda is new to Shelburne Community School this year and teaching Computer Science to all 5th-graders. Find Miranda on Twitter at @strive4STEM If I asked you to describe what a computer scientist looks like, we probably would dig up an image of someone we know personally or a famous computer scientist. Maybe you imagine Grace Hopper in front of ancient computers or you imagine modern programmers in collaborative and fast-paced workspaces. Today our guiding question for our lesson was just that; “What does a computer scientist look like doing computer science?” Instead of answering the questions aloud students were drawing pictures to articulate their answers. My full expectation was that I would see 21 pictures of middle-aged men in glasses on computers (Much like the picture to the left.) I was expecting uniform computer scientists with the same materials doing the same thing and that would lead us to a conversation of who are computer scientists and why representation matters in computer science. Instead, students illustrated a vast array of narratives, some who depicted supervillains taking over the world, and others were sagas of working women in offices wearing masks and lab coats. Instead of doing a gallery walk, I opted for students to share their drawings out since they were creating these adjacent stories to go with their drawings. As students were sharing out I began to notice not a single story was the same. They had common themes of people who either were saving or destroying the world. They were all adults except one drawing of a teenager who was staying up late to work on their programming project. There were hackers, robots, web designers, and mathematicians. They depicted people hard at work, getting stuck, and thinking about how to solve their problems. All on the second day of school where the first time I mentioned computer science was in the prompt.
~ Miranda Dalton, 5th-Grade Computer Science Teacher at Shelburne Community School
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This summer, five educators from the Champlain Valley School District participated in the code.org Professional Learning Program through Project>Login. Three of us did the training for the Computer Science Discoveries course (for grades 6-10) and two trained for Computer Science Principles (grades 9-12). It was a wonderful week of learning and community building with other educators from the northeast region. We came away invigorated and ready to apply our learning to our Rowland Foundation project work. The workshops had just the right balance of computer science content, pedagogical practice, and DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) work. The materials from code.org are thoughtfully and thoroughly designed so that teachers with no background in computer science can teach the course in the role of "lead learner"-- including a number of engaging hands-on widgets that truly promote student discovery. The workshop facilitators gave us opportunities to experience the curriculum both as students and teachers, working independently, in small groups, and all together. This year, we are revamping the computer programming class at the high school to include units and materials from the Computer Science Principles course. We plan to offer the full Computer Science Principles course starting in the 22-23 school year. In addition, there will be over 75 high school students and multiple K-8 students who will be experiencing the Computer Science Discoveries course. We are excited that this is the beginning of growing our district's CS experiences for all students. We are so pleased to have had this opportunity from Project>Login and code.org to grow the ranks of teachers able to bring Computer Science to students as we work to develop a K-12 CS curriculum for CVSD. We would recommend these workshops strongly to anyone interested in building a new or enhancing an existing computer science program for their students. |
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