FIRST Principles to Design for Online, Synchronous High School CS Teacher Training and Curriculum Co-Design
Shuchi Grover, Veronica Cateté, Tiffany M. Barnes, Marnie P. Hill, Ákos Lédeczi, Brian Broll · 2020
The Covid-19 pandemic has offered new challenges and opportunities for teaching and research. It has forced constraints on in-person gathering of researchers, teachers, and students, and conversely, has also opened doors to creative instructional design. This paper describes a novel approach to designing an online, synchronous teacher professional development (PD) and curriculum co-design experience. It shares our work in bringing together high school teachers and researchers in four US states. The teachers participated in a 3-week summer PD on ideas of Distributed Computing and how to teach this advanced topic to high school students using NetsBlox, an extension of the Snap! block-based programming environment.