Inspiring Computational Thinking in Young Children's Engineering Design Activities (Fundamental)
ion Reducing complexity to define main idea. Algorithms and procedures Series of ordered steps taken to solve a problem or achieve some end. Automation Having computers or machines do repetitive or tedious tasks. Simulation Representation or model of a process. Simulation also involves running experiments using models. Parallelization Organize resources to simultaneously carry out tasks to reach a common goal. Results and Discussion Examples from the Curriculum Table 2: PictureSTEM Designing A Toy Box Organizer Lesson Descriptions Coded for Computational Thinking Lesson 1 (1A) STEM+C Treasure Hunt modeling activity: The students are introduced to the design challenge and help develop ideas about what they might need to know in order to design an organizer. Through their definition building, students help the teacher break down the problem into smaller parts (problem decomposition) Building on their defining of the problem, students learn about the problem of not having a standard unit of measure through making a treasure map marked out in paces. They learn that different people's paces are different and so finding the treasure is difficult. They use the steps to act out the roles of the characters in the story to physically demonstrate these differences (simulation) The students must develop a way to standardize the treasure map in order to eliminate this issue. It brings in computational thinking through the use of algorithmic/procedural steps to create standardized solutions for the treasure hunt (algorithms and procedures) The students then tie this back to the engineering design challenge to see how this might help them design a toy box organizer. Lesson 2. STEM+C Design your own "standard" Building on the need for a way to measure things in lesson 1, students explore a variety of non standard and standard measuring tools. Each student pair is given a different non standard unit (such as paper clips, cubes, rocks, etc. to measure a common item in the classroom. Through a justification process, students engage in a discussion about why each pair came up with a different answer for the measurement. Students then use a common or "standard" measuring tool as a class that they will use to measure the same fixed distance in order to see how using the same tool produces similar results. Through compare and contrast methods, students are analyzing the data collected through the measurement activities to look for patterns and similarities that lead them to the need for common measurement tools (data collection, analysis, and representation) The students again tie this to the engineering challenge to determine the usefulness of a standard measure for solving their toy box organizer problem. Lesson 3 STEM+C Physical Properties of Materials: Students are introduced to the science concept of physical properties through the book Living Color as they learn about how objects can be sorted in a number of different ways, which includes abstraction across different objects to recognize that they fit into categories (abstraction) As students are sorting these items, they are learning about physical properties and deepening their understanding of what it means if all of the items in a pile are red or soft or strong (EDP learn) After students have learned about these physical properties, they do an activity where they ask a series of yes or no questions about the properties of an object in a mystery bag until they are able to identify that mystery object (algorithms and procedures) Lesson 4 STEM+C Test Materials Plan Design: Students prepare for the design challenge by thinking like engineers while they test the materials that they will be using in their toy box organizer designs (EDP learn) This lesson helps to build background knowledge that students will use in solving their engineering design challenge by testing the building materials based on their physical properties and using their results to determine which materials will be better for certain tasks. They find that the craft sticks are nice and sturdy if they want to make strong dividers, but aren't very flexible in terms of fitting them together and into their toy boxes (data collection and analysis) After testing their materials, students review the problem and individually brainstorm some possible toy box designs before talking to their partner and deciding on a plan for their group design, which helps students to see that they can break their design challenge into smaller and more manageable pieces (problem decomposition) Lesson 5 STEM+C Students design, build, and test an organization system for a toy box. Then students share their designs and results with the class before using their test results to engage in a redesign (data analysis) After redesigning their new toy box, students will have the opportunity to give their directions and measurements (algorithms and procedures) to another group who will pretend to be the toy company and will attempt to build their toy box design (simulation) Content analysis of the five lessons for the Designing a Toy Box Organizer unit yielded natural opportunities for students to engage in all the computational thinking practices from Table 1 except for parallelization and automation. These two were consistently difficult to imagine in the other units of the curriculum. However, the team did identify opportunities that could prompt students to think about parallelization by dividing the work of the activity into two parallel tasks. However, the curriculum would need to plan for scaffolding this division to ensure that the teams would be on track to bring the parallel work back together again. Integrating automation would likely entail describing how machines (e.g. CNC machines) might automate the process. Despite no clear connections to these two ideas of computational thinking, there was sufficient opportunity to modify the curriculum to more explicitly address and integrate this STEM unit into a STEM CT unit. Examples of students engaging in computational thinking Designing Paper Baskets: Identifying and Using Patterns The research team identified a number of computational thinking practices within the Designing Paper Baskets unit. As described earlier, this unit has students design a paper basket that they weave with various types of paper (e.g. wax paper, tissue paper, card stock, etc. they can choose from. The curriculum includes the reading of the book Pattern Fish that introduces the idea of various patterns (e.g. ABAB, ABBA, AABB, etc. through the physical appearance of the fish. The teacher then relates these patterns to the process of weaving. An example of the dialogue between the teacher and students is as follows: Teacher: Listen for the pattern. Over, under, over, under, over, under. What pattern do you hear? Students: ABAB! The students' ability to identify and name ABAB as the pattern is an example of abstraction. With the teacher's prompting the students are able to abstract this generic form of patterns from what they hear (repeating of over/under) and what they see in the basket weave. Following this discussion the teacher refers the students to a worksheet where they will select their desired pattern (or create their own) Once selected the students follow the weave pattern in creating their paper basket. While the curriculum does not explicitly make an analogy between the worksheet patterns and an algorithm, the research team identified this process as such. For a pair of students who created their own pattern, they had to visually represent a pattern on the worksheet, "the code," and then follow this algorithm/procedure. They did this by repeating the words "over over under over over under." to help them weave with an AABAAB pattern. Designing Toy Box Organizer: Parallelization Students participated in parallelization in constructing their toy organizer. Students take different responsibilities of the building task and work in parallel to complete the construction of the box. The simultaneous work of the student is also an example of students engaging in computationally thinking about the algorithms and procedures required to construct the organizer. Students are seen working in teams and asking questions of each other and the teacher to learn more constraints of their design. Inherently, students are additionally involved in problem decomposition by breaking down their respective tasks into smaller manageable parts. Treasure Hunt: Simulation At the beginning of the Treasure Hunt lesson, based on the problem scenario, three different students acted out the treasure map story. Teacher asked them to take different types of stepsmall, normal and large. By acting out their role, they illustrated how with the same directions they can arrive in different locations. This representation is an example of simulation. In this lesson, simulation helped students to see if they do not create a correct direction, not everyone can find a buried treasure. Participating in the simulation also helped students to develop algorithm and procedure of solving their treasure hunt problem. For instance, after role playing, students started developing their own instructions by considering the different types of step the guests may take. Implications/Conclusions The examples as highlighted within PictureSTEM lessons and as observed in the implementation of two PictureSTEM units demonstrate that children in these early elementary grades can begin to enact what we have defined as computational thinking. Students are able to abstract patterns and then use them to create rudimentary algorithms to carry out a task. As illustrated within the curriculum, the mathematics ideas of patterns, which is introduced in kindergarten (and at times in pre school) provides the possibility to involve contexts for students to apply computational thinking. As with many integrated curricula, PictureSTEM provides opportunitie