Building a Pre-K to 12 Computer Science Program.

Posted on August 26, 2019 by Dan Blier

By Dan Blier, CSTA Board of Directors (District Representative)

It is that time of the year when we re-open our doors to our students for another school year. With that in mind, this is a great time of the year to start thinking about what new computer science resources students will be introduced to this year. As a district computer science curriculum specialist for Plano Independent School District in Plano, Texas, it is my role to work with teachers from Prekindergarten (Pre-K) through 12 grade to build a vertical computer science program.

Building an equitable computer science program takes a great deal of planning and collaboration with others. Input from teachers, campus and district administrators, parents, the District Board of Trustees, and community partners is an important part of this process. The process requires taking a look at what resources are out there and digging into the state standards and CSTA Computer Science standards.

For the past three years, we have been working in my district to develop a computer science program that will allow every student to have an opportunity to learn to code and prepare themselves for a career in computer science or that uses skills from the field of computer science.

As we roll out new resources, we are constantly looking ahead to see what is our next step. So far, this is what we have developed and what we have learned through this process.

Pre-K students have unique needs as many are not yet able to read or write. We have decided to put Lego Coding Express in our early childhood campuses and elementary schools with Pre-K students. Coding Express provides students with structured play while introducing some coding terms such as sequencing, looping, conditional coding, and cause and effect using some color-coded action bricks.

Our elementary schools are engaging students in coding during and after school. Through our partnerships with the University of Texas at Dallas and other community partners, we are able to bring graduate students and professionals to our campuses after school at no cost. During the school day, we are engaging students through interdisciplinary learning by combining computer science and math, science, social studies, and English language arts. Resources like Code.org are great since they allow us to engage our bilingual students through the various translations available. Last year, we created an Elementary Computer Science Cadre to help build this grade band of the program. This group serves as voices on their campuses to help promote this program while helping us evaluate and develop curriculum over time.

Our Pre-K through second-grade students have been engaging with Blue-Bots. Blue-Bots allow students to learn to code through the application of sequencing and looping. We have placed Blue-Bot kits on all 47 elementary and early childhood campuses. Our third through fifth-grade students are provided with more rigor by learning to code with Sphero SPRK+s. These can be programmed using block-based and text-based JavaScript.

We have purchased more Sphero SPRK+s for our 13 middle schools. Initially, this is to provide our students with after school opportunities to learn to code or to engage students with coding through an existing class. Having physical resources for students who are learning to code helps most students connect better with the concepts and see what the code does each time it is run. Our goal is to introduce computer science courses to our middle schools in 2020-2021. We are excited about adding a fifth year to our vertical high school program.

Our high school program is the most developed part of our program. We offer on level, Advanced Placement, and International Baccalaureate at our various high school campuses. Our computer science teachers are a very collaborative and supportive group of teachers. Over the summer, our teachers work together to write the curriculum for these courses. We schedule three full-day pullout days to continue the momentum throughout the school year. Students have an opportunity to engage with our computing clubs that are very active in our region. These clubs compete in Java programming competitions with peers from our neighboring districts. Our three senior high campuses are known for bringing back trophies from these competitions.

Lots of work goes into building a district-wide computer science program. We encourage you to check out the work our district is doing by visiting our website at https://www.pisd.edu/computerscience.

Prayers, Meditations, and Reassurances

Posted on August 22, 2019 by Anthony Owen J.D., M.S.E.

“Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.” – Jacques Barzun

This past Tuesday, the daily rituals my home had fallen into over the previous two or so months were interrupted. My wife’s alarm, sounding thirty minutes earlier than usual, was the marker that for the next ten months our lives would be changing into a different, but exciting routine. It was “back to school day” for Michele, a teacher and my wife, William, a 10th grader and our eldest, and Harper, a newly christened middle schooler and our youngest. Every day most of my deliberations and actions are for and with them. Maintaining their well-being always in mind, helps keep me grounded on those individuals that should be most important in my and other educational leaders’ work, students and teachers across our communities, states, nation, and globe. I once had a supervisor who would often say, “teaching is not a fallback position, it is first choice profession;” she was, and is still to this day, 100% correct. I wanted to use my blog posting this time to remind all of our wonderful teachers that they are in a profession that deserves high-regards, support, more often than not, increased compensation, and a regular “pat on the back.”

