Coding Science Internships: Integrating Science and Computational Thinking for Middle School Classrooms

Purpose & objective

The purpose of this session is to showcase a research-based instructional approach that integrates computer science and science learning experiences, and to highlight generalizable principles about how the approach addresses and confronts barriers to broader participation in CS. The research base, developed with support from the National Science Foundation, aimed to identify, advance and deepen the field’s ideas about what specific factors, designs, and practices could increase student dispositions toward, and capacity for, computer programming and computational thinking, with particular emphasis on females. Ultimately, this research led to the development of instructional units called Coding Science Internships which immerse students (grades 6-8) in simulated internships that mirror the collaborative and computational work of practicing scientists, and that can be embedded within a school's core science curriculum. Through the example, participants will gain insight into some of the project’s research findings and how they are instantiated in these units.

Participants in this session will become familiar with the instructional approach by experiencing the Amplify Science Coral Reef Restoration Coding Science Internship unit, in which students engage in collaborative activities and work towards coding solutions to real-world problems using a digital simulation. The objective is for participants to come away with an understanding of the research-based elements that were incorporated into the Coding Science Internships to engage students in CS, improve student dispositions toward STEM and CS-related occupations, and to improve the capacity of teachers and districts to support CS education.

Outline

This presentation will begin by framing the problem and the need in our society overall to broaden participation in computer science, and how the current approach to teaching coding in school often presents barriers instead of working to solve this issue (15 minutes). Facilitators will then showcase the Coral Restoration Coding Science Internship unit designed for middle school students as a way to highlight the strategies that can address these barriers (30 minutes). It will conclude with debriefing the approach (15 minutes).

To begin, the facilitators will tap into participants’ prior knowledge and experiences with coding in classrooms through peer-to-peer and interactive discussions. For the majority of the session, participants will engage in the internship experience using the same tools students would use — videos, interactive coding simulations, and peer-to-peer collaboration. In the example they experience, students would inhabit the role of CS interns and are introduced to threats to a coral reef ecosystem. They experience how students write code to program underwater robots to remove threats in variable conditions, gain first-hand experience with sequences, loops, and conditionals. They also experience how teams work together to evaluate their code by testing executed code against expected outcomes and real-world data. They also experience how students would work in teams to program a scientific simulation so that it better represents an evidence-based, explanatory account of the phenomenon being simulated in an effort to communicate to stakeholders how various threats affect the health of a coral reef and how those threats may be mitigated. We step back after the experience to consider how the structures in this unit provide embedded supports for educators, regardless of their comfort level or experience with coding or computer science.

To conclude the session, participants will revisit the barriers to participation they were introduced to at the beginning of the presentation and reflect on the strategies used in the Coding Science Internships to address these barriers, forming generalizable principles that can be applied to their own contexts.

Supporting research

Greenwald, E. & Krakowski, A., (2019a). Coding Science Internships: Enabling Broader Participation in Computer Science. Presented at the International Society for Technology in Education, Philadelphia, 2019.

Greenwald, E. & Krakowski, A., (2019b). Coding Science Internships: Enabling Broader Participation in Computer Science Through Meaningful Integration with Core Academic Coursework. Unpublished Manuscript, University of California, Berkeley.

https://stemforall2020.videohall.com/presentations/1706?fbclid=IwAR2cvFIw3fGiXnxId7TpG-jFKaAZf7w20hVxyQysQPCNK14C-5Gc6bFyC04

Our pedagogical framework grounds Mitch Resnick’s coding to learn approach to CS education (Resnick, 2012) in situative learning theories and, in particular, the construct of legitimate peripheral participation (LPP, Lave and Wenger, 1991). Coding to learn contrasts with more traditional CS instruction, in which programming is presented as a discrete skill to learn for its own sake, akin to typing, and instead repositions the learning goals such that programming and computational thinking are practices and cognitive tools to learn on the way to achieving other meaningful goals. Coding to learn, in which learning is contextually embedded in authentic tasks, is a natural fit for situative theories, like LPP, which posit that knowledge is constructed through activity and in relation to others—thus, learning is “situated” in the activity, context, and community in which it occurs (see also Greeno, 1998). LPP's foundational construct of a community of practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998), where individuals share a repertoire of knowledge and practices to address a shared set of problems, informs the intervention’s commitment to authentic and collaborative problem solving. Further, with the internship model, in conjunction with task-embedded supports and a gradual release of responsibility, students progress along a trajectory from peripheral to more central participation in the practice of coding scientific simulations. Initially, students use their scientific content knowledge to understand a simulated phenomenon and its underlying code. Eventually, students work toward more central participation, as they use newfound programming practices to improve and further develop the simulation as an investigative model of a scientific phenomenon. Finally, the LPP framework is tightly aligned with the intervention’s more distal goal of broadening participation in STEM, offering a clear vehicle for students to explore and come to identify with CS as a “possible self” (Markus & Nurius, 1986). Markus’ theory also dovetails with the widely reported distal impacts of students’ early perceptions of STEM subjects as a determinant of whether students enter STEM professions (Tai, Liu, Maltese & Fan, 2006). Our intervention, therefore, aims to support students’ identification with CS occupations as they do legitimate work within the CS community: it will be expressly designed to encourage a broad range of students to see themselves, at least potentially, as both scientists and programmers, and to envision CS as an appealing world to inhabit.

Citations:
Resnick, M. (2013). Learn to code, code to learn. EdSurge, May, 54.
Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge university press.
Greeno, J. G. (1998) The situativity of knowing, learning and research. American Psychologist, 53, 5-26.
Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning as a social system. Systems thinker, 9(5), 2-3.
Markus, H., & Nurius, P. (1986). Possible selves. American psychologist, 41(9), 954.
Tai, R., Liu, C, Maltese, A. & Fan X. (2006) Planning Early for Careers in Science. Science, 1143-4