August 10, 2017
Since May of 2012, LTEC team members from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (UIUC) and the Champaign Unit 4 School District have worked together to bring computational thinking into the classroom. Beginning in summer of 2013, Kenwood Elementary School embarked on a project to make computational thinking its magnet school identity. As part of that effort, they quickly realized that integration into existing content areas would be essential for implementing CS for all students. Beginning in 2014, Kenwood teachers worked together to develop lessons that would connect mathematics activities to computational thinking. Their mathematics curriculum was built around the Everyday Mathematics series developed at the University of Chicago.
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August 02, 2017
The LTEC team is pleased to announce the release of our first public resource: a collection of CS education articles from scholarly and popular publications.
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July 20, 2017
Name: Andy Isaacs
LTEC Role: Principal Investigator
Professional Background: I am a Research Associate Professor at the University of Chicago, where I direct UChicago STEM Education, a center that’s devoted to research and practice in STEM education. I also lead the team responsible for Everyday Mathematics, the elementary program from the University of Chicago School Mathematics Project (UCSMP), and teach number theory for the University’s Urban Teacher Education Program.
I taught fourth and fifth grades in Chicago-area public schools from 1977 until 1985, when I joined the Departement of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) as a lecturer in mathematics education. I came to UCSMP in 1995 to work on an NSF-funded teacher development project led by Shelia Sconiers. I earned a BA in classical Greek from Northwestern University in 1974, an MST in elementary education from the University of Chicago in 1977, and a DA in mathematics (with concentrations in abstract algebra and theoretical computer science) from UIC in 1994.
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July 07, 2017
In April, the LTEC team presented at the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting 2017. We enjoyed returning to San Antonio, TX, after our recent visit for NCTM 2017 and attending presentations to hear about the exciting work being done by colleagues past, present, and future. Some of us were also lucky enough to see the Fiesta Flambeau parade!
Our project was pleased to contribute two posters to a structured poster session entitled “Stories from the Field: Integrating Computational Thinking Across Curricular Domains.” It was a great opportunity to hear about efforts similar to ours and discuss successes and challenges with colleagues.
The session participants are currently working on a putting together a special journal issue based on the work presented in the poster session. Stay tuned for updates – we’ll let you know as soon as we have an expected publication date.
Below you will find a summary of our poster presentations for the integration session, as well as an additional poster presented by members of the LTEC team. As always, please feel free to sound off in the comments section with any feedback!
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