“This is our first-ever CS at Home broadcast,” Diane Levitt, senior director of K-12 education at Cornell Tech, told a class of third-graders from Public School 86 in the Bronx on March 26 via Zoom. “Thank you for being part of our experiment. We have never done this before. So it’s good to do it with friends.”

Levitt, with other members of her K-12 team, were piloting a new virtual lesson plan intended to help New York City teachers instruct their students remotely in computational thinking. The virtual lessons – as well as daily computational challenges posted on Twitter under the handle @Breakfast_CS – are part of their efforts to continue promoting computer science education for all children, even as the city, and the world, tackle unprecedented challenges.

“There’s nothing positive about this situation,” Levitt said, “but we do have an opportunity to find out more about how students learn using an online platform. We don’t want students to stop thinking about computing.”

The day after New York City schools closed, Levitt and her team met via Zoom to brainstorm.

“How are we going to reach children and families where they are?” Levitt asked the group. “How can we leverage the digital tools we have to try to do something rigorous and joyful for students? And those two words are important to us – we’re always trying to get to the intersection of rigor and joy. We don’t want to walk away from rigor, but we definitely don’t want to walk away from joy.”

On the March 26 Zoom call, around 20 Public School 86 students were poised excitedly onscreen, siblings and parents moving in the kitchens and living rooms behind them. They chatted, sent happy face emojis and waved as their classmates’ faces popped up beside theirs.

“Computers only do exactly what we tell them to do,” Levitt told the students. “So we need to give very clear directions to the computer to tell it to do what we want it to do. To write an algorithm, we have to break a task up into many pieces, to decompose. When we decompose, we break something up into smaller pieces. Can you raise your hand if you know what decompose means?”

Virtual hands went up.

Levitt then directed the students in an algorithm of her own – giving them detailed instructions to draw what turned out to be a traffic light.

“I tried to give you clear instructions for drawing something familiar to all of us – something we see in everyday life,” she said. “So if yours looked different than this, maybe it was because my directions were not clear enough. If I gave more detailed directions, everyone’s picture would have looked exactly the same.”

In all of their lessons – formerly in-person and now virtual – Levitt’s team aims to give students tools to think computationally. That involves understanding that an algorithm is a series of instructions required to perform a task; that decomposing means breaking a task up into manageable parts; and that debugging is going back and figuring out where the mistakes were and how to fix them.

The slides used in the Zoom call will be shared with the New York City Department of Education as a resource for teachers; the team also will continue posting a daily challenge on Twitter, offering kids an “unplugged” task, such as hiding an object in their homes and drawing a map to it, or playing tic-tac-toe games in order to identify whether they can use logic to predict the outcome.

“We had the idea to digest some of the work we’ve been doing this year at P.S. 86, about how to make computational thinking accessible to children through the lens of math and English language arts, and chop it up into little bite-sized pieces,” Levitt said. “We wanted to give students a chance to have an open-ended learning experience without the constraints of time that the school day presents.”

So far, @Breakfast_CS has been retweeted by educators including a principal and superintendent, but Levitt hopes to reach families who aren’t necessarily online. “We have to figure out how to do this equitably – that’s our most urgent issue,” she said.

During the online lesson, co-led by Liz Gallo and Kelly Powers, with behind-the-scenes management by Joe Melendez, the third-graders were instructed to create their own “silly creatures.” The students wrote detailed algorithms to explain to their fellow students how to draw them, and several of them then shared their algorithms.

“So the first thing you guys are going to do is draw two big triangles,” one student said. “The next thing you’re going to do is, under those two big triangles, you’re going to do one squiggly mouth.”

When she was done, the other students held up their drawings for the others to see. They had triangle eyes, squiggly mouths, rectangle legs and circle hats.

“They all look exactly like my silly creature,” the girl said, pleased.

This story originally appeared in the Cornell Chronicle.

