Once again we are excited to participate in the 2019 NSF STEM for All Video Showcase to Highlight Innovations in STEM Education!
About the STEM for All Video Showcase
Each year, this showcase features innovative projects aimed at improving STEM learning and teaching, which have been funded by the National Science Foundation and other federal agencies. During the week-long event, researchers, practitioners, policy makers and members of the public are invited to view the short videos, discuss them with the presenters online, and vote for their favorites.
The theme for this year’s event is “Innovations in STEM Education.” Video presentations address improving K-12 STEM classroom, informal environments, undergraduate and graduate education, teacher professional development, and community engagement. Collectively the presentations cover a broad range of topics including science, mathematics, computer science, engineering, cyberlearning, citizen science, maker spaces, broadening participation, research experiences, mentoring, professional development, NGSS and the Common Core.
This year our video submission focused on our progression from developing Learning Trajectories (LTs) to using them to design a curriculum as a vehicle for research about integrating Math + CT instruction. Action Fractions is a 3rd and 4th grade integrated curriculum that builds fractions knowledge and CS/CT skills through approximately 12 hours of instruction in each year. We describe our motivation, our curriculum, and how we will use the development and deployment of our curriculum to further research in Math + CT integration.
We encourage everyone – from researchers to policy-makers to teachers to interested community members – to visit the video showcase, join the discussion, and vote for our video by sharing it on social media!
This past weekend, our team presented at the Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) annual conference for 2019. We were treated to a true Minneapolis winter experience, replete with snow, freezing temperatures, and more snow. Fortunately, our motto is: “when life hands you atmospheric water vapor frozen into ice crystals…stay inside, make hot chocolate, and talk about computational thinking.“
Photo taken at Broward County Schools CS Education Week 2018
This summer, I implemented a research study that used the Dash robotics to teach science and coding at a local elementary school summer camp. I had kids in my classes from different school districts in the Southeastern part of the United States. In the last class, I asked the kids how they liked learning coding and science, and besides showing enthusiasm, two kids asked me if I could do the research study again at their school, one said she was really sad that the class was coming to an end, and one was proud because her parents were going to buy her a Dash robot as a birthday gift.
While students across the world continue to make amazing things using the Scratch programming language, this month Scratch had a significant accomplishment of its own. Scratch attained its highest ever ranking, Position 14, in the TIOBE Programming Community index, an indicator of the popularity of programming languages.
