Ants Go Marching—Integrating Computer Science into Teacher Professional Development with NetLogo

Mike Borowczak,Andrea Burrows

doi:10.3390/educsci9010066

Abstract

There is a clear call for pre-collegiate students in the United States to become literate in computer science (CS) concepts and practices through integrated, authentic experiences and instruction. Yet, a majority of in-service and pre-service pre-collegiate teachers (instructing children aged five to 18) lack the fundamental skills and self-efficacy to adequately and effectively integrate CS into existing curricula. In this study, 30 pre-collegiate teachers who represent a wide band of experience, grade-levels, and prior CS familiarity participated in a 16-day professional development (PD) course to enhance their content knowledge and self-efficacy in integrating CS into existing lessons and curricula. Using both qualitative and quantitative methodology, a social constructivist approach guided the researchers in the development of the PD, as well as the data collection and analysis on teacher content knowledge and perceptions through a mixed-methods study. Ultimately, participants were introduced to CS concepts and practices through NetLogo, which is a popular multi-agent simulator. The results show that although the pre-collegiate teachers adopted CS instruction, the CS implementation within their curricula was limited to the activities and scope of the PD with few adaptations and minimal systemic change in implementation behaviors.

Highlights

While technological devices dominate the world today, advanced artificial intelligence (AI)will dominate the day to day functions in the world of tomorrow [1]
The good news is that computer science (CS) is embedded within many workforce STEM careers [2,3]; the bad news is that based on current pre-collegiate teacher CS self-efficacy and skills, CS remains disjointed from many pre-collegiate STEM courses [4,5]
As discussed in the previous section, the four data collection points of interest in this study focus on the time immediately surrounding the professional development (PD), with a pre-summer PD assessment, a pre-PD session assessment, a post-PD session assessment, and a post-summer PD assessment

Summary

Introduction

While technological devices dominate the world today, advanced artificial intelligence (AI)will dominate the day to day functions in the world of tomorrow [1]. For context to the PD, in the following paragraphs, the authors outline what the pre-collegiate teachers investigated for the NetLogo session, and how the material relates to other subjects. Pre-collegiate teachers investigated the relationship between common science and manufacturing processes and the design of algorithms to solve optimization and design problems that have no apparent brute-force solution. During the first part of the teacher-centric investigations on how genetics influences the design of mathematical algorithms, the session built up the baseline knowledge for the pre-collegiate teachers, relying first on the existing knowledge of the pre-collegiate teachers, and scaffolding and extending the explanation of new concepts by domain content experts. Pre-collegiate teachers engaged in hands-on, minds-on active learning sessions, with a genetic algorithm that created valid mathematical and chemical equations. Pre-collegiate teachers modified a genetic algorithm template

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Methods

Results

Conclusion