Teaching teachers: Future educators learn to introduce computational thinking

Apr. 4—Future educators gathered at Hood College on Tuesday to learn about introducing computing concepts as early as pre-K.

In a series of sessions funded through a grant from the Maryland Center for Computing Education, participants worked to understand the concepts themselves and practiced applying them in simple lessons for young students.

The conference was the first of its kind at Hood. Called "Destination Innovation," it was tailored to current or future teachers with little to no knowledge of computing, said Jennifer Cuddapah, an education professor at Hood.

Frederick County Public Schools is in the "beginning stages" of implementing an instructional pathway to introduce young students to computer science and computational thinking, said Korbin Shoemaker, a career and technical education teacher specialist for the district and one of the presenters at Tuesday's conference.

At the middle and high school levels, students have access to computing courses that ramp up in complexity.

But regardless of a student's age or interests, they can benefit from learning the basics of computational thinking, Shoemaker told participants Tuesday.

Those basics include pattern recognition, algorithmic design — creating a list of steps to accomplish a task — and decomposition, or breaking a problem down into smaller parts.

Shoemaker and Erin Landsman, a STEM teacher specialist for FCPS, led participants through an activity to demonstrate breaking down those concepts for young learners.

Participants split into pairs, and one person had to instruct the other on how to build a specific stack of plastic cups. The instructors could only communicate with the builders by writing arrows on a sheet of paper.

Later, Hood cybersecurity professor George Dimitoglou taught participants about cryptography, a word that literally means "the art of writing or solving codes."

In computing, cryptography refers to securing information and communications like online credit card transactions and emails.

Dimitoglou showed participants activities they could organize with young students, like creating a cipher wheel to break a simple alphabetical code, to introduce them to the concept of cryptography.

The concept ties in well with history lessons, too, he said: Cryptography has been in use since ancient times to protect secret messages, often during wartime.

The overall goal of the conference, organizers said, was to show the future teachers how to build a foundation of understanding for their students.

Landsman said students as young as 5 years old can easily pick up on terms like "bug" and "debug," commonly used in coding. Teachers can tell young students that they have a bug in their math problem and help them debug it, she said.

"When you first introduce the word 'bug,' it's lots of giggles all around that there's a bug somewhere," she said. "Then you talk about debugging, and the kids are easily able to use those terms. Just using the language with the kids in different subjects helps them have that exposure to computational thinking in class."

Cayla Haney, a sophomore at Hood studying to be an early childhood educator, said she was a "history kid," not a math or science kid, growing up.

"I came in here not knowing anything at all," she said, laughing. "Never took a computer science class in my life."

But the sessions helped her see the material as less intimidating, she said. She also appreciated learning how the concepts could be tailored for children of any age.

"I like how they integrate different grade levels," Haney said.

When she completes her schooling, Haney will be certified to teach pre-K through third grade.

Alex Ingram, meanwhile, also an education student at Hood, is hoping to teach high-level math classes in subjects like calculus or algebra to high schoolers.

She said she came to the conference to learn how computational thinking could apply to focus areas besides her own.

"There's a lot of it in mathematics," she said. "So I wanted to see how it is in other subjects, because I like to be well-versed in many subjects."

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