Skyscraper Games: Professional Development to Promote Computational Thinking Using Custom Tools

• In Event: 79.050 - MTCC Roundtable Session 36
  In Roundtable Session: 79.050-6 - Teachers as Learners: Unearthing the Black Boxes of Computer-Supported Technological and Pedagogical Innovations

Abstract

In April 2014, Philadelphians witnessed the transformation of the 29-story Cira Centre into the World’s Largest Video Game screen, with players miles apart competing in Tetris. Dr. Frank Lee used this platform to launch the Skyscraper Games project, engaging middle school students in computational thinking through video game design and computer programming. For the 2017-2018 school year, the researchers conducted professional development (PD) for middle school educators who introduced the Skyscraper Games editor to their students.
Theoretical Frameworks
Brinkerhoff (2006) studied a long-term PD academy for integrating technology into schools in New Mexico. The findings suggested components for success, including: extended contact hours, provision of materials to teachers, centering instruction around participants' interests, and using a variety of group configurations.
Methods
The case study (Yin, 2003) presented here was part of a larger project using key tenets of design-based research to inform the PD activities (Cobb, Confrey, diSessa, Lehrer, & Schauble, 2003; Gresalfi & Barab, 2011). The overall research question addressed is: In what ways can a design-based approach to professional development assist middle school STEM teachers with integrating computational thinking skills in their classrooms?
Data Sources
One participant,G.S., is a white female teacher at a private all-girls school in a wealthy suburb, but with a 40% minority student population and students from 76 zip codes and 10 counties. Data sources include coded transcripts of the professional development sessions, researcher memos, artifacts from the teacher and her students, and responses to semi-structured interview questions.
Results
The Skyscraper Games experience resembles a "digital internship" (Shaffer, Nash, & Ruis, 2015). Throughout the year, G. S. struggled with her identity as a teacher in this context. Initially the most confident about her programming skills, she faltered when she encountered issues. At several meetings she expressed the concern, "What if the kids have a question and I don't know the answer?" The PD addressed Brinkerhoff's (2006) framework through monthly in-person meetings, providing materials, and giving opportunities for whole group and pair activities. In particular, G. S. received help from both the lead researcher and a fellow participant on programming issues. She also recruited one student's father, a computer programmer, to serve as a subject matter expert (SME) for her club. By the end, her concept of her role was close to the "coordinator" function within a distributed mentoring system (Shaffer et. al., 2015). Along the way, her students exhibited computational thinking by designing a game, using models and tools, developing algorithms, decomposing tasks, and exploring multiple solutions (International Society for Technology in Education, 2011). In our final meeting, G. S. related that she felt confident she could lead her students to solve any problem they encountered.
Scholarly Significance
With an increasing emphasis in K-12 education on incorporating computational thinking into STEM (and other) disciplines, along with designing tools to facilitate this process, it is important to recognize that doing so may also require changes in the ways we train teachers and the roles those teachers take in the classroom.

Authors

• Matthew Duvall, Drexel University

• Frank J Lee, Drexel University

• Brian Keith Smith, Drexel University