In order to create professional development experiences, curriculum materials, and policies that support elementary school teachers to embed computational thinking (CT) in their teaching, researchers and teacher educators must under- stand ways teachers see CT as connecting to their classroom practices. Taking the viewpoint that teachers’ initial ideas about CT can serve as useful resources on which to build ed- ucational experiences, we interviewed 12 elementary school teachers to probe their understanding of six components of CT (abstraction, algorithmic thinking, automation, debug- ging, decomposition, and generalization) and how those com- ponents relate to their math and science teaching. Results suggested that teachers saw stronger connections between CT and their mathematics instruction than between CT and their science instruction. We also found that teachers draw upon their existing knowledge of CT-related terminology to make connections to their math and science instruction that could be leveraged in professional development. Teachers were, however, concerned about bringing CT into teaching due to limited class time and the difficulties of addressing high level CT in developmentally appropriate ways. We discuss these results and their implications future research and the design of professional development, sharing examples of how we used teachers’ initial ideas as the foundation of a workshop introducing them to computational thinking.
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Integrating computational thinking in elementary classrooms: Introducing a toolkit to support teachers
Driven by the need for students to be prepared for a world driven by computation, a number of recent educational reforms in science and mathematics have called for computational thinking concepts to be integrated into these content areas. However, in order for computational thinking (CT) to permeate K-12 education, we need to educate teachers about what CT ideas are and how they relate to what happens in their classroom on a day-to-day basis. This paper presents a toolkit to scaffold elementary teachers’ understanding of computational thinking ideas and how to integrate them into their lesson plans.
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- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10095783
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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