Promoting K-12 Computer Science Education : A Computational Thinking Partnership Project

This paper describes a collaborative project that was conducted to promote Computer Science (CS) and Computational Thinking (CT) Education among pre-service and in-service teachers as well as Teacher Preparation Faculty. More than 40 pre-service and in-service teachers and 9 Education faculty members from three schools participated in a learning experience designed to address the K-12 Computer Science Framework [1] and Maryland's K-12 Computer Science Standards. The collaboration was designed to develop CS/CT knowledge, understanding, skills and application among participants. In phase one of the project, pre-service and in-service teachers explored CS educational hard/software platforms and used open-source sites such as Sphero Edu, Wonder Workshop, Scratch and Code.org. They envisioned how activities apply to K-8 classrooms, and they worked collaboratively to design a problem-based project for their own students. In phase two of the project, teacher preparation faculty were trained to integrate CS and CT into several preservice courses as well as build into the coursework sequence meaningful experiences that would expose future teachers to CS and CT knowledge and skills so that they could then incorporate these into their own K-8 lesson plans. Project evaluation included formative and summative assessments to examine changes in content and pedagogical knowledge. The feedback from the participants shows positive results.