Computing in the Classroom

Abstract

Computational thinking is an essential skill for everyone in today's world. It is a problem solving skill that incorporates problem decomposition, pattern recognition, abstraction, logical and algorithmic thinking. Yet the exposure of students in K-12 curriculum to computational thinking is minimal in most schools. There are various opportunities for computational thinking to be included in almost all content areas in the curriculum. In order for this to be realized, teachers need introduction to the concept of computational thinking and they need to be equipped with tools to provide practices in this concept in the classrooms. Inspired by this idea, we organized a workshop in June 2014 to involve all teachers from all grade levels and all disciplines where we introduced them to the concept of computational thinking and taught them tools such as Scratch, Google Sites, HTML, and AppInventor. The workshop attracted 34 teachers mostly from the Muscogee County School District in Georgia. In this poster we present our recruitment strategy, methodology of our workshop, and results from our pre and post surveys. In particular, we present the influence of our workshop on teachers' views of computational thinking. We also share highlights from the projects that the teachers worked on during the workshop and presented at the end.