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1. Agency and Expressivity in Programming Play

   https://doi.org/https://doi.dx.org/10.22318/icls2021.581  

   Steinberg, S. & (July 2021, Computersupported collaborative learning)

   de Vries, E. (Ed.)

   Computer programming has been conceptualized as an expressive medium, but little is known about how to best support students in exercising agency and engagement in coding tasks. This paper draws on data from a five-day summer camp for middle school students that integrated computer science and movement. We focus on an activity in which students created choreography and modeled it in the programming environment NetLogo. The task was designed with the goal of creating opportunities for students to exercise agency and expressivity while coding. We analyze the extent to which incompatibilities, or moments of mismatch between what is possible in the dance versus NetLogo environments, shaped students’ agency and exploration. Our findings suggest that designing with incompatibilities positioned students with agency over their models and supported their own expressive goals. 

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2. Engaging in a New Practice: What Are Students Doing When They Are “Doing” Debugging?

   Gresalfi, Melissa; Brady, Corey; Knowe, Madison; Steinberg, Selena (January 2020, The Interdisciplinarity of the Learning Sciences, 14th International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS) 2020)

   Gresalfi, M. and (Ed.)

   Debugging has been identified as a significant practice of programming in particular, and computational thinking more broadly. However, there is still much to learn about how debugging is learned, how it is connected to particular activities, and what seems to influence students’ strategy use and ultimate solution paths. This paper considers students’ activity on their first formal debugging task using a platform called NetLogo. Our analysis focuses on the ways that students appeared to frame the task, and how that framing influenced their overall approach to the task. Our findings suggest that it is compelling for new coders to approach debugging first by focusing on single elements of code without thinking broadly about their interactions. Implications for design and future studies are discussed. 

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3. Utilizing mathematics to examine sea level rise as an environmental and a social issue.

   Basu, D.; Panorkou, N. (January 2020, Mathematics Education Across Cultures: Proceedings of the 42nd Meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education)

   Sacristán, A.I.; Cortés-Zavala, J.C.; Ruiz-Arias, P.M. (Ed.)

   The phenomenon of the sea level rise is a pressing environmental and social issue of the present age. Starting with the assumption that mathematics can be utilized to help students explore this phenomenon, we designed a simulation in NetLogo, in which students investigated the relationships between the quantities of temperature rise, height of future sea level, and total land area. In this paper, we present the analysis of a whole-class design experiment in a sixth-grade classroom and discuss how our design helped students to examine sea level rise as both an environmental and a social issue. 

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4. Integrating interactive computer simulations into K-12 earth and environmental science

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ISECon.2018.8340488  

   Zhu, Michelle; Panorkou, Nicole; Lal, Pankaj; Etikyala, Sowmith; Germia, Erell; Iranah, Pricilla; Samanthula, Bharath; Basu, Debasmita (March 2018, Proceedings of IEEE Integrated STEM education Conference (ISEC) 2018)

   This paper discusses our work in progress aiming to explore how computer simulations can be integrated into the K-12 curriculum of Earth and Environmental science. Several interactive simulations using Netlogo, a multi-agent modeling environment, and Scratch, a visual programming software are being developed with steerable parameters and the corresponding output plots for students to manipulate and interpret the results, respectively. Here, we present two simulations we designed on water cycle and discuss how these may help students learn about the distribution of water and its continuous move in the ecosystem. 

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5. Two Approaches to Teaching with NetLogo: Examining the Role of Structure and Agency

   Bell, Amanda (January 2020, The Interdisciplinarity of the Learning Sciences, 14th International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS) 2020)

   Gresalfi, M.S. (Ed.)

   This study is from a larger design-based research project contributing to efforts to incorporate CT into K-12 education by studying how middle school students can learn about CT in the context of programming and art. During the first year of the study, we held a five-day summer camp taught by four mathematics teachers using NetLogo. This poster begins to examine the role of the teachers, focusing on the strategies they used to position themselves and the structure and agency of each task. 

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