Introducing Learning Trajectories for Everyday Computing (LTEC)

July 21, 2016

Teachers are constantly told to teach more: more non-fiction, more technology, more engineering, more financial literacy, more problem solving, more foreign languages – more of lots of great things that students should learn, but more than there’s time to teach well.

Among those great things is computational thinking, which one can think of as problem solving in a world filled with digital devices, tools, and resources. Educators increasingly believe that to prepare students for tomorrow’s world, we must teach computational thinking (CT) today. But how do we find time for CT in a very crowded school day? And how do we teach CT to ALL students?

Our project, Learning Trajectories for Everyday Computing (LTEC), is working to answer these questions. We’re exploring whether we can find time for computational thinking by integrating it with mathematics, in a way that strengthens both fields. And in order to reach all students, we’re trying to do this at K–5.

We’re approaching this work by building initial K–5 learning trajectories for computational thinking. We hope these trajectories will enable sound integration of CT and mathematics. We are taking three development approaches to our learning trajectories, which we will describe in future posts.

Thus far the work has been challenging, and as with any exploratory work, we aren’t sure what the end product will look like. But if we succeed in building coherent trajectories for integrating math and CT, then we may be able to find time in their day for one of the many great things we want kids to learn.