Coding, Computer Science, and 21st Century Curriculum Justin Little Janet Purdy Jeff Gaw jlittle@micds.org jpurdy@micds.org jgaw@micds.org Mary Institute and Country Day School 101 North Warson Rd St. Louis, MO 63124

Our Essential Question for today’s session … How important is learning to program?

Who are we? Justin Little Janet Purdy Jeff Gaw I paid my way through college as a database programmer. Since then, I have been programming as an educator and as a hobbyist for the last 20 years. Janet Purdy I’ve been using technology to solve problems my entire career. My focus now is two fold: to use technology to enrich the general math classroom and to mentor advanced computer science students. Jeff Gaw I wrote my first FORTRAN program roughly 41 years ago in High School. I’ve been writing and using code as a scientist ever since.

How important is learning to program?

There are some other points of view …

What are your thoughts?

Some additional information from Code.org

From Code.org

How important is learning to program? The following quote sums up my current feeling … “I think everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer because it teaches you how to think.” Steve Jobs, Apple Computer Co-founder

Here at MICDS Lower and Middle School programs are evolving Blocks/Visual coding via sites such as code.org Use of the Hour of Code modules Scratch This year … All 7th graders participate in a multi-week Project GUTS (Growing Up Thinking Scientifically) computer modeling and simulation project The hope is to teach more advanced text based coding via codehs.com or codecademy.com

MICDS Upper School Classes All students … Introduced to text based Python coding in 9th grade science class (Chemical and Physical Systems) Uses Jupyter Notebooks (formerly called IPython) Uses the Python IDLE or Spyder IDE Hoping to extend Python into 10th grade science (Chemical and Biological Applications) AP Physics Use GlowScript (VPython) Those interested in coding … Robotics Computer Coding (Python) AP Computer Science (Java) Independent Study

The general approach Science 9 Programming is a tool to help you do your science Helps you to analyze data Compare data Visualize data Find anomalies in the data Create computational models Does the computational model match the observed world? If it doesn’t, how can we change the computational model to match experiment? Control devices Finch Robot Rovers Arduinos boards equipped with sensors Robotics

Computer Coding and AP Computer Science … More traditional computer science courses exposing students to the strengths and complexities of modern computer coding

Other Upper School Programming Opportunities … Hour of Code in December Programming club Informal group which meets once every 6 days for 45 minutes. Some students work through various web based tutorials to learn how to code. Others in the club work on various programming challenges that have be identified. Design-a-thon MICDS has previously run a design-a-thon open to the public that encouraged students to design a mobile application to meet a need of their community Hack-a-thons Groups of students with better programming skills participate in various hack- a-thons around town World-Wide Technologies (local IT company) has sponsored one for the past two years in which our students have done very well

Up Next … Walk you through more detailed examples of the types of coding we do in the various courses … Then you will get to do some yourself!