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As researchers who rely on federal funding and community participation, we have an obligation to return scientific knowledge to the community. Our outreach goals are to share information about language development and sensory impairments, introduce language science to future scientists, distribute scientific results accessibly, and illuminate the breadth of what science and scientists look like. We seek to achieve this in two ways: by sharing about language science beyond the ivory tower through short videos on social media and easy-to-read articles on our blog, and through educational outreach. For the latter, in recent efforts we designed and implemented after-school programming for young public schoolchildren, targeting early negative attitudes about STEM abilities. We presented profiles of underrepresented scientists in a range of fields, including language science, and discussed language modalities using observation games to help children appreciate science as a creative process of questions and failure – something they could do, not just “others” who do not look like them. We used the Draw-a-Scientist Task to assess our impact: children’s drawings were more representative after our program. In this article, we explore our missteps, difficulties, and successes.
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Material Anchors for Young Children’s Spatial Planning: Contextualizing Path-Program Relationships
Planning a path from an origin to a destination is a common task for studying children’s spatial thinking and a foundational part of many early programming environments. This paper examines children’s means of abstraction between the grid space and the program domain through an exploration of the strategies they used to plan a robot’s routes in 2-D space. Qualitative analysis focused on ways children used materials to aid in spatial planning and programming, advancing previous work on material anchors for concepts (Hutchins, 2005). Through an elaboration of several path planning strategies, we illustrate how children varied in their use of materials in space to represent a path-program relationship. We argue that these strategies represent multiple ways of contextualizing and abstracting in a programming task, with implications for design of equitable CT assessments in early childhood.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1842116
- PAR ID:
- 10438350
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International Conference of the Learning Sciences
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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