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NEW YORK — Cornell Tech, Siegel Family Endowment and the Robin Hood Learning + Technology Fund today announced two major grants to expand the successful Teacher In Residence (TIR) program. Cornell Tech’s Teacher in Residence program is one of the most innovative and sustainable models for incorporating computer science and tech education into regular school days. First launched at PS/IS 217 on Roosevelt Island, and later at Hunters Point Community Middle School in Long Island City and Girls Prep Lower East Middle School, the new grant funding will enable the TIR program expansion into four additional schools in Brooklyn and the Bronx to help build computational literacy and coding experience and implementation to diverse populations of students, many in high-need areas throughout New York City.

“At Cornell Tech, we believe computer science is teachable to every student and that it imperative that we prepare all children for the digital age,” says Diane Levitt, Senior Director of K-12 Education at Cornell Tech. “On Roosevelt Island, we have seen how the Teacher in Residence has transformed the school, bringing computer science to every single classroom in every grade. Thanks to the vision and generosity of our donors, we will be able to expand our understanding of how to best support teachers as they implement computer science not as a special elective or after school activity, but into the regular school day, for every students, throughout all grade levels.”

“We’re thrilled to be a part of expanding the Cornell Tech Teacher in Residence program,” said Thea Charles, Head of Knowledge and Impact at Siegel Family Endowment. “SFE has been a partner in this project from the very beginning, and we’re excited to see this proven, research-backed program continue to expand in schools across New York City.”

“The Robin Hood Learning + Technology Fund strives for a world where every child can think, solve and create using every effective tool possible – including technology,” said Amber Oliver, Director of the Fund. “We are investing in the Teacher in Residence model because Cornell Tech understands the only way we will achieve this vision, for every child, is if every teacher has the support and resources to infuse computing education into their classrooms, no matter what they teach.”

The Teacher in Residence program is part of Cornell Tech’s commitment to New York City’s Computer Science for All (CS4All) initiative. Cornell Tech’s Teachers in Residence are experienced computer science master teachers who provide professional development, curate curricula, help teachers plan lessons, model instruction, observe classes and give teachers feedback, building the capacity of non-computer science teachers to teach computing in New York City public elementary and middle schools. The program seeks to test and scale tools and curricula teachers can implement with modest investment to add academic value. Thanks to the grant funding from the Robin Hood Learning + Technology Fund and Siegel Family Endowment, the program will scale to The Young Women’s Leadership School of East Harlem, Creo College Prep a new middle school opening in the Bronx, P.S. 86, and at least one additional school in Brooklyn.

K-12 tech education is a priority for the Cornell Tech campus, and over 100 graduate students volunteer their time and knowledge at campus K-12 events. Cornell Tech’s K-12 engagement will grow to over 4,500 elementary and middle school students with the new funding. Cornell Tech faculty also participate in contributing ideas and expertise to Cornell Tech’s curriculum, development, and curation. To date, over 350 teachers have been engaged in computer science training.

About Cornell Tech

Cornell Tech brings together faculty, business leaders, tech entrepreneurs and students in a catalytic environment to produce visionary results grounded in significant needs that will reinvent the way we live in the digital age. The Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute embodies the academic partnership between the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and Cornell University on the Cornell Tech campus.

From 2012-2017, the campus was temporarily located in Google’s New York City building. In fall 2017, 30 world-class faculty and almost 300 graduate students moved to the first phase of Cornell Tech’s permanent campus on Roosevelt Island, continuing to conduct groundbreaking research, collaborate extensively with tech-oriented companies and organizations and pursue their own startups. When fully completed, the campus will include two million square feet of state-of-the-art buildings, over two acres of open space, and will be home to more than 2,000 graduate students and hundreds of faculty and staff.

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I joined Cornell Tech five years ago with a master’s degree in early childhood education and a career that mostly centered on education and philanthropy. I knew very little about computer science. I thought Java was coffee, Scratch was for itching, Python was a snake, and Basic was, well, basic. I came to Cornell Tech to explore what was possible in K-12 computing. Through this exploration, I’ve developed a set of values—a creed of sorts—that guides our work here at Cornell Tech.

Students thrive when we teach at the intersection of rigor and joy. In computer science, it’s fun to play with the real thing. But sometimes we water it down until it’s too easy—and kids know it. Struggle itself will not turn kids away from computer science. They want relevant learning experiences that lead to building things that matter to them. “I can do hard things!” is one of the most powerful thoughts a student can have.

