The Creation of Computational Thinking Learning Activities

        At the start of this computational thinking (CT) learning activity assignment, I’ll admit that I thought four for each concept ^[1] was a bit overkill. At the time, I felt like I could hardly come up with one activity let alone four for each concept with the additional caveat that two are plugged and two are unplugged. Now that the process is over, ^[2]while I can’t say I enjoyed the assignment, I do think it forced me to better understand each concept. The following summarization of how I completed the assignment will be short and sweet because, unlike Turtle Blocks, there isn’t an easy way to either show my progress or explain it since a lot was done in my head or internet research which isn’t easy to screen shot.

When I first embarked on this harrowing journey, I thought I could go at it by myself, with perhaps a few questions ^[3] sent my professor’s way. Alas, after some indefinite time of brainstorming with a side of hitting my head repeatedly against a wall, I decided I could use some help from a classmate if they were so kind as to oblige me. This is where I take a moment to shout out said classmate, Brooke! When I was really struggling, Brooke allowed me to look at what she had created so far and that definitely helped me come up with some ideas of my own even though we are in different disciplines (me ELA and her science). The definitions that she had written beneath each concept as a reminder to herself were especially helpful to me because it solidified my own idea of what each activity was supposed to do/be about. Even with this peer support, however, I felt unsure if the activities I came up with actually fit into the category I placed them under which, I believe, is about the time I gave up that “few” descriptor and sent my professor a barrage of questions throughout the next day or so.

Part of the difficulty for me, was to make the activities specific to ELA, a task I was mostly but not completely successful at. Intellectually, I knew that CT skills could be applied in my class. In reality, on the other hand, it took hours and hours ^[4] of trial and error before I found sixteen CT learning activities that I was both satisfied with and fit all of the necessary parameters.

During class we were paired with one or two other students and given feedback on our activities which we would use to finish them up. A fatal flaw of mine is that I am detail oriented and tend to over think projects. Due to this, I was tasked with coming up with four activities, one from each concept, that was less complex than the activities I already had; by that I mean I had to come up with a task that did not require the students to have a ton of prior background knowledge and/or read a lot of text to complete. Towards the end, I sort of gave up trying create an activity that was cool, ELA specific, or both, because I was running out of creativity and mental energy. Nevertheless, I am still proud of some of my particularly creative activities. If you would like to guess which ones are my favorite, or just have a look at all twenty of them, click here.

 

 ^[1]The four CT concepts are: abstraction, decomposition, algorithmic thinking, and pattern recognition. I found this article, as well as my classmate Brooke who I mention later, very helpful in facilitating my understanding of these concepts.

 ^[2] I was going to joke by finishing the sentence with “…I still think it’s overkill,” and then go on to seriously talk about it, but I wasn’t sure how the joke would land without the joking tone I would have used if I was speaking.

 ^[3]If my professor’s reading this, which he probably is since he assigned this, he’s probably laughing at how different my prediction of a “few” questions was from reality haha.

 ^[4]This is a bit of a hyperbole but, believe it or not, I did spend like 16 or so hours on the project.