Programming Is Heading Back To School

the agent man writes "Researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder are exploring what it takes to systematically get programming back to public schools. They have created a game-design-based curriculum, called Scalable Game Design, using the AgentSheets computational thinking tool. Annual summer institutes train middle school teachers from around the USA to teach their students computational thinking through game design and computational science simulations. What's truly unique about this is that it is not an after-school program; it takes place during regular school courses. Entire school districts are participating with measurable impacts, increasing the participation of women in high school CS courses from 2% six years ago to 38-59% now. Educators would like to be able to ask students, 'Now that you can make Space Invaders, can you also make a science simulation?' To explore this difficult question of transfer, the researchers devised new mechanisms to compute computational thinking. They analyze every game submitted by students to extract computational thinking patterns and to see if students can transfer these skills to creating science simulations."

Comments

Re:To ask the question:

[FlyingGuy]

This year I turned my son's 4th grade class into a computer using nothing but the kids, baskets, 3x5 cards and a white board.

You should have seen their eyes light up when it hit home that a computer is nothing but a machine that follows simple instructions.

After one afternoon the kids were writing their own "programs"

This is an example of 9 and 10 year old's learning problem solving and conceptualization with about $15.00 bucks worth of materials.

Angry Birds is all the rage for 4th graders. After summer vacation and they move onto 5th grade we are going to "write" Angry Birds with the same 15 bucks worth of materials.