Teachers matter. We can’t prepare students without preparing teachers. There is no online platform as effective as a skilled, caring human being in the room.

Great computer science teachers take many different paths to the classroom. On my team, we have four gifted master teachers from four backgrounds: special ed, social studies, tech, and design. There’s no traditional route to teaching K-12 computer science today. This is a shift from the recruitment of computer science teachers in the past and has an impact on how we recruit and prepare teachers. It also adds a wonderful dimension of diversity to our community.

Getting teachers prepared to teach computer science takes time and consistency. A few days of professional development here and there is not enough to get teachers ready for computer science. They need training and support over time. This was the thinking behind Cornell Tech’s Teacher in Residence program: we’re investigating whether putting a highly skilled computer science coach in a school for a year or longer helps teachers deliver instruction more competently and confidently.

The biggest lever we have is the one we aren’t using enough yet: preservice education for new teachers. The sooner we start teaching computer science education alongside the teaching of math and reading, during teachers’ professional preparation programs, the sooner we get to scale. It’s expensive and time-consuming to continually retool our workforce. Eventually, if every teacher enters the classroom prepared to include computer science, every student will be prepared for the digital world in which they live. This is what we mean by equity: equal access for every student, regardless of geography, gender, income, ability, or, frankly, interest.

We need to know more about how and what to teach. We have a little research and some survey data. We’ve transferred some research from other subjects. Some assumptions have been set in stone. This is an imperfect and difficult-to-navigate set of guidelines for educators. Because our curriculum comes from many sources, each with its own set of questions and reasons to research, we have a very fractured picture. We would learn a lot if, as a community, we agreed on a set of metrics for the next five years and were transparent about our findings.

Integrating computer science into other subjects is hard. There’s only so much time in the school day, and in response, there’s a serious effort to embed computer science into other disciplines as our best hope to reach every student. But can we bring computer science into a math lesson and do both subjects justice? I’ve seen some great examples that argue yes—and more that show one subject losing ground to the other. Better understanding the benefits and costs of integrating computer science is a high priority for our field.

It’s not (only) about jobs. When we focus on teaching computer science solely to fill open jobs in technology it changes what and how we teach. We sacrifice deep learning for short-term gains. We teach material that may be obsolete before our students enter the workforce. Our job is to prepare students for the world so they can seize all opportunities, personal or professional, that come their way. We need to let pedagogy — the practice of teaching based on the science of learning — lead the way.

We have to start planning for success.  We can’t continue to offer introductory lessons to students who are on their way to mastery or we will bore them out of computing. We need to be ready for them with fresh curriculum that builds on their skills.

I’m more confident than ever that we can take a highly complex subject and translate it for every student. We can teach rigorous, joyful computer science to kids of all abilities from all backgrounds. We can prepare teachers from diverse backgrounds, grades, and subjects to understand and teach computer science. But we will have to do it intentionally, and commit time and money. There is still so much to learn. We need to know more to do better. But I’ve seen students with special needs, emerging bilingual students, students of color—all underrepresented in tech— navigate computing with dexterity and purpose. So I know it’s possible because it’s already happening for some. And now that we know it’s possible, we must make it happen for all.

This blog is the first in a series of posts called Ground Truth, which is a term from multiple fields describing information provided by direct observation as opposed to inference. Over the course of the year, I’m going to share conversations with some of the people whose leadership I’ve had the opportunity to observe and learn from. Observe with me and share your ground truth on Twitter (@diane_levitt).

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The contest, the brain child of CIS faculty member Robbert Van Renesse, aims to encourage high school students interested in computer science and programming.

Teams of two to three students had three hours to solve as many of the 12 problems provided as possible. For each correct solution, a team received a color coded balloon.

On the Cornell Tech campus there were 38 teams representing 15 high schools from four boroughs, Long Island and New Jersey.

Awards for gold, silver, and bronze were awarded to the teams in each location who solved the most problems, as well as a trophy for the overall winner across both campuses.

