I need hands on high school programming electives in order to engage students more in the learning process. I believe that continuing to develop my own skills at physical computing student engagement will increase.
Most of my students are from an urban area. They have chosen to attend our public charter school, to be a part of a school whose mission surrounds leadership, rhetoric, entrepreneurship, and debate, in a classical model, with twenty-first century skills.
Our school receives one-third of the funding of traditional public schools in our area of the state as a public charter school.
As a small startup in only its 6th year, we often do not have the budget to be able to get materials for our student's interests as we try to cater to their interests and diverse learning needs. As teachers, we don't have budget money for professional development.
My Project
I will be using the skills learned in this professional development to further enhance the existing curriculum we are using for Intro to Programming and our Computer Science Principles courses. The skills learned from this PD will directly benefit at least 15 students this academic year. Given the growth in the elective courses in the department, I anticipate it will directly benefit at least 30 students for the 2020-2021 academic year.
I have noticed our students are more engaged when programming actual physical objects.
Students' depth of understanding also is increased when this occurs. The current curriculum we are using for our Intro to Programming course lacks a physical computing component and does not enhance students' collaborative problem-solving skills as it is largely independent work. I am looking to enhance this curriculum during the second semester by adding collaborative physical computing projects that involves robotics.
We currently have several students in these courses with aspirations of majoring in computer science and engineering. I would love to give them some real-world application scenarios in their courses. However, I need to delve deeper to build my knowledge level in these areas as it pertains to Python programming. Given our school's technology requirements, the majority of our enrolled students will take one of these courses prior to graduation.
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