Developing Coding Skills in K-12: Growing a Research Interest
Last Updated on Sunday, 29 January 2012 12:25 Written by Administrator Saturday, 28 January 2012 19:41
A short time ago, a colleague at WOU emailed a link to an NSF grant: Computing Education in the 21st Century. An excerpt of the synopsis summarizes the emphases:
The Computing Education for the 21st Century (CE21) program aims to build a robust computing research community, a computationally competent 21st century workforce, and a computationally empowered citizenry. In this undertaking, there are three interrelated challenges: the significant underproduction of degrees needed for the computing and computing-related workforce, the longstanding underrepresentation of many segments of our population, and the lack of a presence of computing in K-12.
This got me thinking. Working in the College of Education is different from where I trained: a Technical Communication program in an English Department. Now I work in the Division of Teacher Education. Obviously, my research and work needs to center on training teachers to prepare for teaching K-12. Specifically, my work focuses on training teachers to effectively use technology in their courses, in their professional development, and in developing their technology leadership skills. Reading the grant, the research and application potentials are enormous if not overwhelming. What caught, and kept, my interest was the Computing Education Research track:
Computing Education Research (CER) proposals will aim to develop a research base for computing education. Projects may conduct basic research on the teaching and learning of computational competencies; they may design, develop, test, validate, and refine materials, measurement tools, and methods for teaching in specific contexts; and/or they may implement promising small-scale interventions in order to study their efficacy with particular groups. Efforts can focus on computational thinking as taught in computing courses or infused across the curriculum, they can target students or their teachers in informal or formal educational settings, or they can address any level within the K-16 pipeline, from elementary school through high school and college.
While I have been interested in coding and programming, I have not learned or understood code beyond the most basic html. Recognizing this as an inherent weakness or gap, especially if I'm teaching technology, I decided in December, 2011, to start working with code more regularly. So, I started this site in Joomla! and have worked on some modifications. I know that's a small start, but it's still a start.
When I read the NSF grant's CFP, I was inspired. Yes, indeed, I need to look more closely at coding, training coding in education (K-12 and college), and my own coding skills. Shortly thereafter I saw an announcement by Mark Marino about a Critical Code Studies Working Group. That sent me on a rash of reading and exploring on and about CCS. I'm still intimidated and amazed by CCS's potentials--it feels like I'm learning a new language and topic simultaneously. Invigorating. In the process, I discovered a number of coding languages that were new to me, like Lisp and Processing. I also found that some languages, like Python, appear to have excellent support for newbies.
While doing this, I ran across several other people addressing the same issue of coding in K-12 and/or higher ed (and I suspect there are many, many more!). Cathy Davidson addresses the importance of teaching K-12 students coding in her "Why We Need a 4th R: Reading, wRiting, aRithmetic, and alogRithms." She provides a great introductory argument, and it's one that I think would appeal to a number of K-12 teachers. A weekly Ed-Tech Podcast with Audrey Waters and Steve Hargadon also addresses, in part, the importance of including coding skills in K-12 Education. Additionally, Waters blogs about why college students should learn how to code.
Along the way, several authors mentioned Scratch. At this stage, given Scratch's relative simplicity and its focus on child users
Scratch seems like a good tool for teaching coding to kids. Additionally, they have a community specifically for educators to help teach Scratch.
Currently, there are a number of different wholes--Scratch, CCS, Lisp, grad students in the MS:EdIT program, my colleague--rushing around in my mind. I'm not sure how they fit together, but I know that an assemblage will form.