The team from Princeton High School took home the overall award, solving 12 out of 12 problems. Teams from Trinity HS and Stuyvesant High School took home the NYC silver and gold, respectively.

The problem set was created by Daniel Fleischman, ORIE PhD ’15, who has helped run the competition with Van Renesse since its inception. Fleischman himself was an enthusiastic programming contestant as an undergrad and flew in to support the Cornell Tech event this year. His insider knowledge and joy played a huge role in the day’s success.

“It was really exciting to see this community of young coders come together to compete with so much talent and enthusiasm,” Sr. Director of K-12 Education at Cornell Tech, and the organizer of the New York City event, Diane Levitt said. “This is a perfect example of Cornell impact: when our campuses collaborate, the sum of the parts is greater than the whole.

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The goal of the K-12 Education initiative at Cornell Tech is to give students “computational agency” through learning computer science. Like linguistic agency, this means foundational skills, but doesn’t mean students need to know every coding language or how to fix their code. What they do have are basic skills that help them build digital solutions, and attack abilities to solve problems that arise.

This computational agency prepares students for a future in the digital age — though it isn’t necessarily about jobs.

“We don’t expect every student to be a software engineer or a technical product manager,” said Sr. Director of K-12 Education at Cornell Tech Diane Levitt. “We don’t have to decide in middle schools what our students will do with any of the intellectual tools we give them. What we must do, though, is to prepare every student to understand the world around them, which we know will be increasingly digital.”

As more cities and school districts recognize the need for computer science education, they face a common problem: A shortage of teachers familiar with CS education. Many teachers are already strapped for time and resources, making it all the more difficult to integrate a new subject into the school day.

“Teachers now have to know computer science content, know the pedagogy around teaching it, and bring in instructional strategies from other subject areas,” said Meg Ray, a computer science teacher for kindergarten through grade 12 students. “They are also doing this in increasingly diverse classrooms where they serve students with many different abilities, cultural contexts, primary languages, and interests.”

Ray is the first Teacher-in-Residence (TIR), a pilot computer science literacy program developed by Cornell Tech as a part of the university’s commitment to New York City’s CS4All initiative and the national CS for All Consortium.

Though Ray had no formal training in computer science, she played video games as a hobby, and initially taught herself to code as part of that interest before discovering a passion for CS. She found a position where she could teach computer programming and video game design to high school students. Since starting with TIR in fall 2016, she has helped teachers at eight schools within the New York City public school system incorporate computer science in their classrooms.

Ray worked with more than 60 teachers across eight schools, helping them develop strategies for teaching computer science. She coaches teachers through a cycle of co-planning, model teaching, observing, and reflection to equip them to take ownership of the CS content and learning experiences.

In her coaching of teachers, Ray emphasizes Universal Design for Learning (UDL) which, according to the National Center for Universal Design for Learning, is a “set of principles for curriculum development that give all individuals equal opportunities to learn.” This framework emphasizes giving students choices in three key areas: how they take in information, how they express what they learn, and how they engage throughout a lesson.

In a UDL classroom, instruction is designed to offer all students options. Students are able to decide for themselves what they need, regardless of their talent or disability. For example, a classroom may have a pair of traditional scissors and a pair with a special grip. UDL principles would dictate that rather than give the special grip scissors directly to the student with a known disability or need for them, the teacher would provide the choice between the two types of scissors to the whole classroom. The scissors with a special grip may be helpful to others students in addition to the one with the known need.

In the context of CS and other subjects, this framework plays out more subtly by allowing students to choose their project, using assistive technologies, and selecting coding apps that allow students to adjust settings like font size and contrast. UDL also encourages teachers to use multiple teaching strategies to reach all learners.

“It’s not just about putting CS in every school, it has to be made accessible to every student in that school,” Ray said. “That’s an integral part of our coaching, equipping teachers to reach every student in a meaningful way.”

