Teacher Views on Computational Thinking as a Pathway to Computer Science

ABSTRACTRecent years have seen increased focus on integrating Computational Thinking (CT) across subject areas in lieu of treating it as a standalone subject. Over the course of two years, we focused on teacher development in a large city school system via summer workshops that brought in-service and pre-service teachers together to co-create integrated CT lessons. In this experience report, we will describe the workshop design and share the perspectives of the participating K-5 teachers. One particular area of focus of the workshop was integrating 'plugged' or technology-based computing examples for the teachers. Further, we engaged the teachers with a discussion of the role of CT in promoting equity for students and demonstrated ways in which student cultural experiences could be activated through creative computing. Specific outcomes of the work included increased confidence and value in CT vocabulary usage, ideas to infuse existing curriculum with CT ideas, and teacher belief that CT could be used as a "gateway" for learning CS. We make recommendations for future efforts to include CT in pre-service teacher preparation.