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The College Board's AP Computer Science Principles (CSP) content has become a major new course for introducing K-12 students to the discipline. The course was designed for many reasons, but one major goal was to broaden participation. While significant work has been completed toward equity by many research groups, we know of no systematic analysis of CSP content created by major vendors in relation to accessibility for students with disabilities, especially those who are blind or visually impaired. In this experience report, we discuss two major actions by our team to make CSP more accessible. First, with the help of accessibility experts and teachers, we modified the entire Code.org CSP course to make it accessible. Second, we conducted a one-week professional development workshop in the summer of 2018 for teachers of blind or visually impaired students in order to help them prepare to teach CSP or support those who do. We report here on lessons learned that are useful to teachers who have blind or visually impaired students in their classes, to AP CSP curriculum providers, and to the College Board.
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Co-Designing Learning Experiences to Support the Development of Culturally Relevant CS Lessons in Elementary Classrooms
This poster reports on a workshop to help elementary school teachers integrate culturally relevant computer science (CS) learning opportunities into their classrooms. Findings highlight the importance of facilitators to help teachers discuss cultural competence and the value of co-developed rubrics to evaluate lessons. The presentation will discuss results and share artifacts from the workshop.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2031258
- PAR ID:
- 10318041
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- SIGCSE '22: 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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null (Ed.)K-12 teachers serve a critical role in their students’ development of interest in engineering, especially as engineering content is emphasized in curriculum standards. However, teachers may not be comfortable teaching engineering in their classrooms as it can require a different set of skills from which they are trained. Professional development activities focused on engineering content can help teachers feel more comfortable teaching the subject in their classrooms and can increase their knowledge of engineering and thus their engineering teaching self-efficacy. There are many different types of professional development activities teachers might experience, each one with a set of established best practices. VT PEERS (Virginia Tech Partnering with Educators and Engineers in Rural Communities) is a program designed to provide recurrent hands-on engineering activities to middle school students in or near rural Appalachia. The project partners middle school teachers, university affiliates, and local industry partners throughout the state region to develop and implement engineering activities that align with state defined standards of learning (SOLs). Throughout this partnership, teachers co-facilitate engineering activities in their classrooms throughout the year with the other partners, and teachers have the opportunity to participate in a two-day collaborative workshop every year. VT PEERS held a workshop during the summer of 2019, after the second year of the partnership, to discuss the successes and challenges experienced throughout the program. Three focus groups, one for each grade level involved (grades 6-8), were held during the summit for teachers and industry partners to discuss their experiences. None of the teachers involved in the partnership have formal training in engineering. The transcripts of these focus groups were the focus of the exploratory qualitative data analyses to answer the following research question: How do middle-school teachers develop teaching engineering self-efficacy through professional development activities? Deductive coding of the focus group transcripts was completed using the four sources of self-efficacy: mastery experience, vicarious experience, verbal persuasion and physiological states. The analysis revealed that vicarious experiences can be particularly valuable to increasing teachers’ teaching engineering self-efficacy. For example, teachers valued the ability to play the role of a student in an engineering lesson and being able to share ideas about teaching engineering lessons with other teachers. This information can be useful to develop engineering-focused professional development activities for teachers. Additionally, as teachers gather information from their teaching engineering vicarious experiences, they can inform their own teaching practices and practice reflective teaching as they teach lessons.more » « less
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Kong, S.C. (Ed.)This work aims to help high school STEM teachers integrate computational thinking (CT) into their classrooms by engaging teachers as curriculum co-designers. K-12 teachers who are not trained in computer science may not see the value of CT in STEM classrooms and how to engage their students in computational practices that reflect the practices of STEM professionals. To this end, we developed a 4-week professional development workshop for eight science and mathematics high school teachers to co-design computationally enhanced curriculum with our team of researchers. The workshop first provided an introduction to computational practices and tools for STEM education. Then, teachers engaged in co-design to enhance their science and mathematics curricula with computational practices in STEM. Data from surveys and interviews showed that teachers learned about computational thinking, computational tools, coding, and the value of collaboration after the professional development. Further, they were able to integrate multiple computational tools that engage their students in CT-STEM practices. These findings suggest that teachers can learn to use computational practices and tools through workshops, and that teachers collaborating with researchers in co-design to develop computational enhanced STEM curriculum may be a powerful way to engage students and teachers with CT in K-12 classrooms.more » « less
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Abstract This study explored teachers’ conceptualizations of integrated computational modeling in secondary physics by exposing twelve experienced physics teachers to programming and then analyzing interview responses. Responses revealed that teachers fell along a spectrum of disciplinary boundary–stretching mentalities. This paper presents a preliminary conceptual framework for exploring both horizontal (interdisciplinary) and vertical (intradisciplinary) boundary stretching, as well as for identifying bounded mentalities as teachers consider integration. Horizontal boundary stretchers envisioned opportunities to use computational modeling to shift their curriculum or pedagogical approaches in physics to help students enhance skills underlying multiple fields, while vertical boundary stretchers considered how computing might allow students to explore physics concepts more deeply. Teachers with more boundary-stretching indicators at the outset of an integrated curriculum development workshop were more likely to persist in the implementation of computational modeling–integrated materials in their physics classrooms than those who expressed more bounded thinking. These findings emphasize the importance of considering teachers’ perceptions about how their own science discipline is connected to similar fields and provide implications about how to identify potential adopters of innovative teaching approaches.more » « less
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3478432.3499108
