NJEdge Best Practices 2012 K-20 Computational Thinking - Beyond STEM Jennifer Swift-Kramer Women’s and Gender Studies William Paterson University

WPUNJ UCC TI Courses Technology Intensive undergraduate courses tend to use either programs typical of K-12 lesson plans (word processing, spreadsheets) or specialized software geared to particular majors (patient management, Monte Carlo simulation, etc.). What transitions will be needed and when? Will non-majors shy away from TI courses in subjects like physics? Will training in programs like Blackboard or Tegrity be left to the “first-year experience”?

Tegrity “Straw Poll” Appx. 40 WPUNJ faculty contacted via ; about 1/6 replied to “Do you use Tegrity?” All said “No,” …even the one on Facebook 24/7 and one who was a one-time “early adopter.”

Another layer of pop-ups? Student Comment: “I was trying to look at the lectures so I clicked on Tegrity, then I tried to open one of the lectures. It asked me to download and I did. Then it still didn't open.”

Tegrity Connect Tegrity’s chat feature will flag where during a lecture playback a student stops for help. This new tweak offers some chance to locate a sticking point for an individual student, even within an asynchronous online course. The Catch-22 is, will those students most likely to benefit from such a feature also be the ones least likely to use it?

Issues: Parity and Adaptability “In his keynote at the Digital Media Learning 2010 Conference, University of Texas, Austin professor S. Craig Watkins presented a number of emergent patterns on African- American and Latino youth and their use of mobile phones. His key finding was that for many urban and minority youth, a mobile device is their primary access point to the Internet.” -

Adjust to a “Mixed Audience” Be mindful of the online course/paper book paradox Make high and low bandwidth supplements available (multimedia with transcripts) Remember students will choose their hardware and software, but require them to account for the impact of their chosen combination Give options for levels of engagement with technology and media (text, stills, video, animation, programming) Leave specialized or time-consuming technologies and media for extra credit

Recursion in C.T. C.T. is thinking recursively.... C.T. is prevention, detection, and recovery from worst-case scenarios through redundancy, damage containment, and error correction. Source: Computational Thinking, Abstraction and Programming: A Personal Perspective Bryant W.York, Portland State January 18,

Recursion vs. Repetition Which students can tell one from the other?

Undergrads & “repetition” Some interpret re-evaluating a forum question during the second week of a two- week Discussion Board exercise as "doing the same thing twice." Others see searching X number of library databases as doing the same thing X times in a row, not X separate things. Many are unused to looking up a double or hyphenated last name in a book index.

An exercise in recursion… How many of a rap mogul of your choice would it take to add up to an Oprah? How many Oprahs does it take to make your Wal- Mart founder/heir(ess) of choice? How many of your chosen Wal-Mart billionaire does it take to make a Warren Buffett or Bill Gates (your choice)? How many Buffetts or Gateses does it take to make a Carlos Slim?

…and visualization I used my personal definition of a “nest egg” ($150K) as an arbitrary unit of measure. My Tegrity lecture showed how this was the only way I could register on a chart that barely shows someone worth a good half- billion.

A mobile search exercise In your mobiles’ default browsers, search “Play-Doh Topologist,” then try again with the phrase “Play- Doh Burger Builder” and ask: Might different hardware or software “shape” results? How can you visualize the differences between the two sets of search results? How might you find the page that asks why one product exists but the other doesn’t ( 81.dot) using the second phrase, instead of the first? How might you try to find a product review of the Burger Builder on the Web that critiques the box cover? How do you account for negative results?

(Re)search & Enlightened Witnessing Search the following terms online and in library databases for images, news items and articles: Elizabeth Short Jeanne Axford French The Black Dahlia The Red Lipstick Murder How do you account for disparities in the results? What kinds of searches using what terms appear most popular? Are the two women linked in any of the results? Do any results mention other cold cases?

Picture Credits Slide 4: 4 ttp:// 7770/ Slide 8: erpoint-circles-550.htm Slide 12: