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Pivoting in a Pandemic: Transitioning from In-person to Virtual K-8 Computing Professional Development

Published: 05 March 2021 Publication History

Abstract

This poster reports on year one of a three-year NSF-funded Research Practitioner Partnership (RPP) to develop a K-8 pipeline for computer science (CS) and computational thinking (CT) education within two rural school districts in Eastern Kentucky : Pikeville Independent School District and Floyd County Schools. Economically devastated by the departure of the coal industry, these communities are committed to developing high-quality computing curricula for all students, beginning in their earliest years. The poster has two components. First, through a mixture of qualitative measures, the poster reports on the genesis and development of the RPP. It focuses on the RPP's origin in leveraging the districts' existing relationship with Pennsylvania's South Fayette School District, which has developed one of the nation's leading programs for teacher professional development (PD) in K-12 computing. The second component of the poster focuses on the development of a series of summer workshops for Kentucky Appalachia K-8 instructors to learn the basics of CS and CT and how to integrate these skills and concepts into existing K-8 coursework. Of course, the RPP faced new challenges with COVID-19 most notably, the need to offer these summer workshops remotely, and adjusting the objectives and research questions accordingly. Through focus groups with the PD instructional team and survey responses from the KY teacher workshop participants, the poster will report on the pedagogical implications of offering teacher PD exclusively online and what the ramifications have been for Pikeville and Floyd County children with the return to school in the Fall of 2020.

References

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Google LLC & Gallup, Inc. (2020). Current Perspectives and Continuing Challenges in Computer Science Education in U.S. K-12 Schools. Accessed from https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/computer-science-education-in-us-k12schools-2020-report.pdf
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  • (2021)Main Memory Database RecoveryACM Computing Surveys10.1145/344219754:2(1-36)Online publication date: Mar-2021

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  1. Pivoting in a Pandemic: Transitioning from In-person to Virtual K-8 Computing Professional Development

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    SIGCSE '21: Proceedings of the 52nd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
    March 2021
    1454 pages
    ISBN:9781450380621
    DOI:10.1145/3408877
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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    Published: 05 March 2021

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    Author Tags

    1. computational thinking
    2. educational equity
    3. research practice partnership (rpp)
    4. rural education

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    • (2021)Main Memory Database RecoveryACM Computing Surveys10.1145/344219754:2(1-36)Online publication date: Mar-2021

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