Brandon Myers and Denise Szecsei have been collaborating with the UI College of Education's Mark McDermott in teaching the “Methods: One course,” which is required coursework for the Iowa CS Teaching endorsement. The team plans to regularly offer the course.
Throughout the week, the Central City School District teachers worked on:
- Argument-based inquiry, introduced by McDermott
- Guided inquiry
- Programming with Python, Cozmo robots, Arduino, Swift Playgrounds
- A robot dance competition where two teams each programmed four robots to do a synchronized dance to music
- Integrating other disciplines with computer science
- Implementing computer science K-12 standards as the state works on adopting Computer Science Teachers Association standards
- How to help students build up to challenging programming skills
Funding for the Computer Science's involvement in this projects includes Szecsei's Iowa STEM Innovation Fund and Cognitive Robots in Education awards.
Related: "STEM Innovation Fund Awards Four Stellar Stem Programs, including one by CS@UI"