Eighteen Hours of Code with Fifth Grade Students (Abstract Only)
Katie M. Davis, Zoë J. Wood, John Wilcox · 2016
Integrating programming and computer science into the K-12 curriculum is of national importance. This poster reports on our experience creating an eighteen-week lab curriculum for fifth grade students. Using Processing, an open source programming language and IDE that is built on the Java programming language, we developed and taught eighteen separate lab components introducing basic coding concepts appropriate for fifth grade. These lab modules were developed by a team consisting of a fifth grade teacher, a computer science master's student, and a computer science professor. The labs were taught to over 100 fifth grade students in the 2014-15 academic school year at a public school, Peabody Charter School. All coding labs produced visual output, either static scenes or animations. Topics included basic syntax with a large focus on two dimensional spatial reasoning, but also included three different modules focused on concepts from the fifth grade science curriculum. All curriculum is available at http://users.csc.calpoly.edu/~zwood/Outreach/PCS/PCS5.html. This poster breaks down the basic lab components developed and presents challenges and positive outcomes. In general, students enjoyed the exercises; the teacher observed that all students were eager to complete the labs. Prior to this experience the teacher had no programming knowledge and learned alongside the students each week. He continues to teach the Processing modules in the fifth grade for the 2015-16 school year.