CTiMNAT - Computational Thinking in Math and Science

Computational Thinking in Math and Science (CTiMNAT)

Computational thinking in secondary education and professional development of high school teachers in STEM.

We are a team of researchers and educators at CCTD working to design, implement, and research computational thinking in high school math and science subjects. The goal is to develop computational thinking skills for all students and teachers involved, by combining content knowledge, computer modeling, and coding in an approach called CMC.

The project, running for three years 2018-2021, focuses on teacher professional development in designing, coding, and using modeling and computational thinking in their STEM classrooms. In the first year, we will train a small group of teachers in CT-activity design. We will scale up over the next two years by relying on our first cohort of teachers to coach and guide their colleagues in building and implementing their own CT-activities. All together more than 30 High Schools, 200 teachers and approximately 4000 students are expected to participate in the project. The project primarily uses NetLogo as a programming environment for developing models.

We take an iterative, Design-Based Research approach to understanding how to design and implement a large-scale intervention in which teachers coach and support each other in designing and building educational activities that support CT. In particular, we are interested in how this approach influences teachers and students’ comprehension, learning and identity as computational thinkers and practitioners. This broad project draws on research in computer science, human-computer interaction, participatory design, and learning sciences.

This project addresses two important questions: First, how do we develop good curricular classroom activities that support students in developing computational thinking practices; and second, how do we develop programs that can scale up and out across the education sector. This project addresses the first question primarily by investigating the use of the CMC-approach to learning design, and the second question by investigating how best to train teachers in both developing their own CMC-activities, and in coaching their colleagues. Results and experiences from this work will qualify future work in this area done by CCTD.