The ISTE Poster: CTRL-Shift joins LTEC

September 09, 2016

Last June, we prepared a poster for presentation at the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) Annual Conference in Denver, CO¹.

The video we linked to in the poster was the one we prepared for the National Science Foundation’s Video Showcase. We are especially proud of that video, as it won both the Facilitator’s Choice and the Public Choice award. Most of all, it reflects the spirit of collaboration we have with our partner school district as we work together on research into practice, through the creation of learning trajectories for math and computational thinking.

The lessons we featured were the polygon walk, which we have talked about before, and a third grade project called “number line mysteries” that came out of the number stories theme. In this project, students attempted to create question-and-answer games around the properties of fractions between 0 and 1. The students presented their stories to their classmates and took questions. Students achieved varying degrees of success with this activity; some struggled with the mathematics concepts as well as with making their code do what they wanted, but we learned a great deal about the challenges of connecting the mathematics content and the coding activity. One observation is that the teachers themselves placed more emphasis on the mathematics content than on the computing content (Isreal et al., In preparation). Another is that, as we have seen before, students were very engaged and felt ownership of their projects. While there is much more to say on this, here we will just note that the interaction was complex and we expect change as students, teachers, and researchers learn more.

Finally, the poster session marked a growth moment for our project team – work as LTEC had begun. Back in 2012, our school district partner, some local business people interested in education, and a few UIUC faculty and staff started an effort we called the “Creative Technology Research Laboratory for Shifting Education” or CTRL-Shift. At the time, the project had no research funding, just a desire on the part of the stakeholders to do more with computing in the schools. During the 2012–2013 school year, a group of teachers learned Etoys and piloted projects in three middle schools. In the summer of 2013, the group shifted focus to a single elementary school and emphasized Scratch as the coding tool. During the 2013–2015 school years, the project took off as the elementary school took on computational thinking as a part of its identity as a magnet school and CTRL-Shift team members started talking to like-minded EM4 developers at UChicago. This work soon kicked up into the current collaboration between CTRL-Shift and the UChicago STEM Education, LTEC – increasing our capacity for research, development, and impact.

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