Ants Go Marching—Integrating Computer Science into Teacher Professional Development with NetLogo

Abstract

There is a clear call for pre-collegiate students in the United States to become literate in computer science (CS) concepts and practices through integrated, authentic experiences and instruction. Yet, a majority of in-service and pre-service pre-collegiate teachers (instructing children aged five to 18) lack the fundamental skills and self-efficacy to adequately and effectively integrate CS into existing curricula. In this study, 30 pre-collegiate teachers who represent a wide band of experience, grade-levels, and prior CS familiarity participated in a 16-day professional development (PD) course to enhance their content knowledge and self-efficacy in integrating CS into existing lessons and curricula. Using both qualitative and quantitative methodology, a social constructivist approach guided the researchers in the development of the PD, as well as the data collection and analysis on teacher content knowledge and perceptions through a mixed-methods study. Ultimately, participants were introduced to CS concepts and practices through NetLogo, which is a popular multi-agent simulator. The results show that although the pre-collegiate teachers adopted CS instruction, the CS implementation within their curricula was limited to the activities and scope of the PD with few adaptations and minimal systemic change in implementation behaviors.

Multi-agent simulation of pedestrian activity in historic district

“…When an ant finds food, it releases this chemical smell. As more ants followed the smell trail to food, the smell trail itself was reinforced, and this kind of smell that can optimize the behavior of ants is pheromone [9].…”

Computer Science in Schools: A Literature Mapping of Professional Development for In-Service Teachers

“…What we think is natural to investigate further is then which school level these interventions are aimed at. We can see that PDs are provided in all levels ranging from preschool [21], after-school setting [22] to precollegiate [23]. We want to know what schools levels are in focus and ask the research question (RQ.2): At what school level is research done?…”

Computer Science beyond Coding: Partnering to Create Teacher Cybersecurity Microcredentials

“…Computer science is, at its core, problem solving, or specifically, how to manipulate computational devices to solve problems with data. Although many not acquainted with computer science might think that it focuses solely on coding [16], and there are research studies focused on teaching coding [17], there are computer science skills that can be taught at any age or grade level, both with and without a computer [18,19].…”

“…The authors present the evidence of self-efficacy towards CS for the cybersecurity microcredential from survey Questions 11 and 12 (see Figures 1 and 2). Question 11 (Figure 1) asked the teacher participants to respond to the following prompt: "I can effectively teach all students computer science" [16]. On the presurvey (n = 22), 68% (15/22) of the precollegiate teachers responded 'strongly agree' and 'agree' about their self-efficacy to teach computer science effectively in the classroom.…”