Welcome to our class on computational thinking for K-12 Educators: abstractions, methods, and lists. This is a class for educators who may already know about abstractions, method and lists, but maybe not and want to learn about it for the first time. But most importantly, it's offered to you with the option or with the goal that you are interested in teaching these concepts to others. In this class, you'll learn about methods which is our example that we'll be using primarily of abstraction and lists, but using better pedagogies than we often use with students in teaching them new concepts and programming, which is like let me explain it to you and then go write a program about it. Also you'll be learning about the debugging expertise that I've had and encountered and from the research literature about the challenges students have with making methods or understanding the concept of abstraction, and also especially there's so much when dealing with lists. Finally, you'll be given practice to prepare you to run classroom discussions around these concepts that will help deepen your students understanding and help them develop the analytical skills that are needed to program with these concepts effectively. We're going to get started with a really fun unplugged activity, which has to do with songs. Don't worry if you're not going to have to sing, I promise you there's no singing because I can't sing at all. But you will be exploring how songs have refrains, courses that get repeated and how could we package those in a smaller piece and wrap that up as an abstraction. You'll learn to actually create your own blocks and snap. You've been using blocks that are available to us up, you have to find out that you can make your own. This will allow you to simplify specific things, and in particular we're going to have you on joining some art. We're going to do teach your power up when it comes to abstraction by further exploring recursion, and we'll go back to using something we used in our previous class Pencilcode.net. Recursion is really fun in a visual sense, and it allows you to make fractals and other sorts of things. You'll in fact be making the epitome of the common example which has this fractal tree with your turtle. Finally, this looks silly but actually it's a really fun extension and you'll be able to go and find some online videos with lists that allow you to visualize for students how sorting items in a list can happen. So, we'll hope you'll have fun with that. Finally, in this last class in our specialization we're going to be combining pedagogy and equity in looking at culturally responsive teaching. In the United States, culturally responsive teaching is something that we've been working on for a number of years and you may have had some PD on extra. But it's especially important to think of it in respect to teaching a computer science or computer programming course. Sad to say, we actually don't know a whole lot about it at least from research. But I think as teachers, we can come up with some great ideas that we can try out and maybe share with each other. Finally, as always, we hope that there's no busy work in this class. This class is designed in ways to enable you to dive in and engage with things that you can immediately turn around and use in your classroom, or share with other teachers. Through our peer review, we hope you'll have the opportunity and the benefit of being able to look at other people's materials and learn from them, and maybe find some things that you can use in your own classrooms. Thanks for joining us and I hope you enjoyed this class on abstractions, methods, and lists.
