The
webinar I attended today on February 21st 2018 was titled “Bring Computer Science to Life in Your
Elementary Classroom”. It was presented by Joan M. Mazur, Ph.D., Professor
of Instructional Systems Design, University of Kentucky College of Education;
and Jennifer Rodabaugh, STEAM Lab Instructor, Fayette County Public Schools,
KY. Not to mention that it was sponsored
by LEGO® Education.
The
speakers Dr. Mazur and Ms. Rodabaugh welcomed the attendees warmly before
digging deep into the computer-science title. The punchline of the webinar came
to shed the light on how teachers are getting into academics and neglecting
computer sciences. The introduction came to emphasize on how we humans are
living in the internet of things. Then the following essential questions were
raised “So what needs to be done in this case?” & “How should teachers
prepare students to see the benefits of technology?”
An educational
answer to the questions was presented by Dr.Mazur who suggested looking into “Computational Thinking”; a consultation which
exists in the form of five stages of decomposition, generalization, algorithmic
thinking(a central skill in coding),
evaluation and abstraction. This benefitted me to understand how education
helps kids learn the basic inner workings of computers and eventually set them up
for a lifetime of successful use and management of the technology in their
everyday lives.
Not to
mention that the mentioned stages include attitudes and dispositions in terms
of one’s confidence when dealing with complexity, persistence in working with
difficult problems, tolerance for ambiguity, having the ability to deal with
open-ended problems, and having the ability to communicate and struggle within
groups with other members to achieve a common goal. As a teacher, I’d advocate
instilling such attitudes within my students in order to empower them to become
autonomous learners because there will come a time where I won’t be there for
them anymore.
The
second solution proposed by Dr.Mazur is including hands-on activities. I come
to benefit from the examples provided in order to have students actively engaged,
take ownership of the learning, give opportunities to use academic language and
finally have students reflect on their learning.
Furthermore,
to add to what has been presented, Ms.Rodabaugh clarifies “computational
thinking” by teaching vocabularies in the form of coding, programming, looping
in the beginning. This would have me train students to create real world
connections to hardware independently. Therefore, educational outcomes would be
having my students engage in a range of collaborative discussions with diverse
partners and develop main ideas and themes as multimedia components and visual
displays are available too( like graphics and sounds).
A
decent part of Ms.Rodabaugh’s presentation focused on projects and possible
educational outcomes (like building a device that detects objects remotely
after determining the distances of the sun and stars from the Earth). So maybe
I would transfer such projects to my classroom and have students offer outcomes
in writing or speaking for different purposes. The appropriateness of computational
thinking is in exposing students to skills that deal with team work,
organization, sharing ideas and searching for own information and solutions.
A coda
to the webinar focuses on teaching computational thinking though it requires
changing the role of a teacher to becoming a facilitator. It changes the way
teachers teach because one starts to teach for application. So all in all,
computational thinking comes to give platform for collaborative teaching.
