Future Teachers Education: Computational Thinking and STEAM

General Introduction to CT

Module 2. General Introduction to Computational Thinking: A basic module suitable for all teachers
Module 2 provides future teachers with basic knowledge and skills on teaching and learning of CT. The core of Module 2 can be considered a prerequisite for studying other modules. The module addresses both teachers’ content knowledge and their pedagogical content knowledge (PCK).
The module consists of 4 units, and takes approximately 24-30 hours to complete.
Participants practice CT using digital tools like Google Ngrams, a tool for visualizing occurrences of words in literature in the course of time, and simulation of spreading and infections of the Zika virus, also application on a climate model.
The module makes use of a widely used programming language, Scratch. Participants experience also two main strategies for teaching and learning of CT: 1) unplugged learning, e.g. tasks of the international Bebras challenge, and 2) the problem of escaping from a maze.
The module includes many tasks, mostly carried out in pairs or groups. These can be a useful basis for assessment.

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CT for Pre-school

 Module 3 is specific for pre-school (kindergarten) teachers and students. Teaching CT in these early ages mostly requires the use of cognitive abilities like logical reasoning, decision making on comparisons, and finding similar patterns in various visuals.
STEAM integration of CT is also introduced for making cross curricular connections of the themes. Hence, this module has a significant contribution for pre-schoolers in terms of the pedagogical approaches to integrate CT into teaching-learning activities.
The module 3 has composed of 4 units: 1) CS Unplugged Activities; 2) Creative Drama Activities; 3) Games and Toys; 4) Integrating CT and STEAM into Early Childhood Education.
All activities in the module are expected to have potential impacts on not only teachers but also pupils. Many derivatives can be created by teachers for different situations and implementations, hence having an easy transferrable structure.

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CT for Primary School

Module O4 is target explicitly at primary schools and aims at integrating conceptual development with specific practical elements in education. Since the activities describe real-world phenomena like finding the optimal route from one place to another, it teaches not only how to use the technology and reflexion on the use, but also includes skills from other STEAM areas like spatial and logical thinking.
The module requires no prerequisites and can also be used for in-service teacher trainings.
The module consists of 4 units: 1) general teaching-learning-theories (e.g. constructivism) as well as national guidelines that must be considered when implementing CT in primary classrooms are discussed; 2) CT as a problem-solving process including technical artifacts; 3) students are asked to design their own lectures based on the presented robots; 4) students evaluate their own lessons, giving and getting feedback by and to the teacher of the class and thereby repeat and summary the theory about CT.

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CT for STEM Teachers

This module is meant for future teachers in STEM subjects, e.g., teachers in mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology. The module fosters teachers’ development knowledge and skills on CT in STEM, as well as on teaching and learning of CT in a STEM context.
The module 5 consists of 3 units, and takes approximately 24-30 hours to complete. In Unit 1, students practice CT using two cases: 1) an example in mathematics, involving a statistical analysis on an existing, historical data set: the passenger list of the U.S.S. Titanic, 2) building the NetLogo simulation activity.
Unit 2 elaborates on teaching and learning of CT. In Unit 3, participants design a lesson activity for their own STEM subject, building on the competencies acquired so far. In the design, participants combine elements of the subject with aspects of CT.
The module includes many tasks, mostly carried out in pairs or groups. These can be a useful basis for assessment.

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CT for Informatics Teachers

Module 6 provides teaching and learning material, which can be used by teacher educators to design a lecture for prospective informatics teachers with about 1 ECTS. The material enables prospective informatics teachers to understand the role of Computational Thinking in informatics education.
Module 6 concentrates in its activities on one side on the reflection of the thinking processes while solving informatics tasks and on the other side on the reflection of CT content in informatics applications in other disciplines.
The module is structured in 4 units: 1) CT demonstrated on the algorithmic paradigm divide-and-conquer; 2) CT aspects of codes, understanding Huffman codes; 3) Virus simulation: CT in biology, medical research, and health; 4) Robotics and sensor technology - CT in our digital world.
The first two units deal with core informatics topics obtained from algorithms design and information representation. The third and fourth unit deal with interdisciplinary problem solving with means of informatics.

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CT for the Languages & Arts

The aim of this module is to facilitate future teachers to embed CT skills into their Language, Arts, and Humanities subjects. This module is about the “A” in STEAM. Thus, in this module CT is viewed as a framework to develop students’ artistic, linguistic, social, humanity skills through developing prospective arts, languages, and humanities school teachers’ conceptual, pedagogical, reflective competences in CT.
The module has consisted of 3 units: 1) CT viewed as “A” in STEAM; 2) CT for Social Sciences; 3) CT for Language Arts.
This module was contributed to the field with its creative implementation ideas and relation in terms of showing computational thinking aspects with disciplines of arts. These ideas are expected to inspire teachers so that they can design and implement similar activities in their classes possibly having an important impact in terms of teaching CT skills. Moreover, all the ideas have transferability to lower or upper ages with similar subjects.

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Educational Environments for CT

 Module 8 is about how to create educational environments that support the integration of Computational Thinking (CT) with STEAM. CT is seen here as a skill set that supports the integration of methods from computer science to the disciplinary practices.
Three perspectives (mathematics, engineering, and science) on Computer Science combined with a model of CT are used as a framework in this module.
Module 8 is intended for the future teacher students of STEAM. There are no prerequisites except for good knowledge of their own main subject(s) and pedagogical studies. The module is an elaboration of the Code, Connect and Create (3C) professional development model.
The innovation in this module is based on the choice of components (models, technologies, and theories) and their interaction. In addition to learning how to create educational environments supporting integrating CT and STEAM the students will also know why these components were chosen.

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Constructivist and Project Driven CT

Module 9 develops teacher’s competence with challenge based and project based learning methods for scaffolding learner development of CT skills. Participant target groups are pre-service teachers with an interest in CT in their classroom practice.
The module comprises 6 units, 16 activities, and takes approximately 27-30 hours to complete.
The module introduces participants to the basic ideas of constructionism through a combination of hands-on activities and presentations. Constructionism is introduced as the conceptual basis of learning activities in CT skills development in Unit 1. The remaining units support teachers in the process of designing appropriate learning strategies for CT using a challenge based constructionist pedagogy. The final units provide a set of materials to scaffold the development of challenge based classroom practice and assessment rubrics.

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Pedagogy of CT in STEAM

Module 10 focuses on practical aspects of instructional design guidelines and digital tools that can help teachers to integrate CT into everyday learning and teaching activities in any subject area. The module is based on Merrill's task-centred instructional design approach. A set of free digital authoring tools will be introduced and put into practice during the practical and collaborative instructional design activities.
This module is designed for future teachers in any subject area and education levels from preschool to upper-secondary. The students are expected to be acquainted with key concepts and issues of teaching CT (Module 1) as well as one module related to their subject area or target education level (e.g. in case of future language teachers, Module 7: CT for languages, arts and humanities).
Module 10 is meant to be taught collaboratively to future teachers from various subject areas, so they could explore through collaboration the different perspectives on CT.

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