Justin Toombs Meeting

  • 7th, 8th grade. All the kids in the district (with some exceptions)

    • 0.25 CTLE credit, so some kids don’t need Justin’s courses.

  • Curriculum is WozEd

    • Animation
    • Mobile development (meh)
    • 3d printing
    • AR/VR (meh)
    • AI
    • Cybersecurity (hard)
    • Drones: Prebuilt
    • Drones: Build your own

  • Ideas:

    • Don’t push too fast. A little goes a long way.
    • Creating opportunities for audience
    • App mapping: shouldn’t we map existing apps first?
      • Prototyping: use colored sticky dots to indicate transitions
    • Cross-grade learning: Are there opportunities to learn about 3d printing from high-school students?
    • TinkerCad. What about swapping with another group, and having them recreate it?
    • Identity authorship: Could the AR/VR unit involve documenting a place that’s important to you?
    • AR/VR unit: Stargazing
    • AI: Contrast human learning with machine learning
      • Reasoning around sensing
      • Use Scratch?
    • Personally-meaningful projects
    • Generally–for revising the curriculum: take a design approach
    • ChatGPT: Holistic strategy?
    • AI: Could we get ahold of a bunch of students’ writing from English teachers?
    • Cybersecurity: TCP/IP Simulation
      • What about thinking about information and codes?
      • Look up your own computer’s IP address.
      • Web-based encryption/decryption (rotate the cypher)

  • Principles:

    • Identity authorship / audience
    • Personally-meaningful projects
    • Culturally-relevant / situated
    • Critical: How does this stuff matter in our lives?
    • Learning across peers
    • teacher agency

What matters to Justin?

  • Having the district (or building by building) have a transition to expetidionary learning. Field trips: Go to different places that might be able to present the information better. How does CS affect areas locally? How does CS affect economics? Sports teams? UB?
  • Setting up a more permanent space for exploring ideas.
  • Brokering
  • Flexibility away from the WozEd kits
  • Curriculum (What), How (pedagogy), Why ()

Needs:

  • Teacher agency: locus of decision-making
    • Freedom to explore new areas
    • Dynamic curriculum
    • Brokering
    • Ability to critique received curriculum
  • Student agency
  • Continuity with students
  • Space

What’s next?

  • baby steps
  • structure
  • documentation

Outcomes that matter to the district

  • Looking good:
    • test scores
    • behavior
    • appeal

Possible projects

  • Field trip to UB
  • Workshop on expeditionary learning
  • Action research: lesson study on a WozEd unit
  • STEM Hub study
  • Enacting practices in the classroom

Reflections

The CS design committee could yield a vision of CS/STEP which would authorize Justin’s projects.