Code.org at CSTA 2024

By now, we’ve all heard the grand claims about the potential of artificial intelligence to revolutionize education by reducing teacher work time and tailoring educational content to each student. But unless we educate teachers on how to use AI effectively and safely, it will remain an untapped resource. In this session, you’ll learn about AI’s impacts on education and acquire the knowledge, tools, and resources to support your staff in their AI journeys. This workshop offers attendees a professional development session suitable for CS teachers, encouraging collaboration and co-planning. At the close of the session, participants will receive extended resources and a planning guide to help formulate your own professional development.

The sensemaking approach is a way of structuring our teaching to create space for students to actively think and create strategies—not just to complete work. From simple routines like “Notice and Wonder” or “Which One Doesn’t Belong?” to more complex ones like “The Thinking Classroom,” sensemaking methods broaden the range of perspectives in the room, setting the scene for more focused, specific instruction. In this workshop, we apply several sensemaking routines at a range of grade levels. We’ll play them out together to get a feel for each one, then take time to pair our favorite CS projects with sensemaking routines that match.

In the age of artificial intelligence, it’s vital to retain the core concepts of CS education while also teaching students how AI technology works, how to use the latest AI tools ethically, and how to evaluate AI’s impacts on society. Much as typing and internet skills have become requirements for basic functioning in the world, AI skills are becoming similarly foundational in CS. For instance, AI-powered tools offer better and better suggestions for code completion, which in turn leads to major shifts in the responsibilities of software engineers in tech industry jobs. This session aims to help attendees teach CS in this new and evolving AI landscape. Presenters from industry, academic research, curriculum/PD development, and school district leadership will share their perspectives on how AI is transforming CS instructional practice. We’ll share our collective insights, engage participants in four AI classroom activities, and close with structured conversational activities that support the implementation of the resources shared during the session.

Adding a physical element to computing education greatly enhances children’s comfort and proficiency as they learn how to code. Using the micro:bit helps students make connections between the code they enter on the screen and the results they see in real life, which improves their motivation and builds their confidence with tech as their conceptual understanding grows. The micro:bit is a pocket-sized computer that introduces students to how software and hardware work together. It has an LED light display, buttons, sensors, and many input/output features that can be programmed to let it interact with you and your world. Using App Lab, students can quickly build apps that communicate with external hardware using a block-to-text app. Code.org and the Micro:bit Educational Foundation have collaborated to empower teachers with resources to help bring coding lessons to life. This session shares an overview of the Code.org courses that incorporate micro:bits. Each course has a guide that contains an introductory exploration lesson to build familiarity with the micro:bit; a guide to teaching the coding lessons; three full coding lessons, each matched to relevant CS topics; and key vocabulary relating to physical computing and the CS Fundamentals Course. You’ll leave the session with all the tools and resources you need to harness the immersive power of physical computing to teach computer science.

Teachers in rural schools face unique challenges in bringing CS to their students, but universal design for learning (UDL) principles can help these educators improve learning and make computer science education more accessible to their students. In this session, we will explore how UDL can remove barriers to CS education and help teachers create inclusive and equitable learning environments in rural schools. We’ll discuss the value of UDL for rural CS classes, explore collaborative strategies to improve academic achievement, discuss the use of co-teaching as a means of expanding CS access in rural schools, and examine how to use freely available curriculum with UDL principles. Teachers will leave the session with ideas, connections, and CS resources they can use immediately in their rural classrooms.

This session presents the results of a study on strategies to increase equity in the elementary computer science classroom. Access and opportunity are not the only factors affecting equity in computer science education, particularly in a landscape where many teachers receive little formal training on CS teaching. This study explores how elementary CS teachers think about equity in relation to their goals for their computer science instruction, and delves into the strategies these teachers use to make their practice equitable. Findings indicate that elementary computer science teachers think about equity in two ways: opportunity and differentiation. Their equity goals include providing access to opportunity, promoting positive identification with computer science, empowering students to use computer science for social change, and increasing academic achievement. In this session, we’ll share strategies to increase equity in elementary CS instruction using the Kapor Center’s Framework for Culturally Relevant-Sustaining Computer Science Education.

Join us for the first in-person meeting of CSAccess, a CSTA working group focused on making CS Education accessible to students with disabilities. This session will provide an opportunity to brainstorm next steps and long term goals, provide feedback on resources that have been developed, curate examples and materials to support students with disabilities in general education classrooms, and determine what resources are still needed. Most of the time in this session will be spent working in small groups.

There are relatively few ongoing supports for experienced computer science (CS) teachers, particularly focused on increasing teachers’ use of equitable and inclusive teaching practices. We are in our third year of implementing a year-long, equity-focused peer mentoring program with CS teachers. One of our mechanisms for supporting mentors is monthly, virtual community of practice (CoP) meetings. During the CoP meetings, we provide time for mentors to share promising practices and troubleshoot challenges. Additionally, we facilitate activities to help mentors develop and practice equity-focused mentoring skills, and deepen their understanding of equitable and inclusive teaching practices. Each month, mentors are asked to read a chapter from the book, “Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain.” The equity-focused activities are developed around the chapter the mentors read.

For this breakout, we will present the structure of the CoP meetings, lessons learned from facilitating the meetings, and our research findings. Then, we will facilitate an equity-focused activity that we have used in our CoPs. We will ask the audience to review images that represent an equity issue that occurs in CS classrooms and discuss those images and issues in small groups.

About Code.org

Code.org® is a nonprofit dedicated to the vision that every student has the opportunity to learn computer science as part of their core K-12 education. We focus on increasing participation by young women and students from other underrepresented groups. The leading provider of K-12 computer science curriculum in the largest school districts in the U.S., Code.org organizes the annual Hour of Code campaign. Code.org is supported by generous donors including Microsoft, Amazon, Google and others.

Code.org at CSTA 2024

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Bringing AI to your school

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