NSF STEM + Computing grant for Schoolwide Labs’s Middle School curricula titled 'Collaborative Research: Using a School-Based Sensing Platform and Targeted Teacher Professional Development to Support Computational Thinking Integration and Student Learning' integrate and promote Computational Thinking (CT) in STEM and Science classrooms through providing engaging, hands-on learning experiences through a school-based sensing platform anchored in Storyline units focused on phenomena (NSF #174205, #1742046)
Curricula are developed in a collaborative co-design process with teachers and researchers. Students use the sensing platform to conduct a variety of data-enabled science and engineering investigations that are rooted in personally relevant questions about their community and their lives. This sensing platform enables teachers and students to envision a new type of “school-wide science lab” - moving beyond specialized classrooms where students go to conduct experiments to imagining the entire school and neighboring environment as a potential space for scientific inquiry. As such, this expanded environment for “doing science” enables teachers across STEM disciplines to creatively integrate CT (CT) activities into their disciplinary instruction.
The sensing technology is integrated into a series of lessons that address identified performance expectations in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) as well as science, engineering and computational thinking practices. Each instructional unit is referred to as a storyline -- a set of lessons that are driven by student questions about a specific design challenge or scientific phenomena. These storylines use students’ questions and ideas to ground the sensing investigation and drive the class forward.
Professional Learning workshops are available for curricular units. Contact schoolwidelabs@colorado.edu for more information.
Learn more about the personnel team on this project.