During a training that I participated in recently, part of the introduction/icebreaker activity included each of us drawing a card with a question that we were supposed to individually meditate on and then answer out loud for the group. The question I received was, “who was the best supervisor, professor, or teacher you ever had?” After thinking about it for a while, and remembering so many people who have been extremely influential during my life, my mind drifted back and focused on 10th grade and Mr. Jack Knight. Mr. Knight was my social studies teacher, but he was so much more. He was a great teacher, a true professional educator. As I consider his class now, from an educational leader perspective, I can confidently say he was a master of maintaining classroom discipline while engaging his students in their learning. However, beyond that, Mr. Knight, who had a family of his own, also took the time to get to know and appropriately befriend and mentor a young man who greatly needed it during that time of his life; if you need a hint, that young man was me. I will not go into my personal life, but just know that his extra time, deep caring, and daily demonstration of what being a good teacher and mentor should be, has had a profound effect on me to this day and probably been more influential in my life than he will ever realize.

As teachers, you all have an immense responsibility within your position of power. You have the responsibility to teach, but more importantly you have the opportunity to make a positive difference in the life of a child which will follow them into adulthood. I hope you will never forget these facts, and it is my desire that some who are not in the classroom will soon be reminded of it.

Tuesday morning as wife and boys left our driveway to embark on this year’s adventure, I said a short prayer. That prayer, which was for safety, a “good day,” meeting new friends, and connecting with a person who really needs it, was not only for the members of my family. It was for all students and teachers; it was for you! As you progress through these first few weeks of this new year, take heart in the words of Galatians 6:9.

Go make that positive difference that I know each of you can; I wish each and every one of you a phenomenal school year!

Anthony A Owen
State Department of Education Representative

Technology has Vastly Improved our World, and Artificial Intelligence Will Keep Making It Better

Posted on August 16, 2019 by Fred Martin

Check out these recent headlines about artificial intelligence (AI):

Artificial Intelligence and the Rise of Economic Inequality (2017)
Never Mind Killer Robots—Here Are 6 Real A.I. Dangers to Watch Out For (2019)
AI Greater Threat to Human Existence than Climate Change (2019)

These headlines are from reputable news sources, including MIT Technology Review. Is it just me, or has the media decided that AI will cause the end of civilization as we know it?

I’d like to suggest that exactly the opposite is true. In fact, owing to technological innovations, the quality of life has improved immensely—across all of the world. For example, did you know that:

Over the last 200 years, the fraction of people living in extreme poverty has dropped from 85% (in 1800) to just 9% (in 2017)?

Over this same period, the average life expectancy—worldwide—has risen from 31 years to 72 years?

Since 1970, the fraction of people who are undernourished has dropped from 28% to 11% (in 2015)?

All of these things are true (Rosling et al., Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think, 2018).

For all of us who are living reasonably comfortable lives, we owe this largely to the march of technologies which have made our lives massively better: providing abundant food, inexpensive clothing, affordable shelter, and sanitary plumbing.

**Remember the Luddites? They were wrong. Machines have made our lives *better*.** Representation of Luddites destroying a weaving machine, early to mid 1800s. Public domain image retrieved from Wikimedia.

What does this have to do with artificial intelligence? Let me suggest that AI is simply the current technology for building machines that are improving our lives.

Here are three big areas in which AI is making things better, right now: medicine, energy, and food:

In medical applications, AI-based software, working in conjunction with doctors, is analyzing lung nodules in CT scans, freeing up doctors’ time and lowering costs; achieving nearly 100% success in identifying breast cancer cells (better than doctors or AI alone); and preventing blindness, by automating the detection of eye diseases.

In energy applications, AI systems do weather prediction to allow more efficient utilization of renewable sources of energy; are deployed with sensors in environments to better control heating and cooling (e.g. saving up to 40% of cooling costs in data centers); and used in “intelligent energy storage,” a key part of the solution in deploying solar and wind power. In short, AI is integral in saving energy and making renewable energy effective at scale.