So far, Ray’s coaching has proven to be successful with students and their parents. “It’s been exciting to think of our school as a place at the forefront of computer science education,” says Erin Olavesen, president of the Parent Teacher Association at PS/IS 2017 on Roosevelt Island, one of the partner schools where Cornell Tech has committed to improve the curriculum around computer science. “My kindergartener was able to speak about debugging code and algorithms by learning how plants grow,” said Olavesen. “That’s impressive, for such a young student to grasp the basics of computer science.”

This method is what Ray explained as Concrete Representational Abstract (CRA) teaching, a three-step approach used to teach math concepts. Students use solid objects (concrete) to model the problem, then they might draw out the problem (representational) so that it makes sense as a 2-D version of the physical model. Finally, students write the problem in mathematical terms (abstract) so that they understand the full correlation between real-world application and an equation.

“We teach coding in the same way,” said Ray. “We start with unplugged lessons, for instance students may start by “programming” each other—at first they might use gestures or words or simple drawings like arrows to tell each other what to do, like steps and turns to walk in a square. That would be the concrete part. Then, we have them use representations such as holding up images of coding blocks or creating an algorithm for a square using graph paper. Then we move them onto the computer.”

So far, it is a hit with the students, and Ray has plans to coach teachers on integrating computer science thinking within other subjects.

Cornell Tech’s Levitt is optimistic about the program’s impact, and looks forward to growing the program to learn more. Though it’s a new program, she emphasizes that Ray’s coaching model can be shared with schools and teaching organizations around the country.

“In five years, I’d love us to have more teachers in residence,” said Levitt. “We’re conducting research on the work now, and look forward to sharing what we’ve learned about K-12 CS content coaching with our colleagues in NYC and across the country. We see content coaching as a great way to support computer science integration on a larger scale. I see us as really playing playing a role in disseminating that knowledge.”

The ultimate goal of Cornell Tech’s K-12 Education initiative is to catalyze computer science education so that every student in New York City will have the skills, tools and strategies to build something digital that has meaning to them.

As the first TIR at Cornell Tech, Ray is excited to work with teachers to educate more students for the future while also strengthening community ties. “As a coach it’s not just where you can go, but you’re managing and building relationships with stakeholders at each school,” said Ray. “Teachers, parents, students, the principal: We want our approach to include everyone.”

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Our work in computer science (CS) classrooms focuses on studying strategies that support teachers who have students with learning and cognitive disabilities in their classrooms. This work reinforces that “CS for All” can, and should, include ALL learners, and shows that when CS activities are planned using Universal Design for Learning (UDL) all students can learn and find joy in CS education. UDL is an instructional framework that addresses learning barriers through flexible planning that includes multiple ways of (1) engaging learners, (2) representing instructional content, and (3) allowing learners to express their understanding. Students with disabilities are obviously diverse, with different strengths, challenges, and support needs. The table below includes strategies that our work has shown effective for a wide range of learners.

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Since the beginning of the 2016–17 school year, Meg Ray, a Cornell Tech Teacher-in-Residence, has been “providing content coaching, curriculum consultation, and professional development on a weekly basis for teachers in all grades” at PS/IS 217, where principal Mandana Beckman is committed to incorporating CS instruction into every classroom in grades K–8.

“We have just started working with the middle school on CS integration in their science classes,” Ray says. “The goal is to deepen understanding of both subjects by building on prior CS experiences to support synthesis of new science content.” Ray sat down with science teacher Emily Wong in December, and they co-designed a computing project to complement her existing sixth-grade unit on ecosystems. Wong has never taught coding or CS, and Ray, a former classroom teacher herself, appreciates that Wong is “open to collaborating and modeling the learning process for her students.”

This project, a light-up, talking poster about biomes, combines “making with paper circuits, coding in Scratch, and physical computing with Makey Makey.” The students had attended community events held by Cornell Tech introducing making and paper circuits, so Ray knew that “bringing this type of hands-on work into the classroom would build on prior knowledge and be highly motivating.” The students feel at home with the technology and find the curriculum both “rigorous and fun.” As they build knowledge and confidence they’ll move on to more advanced projects, Ray says, such as “creating animations or programs that control robots” using Raspberry Pis and data collected with sensors.

Read the full article on Tech & Learning.

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