Lessons Learned: One Year of Teaching Snap! to College Students, High School Students and K-12 Teachers

Brendan Henrique

bhenrique@berkeley.edu

Brendan Henrique

• Currently a 2nd year Ph.D. student at the Berkeley School of Education where I study critical CS education.
• TA for BJC College Course at UC Berkeley
• Intern at SAP w/ Snap Development Team
• M.A. of Urban Education at Loyola Marymount
• Former 7-8th grade science teacher in Richmond, CA

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Unique Opportunity to teach Snap! Via BJC curriculum to three different learning populations

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• HS Student Summer Camp
• College Student BJC Course at Berkeley
• Pre-service Teacher block-based programming

College Students at UCB

• Enrolled in CS10.org
• 350+ students
• Primarily ‘never coded before’
• Intro to CS for Non-Majors

Key Learnings

• Major differences between pre/post pandemic experience as an instructor
• Required different methods of explanation
• Encouragement required for exploration+discovery
• Also for social interactions!
• College Students will serve as our reference group for the talk

HS Students at

BJC Summer Academy

Feedback provided by BJC Summer academy instructors

• Summer Academy
• First two weeks of BJC curriculum
• Most students with little/no experience
• 40 total students
• ~10 in ‘beginner’ section

Key Learnings

• Functions, BYOB and Abstraction were more difficult concepts
• Many students thought of coding in terms of games
• Students focused heavily on ‘user inputs’ rather than reporters and variables.
• Would leave ‘blanks’ for “the user to input later”
• Copy 4-5 lines of code over and over rather than make a block
• Willing to tinker and get ‘unstuck’!

Pre-Service Teachers in BTEP at UC Berkeley

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• Enrolled in M.A. of Education program that also grants a teaching credential
• For CS Authorization, first course is Block-based programming
• Learned first half of BJC curriculum
• ~10 students, most with no experience and all backgrounds (teaching degrees in STEM, elementary, social science, etc)

Key Learnings

• It is vital to teach tinkering and growth mindset with teachers (who are new to coding).
• CS is fundamentally different from almost any other discipline
• Teachers are not commonly exposed to computational thinking
• Dedication to exploring CS in multiple lens
• Themes of ethics, fairness, justice
• Scaling concepts by credential and age

Summary of Findings (Recommendations)

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• Teachers and some college students may require explicit coaching and instruction on ‘tinkering’ and exploration in CS
• Abstraction can be a complex concept to grasp when teaching computational thinking and different methods of exploration/explanation are needed when instructing different learning populations

CS Education Future Research

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• CS Teacher Ed tends to focus on either CS majors/STEM->teacher pathway or teachers->Curriculum PDs.
• Focusing on engaging computational thinking w/teachers in teacher education programs

References

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• Yadav, A., Stephenson, C., & Hong, H. (2017). Computational thinking for teacher education. Communications of the ACM, 60(4), 55–62. https://doi.org/10.1145/2994591

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• Amy J. Ko, Anne Beitlers, Brett Wortzman, Matt Davidson, Alannah Oleson, Mara Kirdani-Ryan, Stefania Druga (2022). Critically Conscious Computing: Methods for Secondary Education. https://criticallyconsciouscomputing.org/, retrieved 8/5/2022.
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Bonus Resources For Teachers (in progress)

• Elementary Resources:
• Code.org's K-5 Curriculum (Links to an external site.)
• ScratchJR (Ages 5-8)
• SnapJR (Snap with emoji/simpler commands)
• CS Unplugged
• Culturally Relevant/Responsive Science(and CS)
• Science in the City
• Critically Conscious Computing
• Integration Chapters are awesome for cross-discipline CS
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Q+A

bhenrique@berkeley.edu

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