In agricultural applications, AI is employed in computer vision techniques to improve crop health and reduce herbicide use; in harvesting-robots, which are reducing labor costs and increasing yields; and in precision-farming (e.g., providing farmers with timely and actionable information about how to combat a swarm of pests).

These are all fabulously good, amazing things that are making our world better and improving people’s lives.

Of course, there are challenges. Technology causes disruptions in work, as work previously done by people is done by machines (see Luddites, above). AI will cause the same. People will lose their jobs. New jobs will be created, but it’s not clear that the people who lose their jobs will be the ones able to fill the new jobs.

These societal challenges are best resolved with engagement in consciousness-raising and political action.

We have already seen positive change stemming from recent concerns with AI systems. Just 18 months ago, it was headline news that face-recognition systems often misidentified women and people of color.

Thanks to the work of activist reporters and many others (including those who were most adversely impacted), it’s a widely known issue. An entire community has formed to address issues of “fairness, accountability, and transparency” in AI; this group holds an annual conference. Microsoft has withdrawn its facial recognition database in response to these concerns, and IBM Research released a “Diversity in Faces” dataset to advance the study of fairness in facial recognition systems.

This is exactly what we would want to happen in a democratic society.

While we combat social injustices, we must take the long view. Artificial Intelligence will be part of the technologies we build to advance humankind and all the species which populate our world.

Let’s not fear AI; let’s embrace it. AI will save the world.

Fred Martin, Past Chair of Board of Directors

My Summer PD looks like a Promising New Adventure…

Posted on August 6, 2019 by Michelle Lagos

The CSTA conference has been my summer PD for many years now, and it is incredible all the things I’ve been able to learn and bring back to my classroom for the new school year. This year I started thinking about this and how my instruction is always enhanced by the workshops and sessions I attend.

This year, I was looking for fresh new ideas. After teaching High School Computer Science for the last few years, this year I will be teaching Middle School. I needed ways to make my class engaging without eliminating the element of fun. I attended many great workshops and sessions at the conference but a session about Flipping, Agile and Gamification was particularly enlightening. This session talked about how to truly engage students and teach collaboration. It talked about adding game-like elements to projects and instruction to motivate and engage students. It was a great session given by Mr. Brandon Milonovich.

After the conference, I decided I wanted to learn more and felt I had a road to follow and a goal to meet. During my research, I came upon a book called EDrenaline Rush by John Meehan (@MeehanEDU) that talks about how to engage students using several elements that are used in Theme Parks, Mud Runs and Escape Rooms. This was a game-changer. I started planning my year with a new perspective. It talks about how “classroom walls belong to the learners inside as much as the teacher”. It talks about how your class needs a story. This book is not specifically about Computer Science, but it is so applicable.

I am using Avengers as my classroom theme this year. I am introducing middle schoolers to the Problem-Solving Process and how to apply Computer Science to engineering and I thought this will make a great story for my class. Some of the Avengers were born with their powers but others were self-made. Tony Stark is a great inventor and engineer who created Iron Man, Captain America was also made through science and innovation. This is opening a door for my students to become Everyday Heroes doing extraordinary things. They will have a mission to improve their world through Innovation, collaboration all using Computer Science Skills. They will feel they belong to a team with a purpose and a mission, all the while earning points and badges. Gamifying my class. I want them to think, ask, research & create using Computer Science skills.

I was really nervous and stressed about the move to a new division and now I am really excited to see all the great things my students will be able to do throughout this year. If you have the chance, please do not doubt to register for the CSTA conference 2020 in Arlington, Virginia. There has not been a year so far that I have not used some of the knowledge I got at the conference in my class the following year.

I will let you know how the adventure goes. To be continued…

The CSTA Advocate Blog

Monthly Archives: August 2019

Building a Pre-K to 12 Computer Science Program.

Prayers, Meditations, and Reassurances

Technology has Vastly Improved our World, and Artificial Intelligence Will Keep Making It Better

My Summer PD looks like a Promising New Adventure…