A block-based modeling curriculum for teaching middle grade science students about Covid-19
Veronica Cateté, Nicholas Lytle, Danielle Cadieux Boulden, Madeline Hinckle, Eric Wiebe, Tiffany M. Barnes · 2020
While the scientific community is learning more about the novel Coronavirus and its associate disease, Covid-19, it is important to begin efforts to educate students on the disease, how it is transmitted, and the possible steps we as societies and individuals can take to combat the spread. To this end, we adapted an existing computational thinking curriculum originally designed to teach students about how infectious diseases are spread by having them build a model within the block-based programming environment, Cellular. This new curriculum introduces relevant scientific terms and tasks student to program an increasingly complex model ending the activity by choosing which risk-reduction strategy to employ.