On Friday, May 7, we held an off-site, half-day retreat for our steering committee at the Pierson Library in Shelburne, VT. In addition to our standing committee, we were pleased to be joined by Adam Bunting, the principal at CVU High School, and Jeff Evans, the Director of Learning and Innovation for the CVSD school district.
After having lunch together, we dug into sharing and reflecting on:
The discussions were thoughtful and lively. The two student members of our high school steering committee (Lindsay and Sam) provided invaluable insight. We both celebrated our achievements and worked on the plans for how the work to develop more robust and equitable CS learning opportunities will be carried forward in our district. As the formal part of our Rowland Fellowship comes to a close, we are grateful to our steering committee members for all their input and feedback throughout the process. We recognize the work still to be done and are thankful that all at the retreat are passionate about making it happen. The attention, care, and integrity in their work and in the energy and ideas that they bring to every conversation have been an absolute pleasure; we are so lucky they've taken this journey with all of us.
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We're pleased to report a huge increase in CS course interest for next year at Champlain Valley Union HS. This year, we only had 16 students in the single computer program course we offered. Next year, we have 135 requests among our four semester-long courses.
We still have a ways to go, but it is satisfying to see this kind of response to the programs we're putting in place. This post is from Beth Damon, Charlotte Central School's STEAM Teacher & Digital Learning Leader. This year the Charlotte Central Scientists competed in First Lego League's Challenge Mission Cargo Connect, which was held virtually again this year on January 23rd. The team of students did an awesome job designing and programming their EV3 Robot with coaching from CCS's STEAM Teacher & Digital Learning Leader Beth Damon and Jeremy Rauch, parent of two CCS student-team members. This year there were 17 other Vermont teams that participated. The CCS Scientists worked hard at their presentation for the judges and recording and uploading their challenge rounds. On the day of the competition, two of 8th-graders, Leah Rauch and Sam Moore, spoke before the judges' panel. These two students exemplified all of FIRST's most valued attributes, and we are so proud of them. Our team went through many challenges of its own as we were forced to divide our team of 22 into 2 groups due to Omicron and school safety directives. In spite of these logistical hurdles, the CCS Scientists did a great job coming together on the day of the event. We are proud of their continued hard work at CCS to keep robotics going after the event and appreciate our district leaders and staff who are working to bring more problem-based learning, robotics, and FIRST programs into our schools. Looking ahead, we are in the middle of grant applications to have enough of the new Lego Spike Prime robots for all of our K-8 schools for next year. FLL is a wonderful robotics opportunity for students of all ages. Thanks in advance for your support! ~ Beth Damon, Charlotte Central School's STEAM Teacher & Digital Learning Leader Charlie MacFadyen and Tim O'Leary, both Rowland Foundation Fellows centering their work in this area, along with Bonnie Birdsall, CVSD Director of Digital Learning and Communication, facilitated the conversation with three main objectives:
Slides below from the presentation and conversation:This year for Computer Science Education Week (the week of December 6th), students at CVU participated in a schoolwide project. They learned how colors are represented numerically in computers, then used a color picker to select and find the (hexadecimal) values for a color of their choice. In their advisory groups, they reworked code to generate their names in the chosen colors. The program was written in the Processing computer language, using openprocessing.org, which encourages the sharing and adapting of other's projects; The animation is now playing on monitors around the school In planning the project, we wanted to do more than code. Understanding that all data (such as colors) is encoded numerically in computers was an important learning. We also wanted a project that built a sense of community. Here are the instructions for advisories (included a video narrated by a CVU 9th grader)... ...and here is a snippet of the final result
Towards the goal of providing universal CS opportunites for students, we have been working with the math department at the high school. Most students take the Math 2 course, so we've targeted that class. Using funds from our grant, we purchased a class set of Edison robots.
Our aim is to connect the CS learning directly to the math concepts in the course. Using the robots has elevated student engagement and collaboration. The first two lessons are:
Exploring functions
Once students have learned about functions in math (including f(x) notation), this lesson solidifies that understanding and connects to how functions in CS are the same and how they differ.
Trigonometry
This lesson challenges students to write programs for the Edison that incorporated right-triangle trigonometry. One robot travels forward, turns 90 degrees, then travels forward again. A second robot is programmed to meet the first following the "hypotenuse." Students need to calculate the appropriate angle and distance. We just returned from Code.org's Computer Science Education Conference (CSEdCon) in Los Angeles. It was an invaluable experience that gave us insight into how computer science programs are being implemented in our region, across the US, and internationally. We connected with educators from the northeast region and learned about their specific programs. The organizers decided to hold the conference in-person with strict COVID policies. As helpful (and convenient) as virtual conferences have been during this pandemic, being in the same room with others and and engaging in "hallway conversations" made the trip more than worth it. There were regional sessions where we connected with educators from the northeast region and learned about their specific programs. 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
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. On May 17th, Charlie and Tim were joined by Peter Drescher to share some of their work in CVSD and to talk about how to reinvigorate a statewide conversation around Computer Science in K-12. The presentation was part of VITA-Learn's and The Vermont School Library Association's Dynamic Landscape annual conference. The description of their presentation is below: Part One: Tim O’Leary & Charlie MacFadyen are leading emerging work through their Rowland Foundation fellowship to build a Computer Science program across the largest district in Vermont. They’ll share their project concept, goals, change process, current status, and next steps. Find out more about Tim & Charlie’s emerging work here: https://cvsd-crackingthecode.weebly.com/ Part Two: Peter Drescher will lead a discussion to explore how we can keep the conversation going, better leverage change statewide, and reinvigorate CSTA Vermont. ### Tim O’Leary and Charlie MacFadyen are current Rowland Foundation Fellow working to address the marginalization of females and nonbinary youth that occurs within Computer Science (CS) education and the workforce. The project envision a world where all are inspired to become creators, change-makers, and leaders.
They believe that we all bear a responsibility to actively combat this inequality by creating new systems, and we plan to do just that. Tim and Charlie will develop a K-12 CS program because schools must assume a critical role to create CS learning opportunities. Otherwise, students will continue to develop identities informed by a world where males far outpace female participation in this area. Tim is also currently the principal of Champlain Valley School District’s Virtual Learning Academy for middle-level students’ the Digital Learning Leader for both the Virtual Learning Academy and Shelburne Community School (both K-8), and co-directs a statewide program for secondary youth to make meaningful social change through the creation of video documentaries: What’s the Story? The Vermont Young People Social Action Team. Charlie is the Digital Learning Leader for Champlain Valley Union High School. |
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