Welcome to Computational Thinking for K-12 Educators, Variables and Nested Loops. This is a course for educators who want to learn how to teach K-12 students to program in a block-based language. In this course, we're going to be learning three new concepts actually. That would be nested loops, events, and variables. In this course, besides teaching you the actual programming concepts, we're going to actually engage you in learning those yourself through better pedagogies than what we often do in computing courses. Which is to explain the concept and then ask students to write a program which uses that concept. We'll also really heavily feature, well, especially when it comes to variables. Both my debugging expertise in terms of expertise, based on what I've seen many years of beginning programmers struggle with. But also some of the research literature on the kinds of challenges students face, critically in programming of these concepts in block-based languages. And finally we're going to help you prepare to run classroom discussions where you'll have your students constructing their own knowledge of these concepts. And deepening their ability to analyze code using these concepts through in-class discussions. We're going to start off with a great CS Unplugged activity in this course. You're going to create your own instruction language, computer language if you want, for giving instructions on how to do the chicken dance. I tell you, you can turn around and use this in your classroom almost immediately. We are going to do the bulk of our learning in the programming language, Snap! Using the materials that I've generated for you to scaffold your learning. However, we'll also be able to visit the code.org curriculum in each of these concepts. And in particular, I wanted to point out another Unplugged activity that we'll be involved with, which is the Variables in Envelopes CS Unplugged activity. And this one is going to feature actually real classroom video, where you can see how a teacher was actually implementing this in the classroom. For our pedagogy section, we're going to understand and explain these interactive programming puzzles that you'll be dealing with, and even the check your knowledge puzzles. In the computer science education world, these are named Parsons' Problems, after the woman who invented them, Dale Parsons. But you want to think of them as basically programming puzzles that help students engage with learning on a concept in a lower cognitive load way. In our equity section, we're going to focus on how do you design and manage your computer lab classroom so that it's an equitable learning environment? If you're new to teaching programming, this may be the first time that you've taught in a computing lab. And there tends to be a lot of activity going around. And so we'll have you engage with understanding what kind of rules you want to have for your lab classroom. And how you're going to monitor your classroom to make sure that students are having an equitable experience. Finally, as with all of our courses, the most important thing is that in doing all of this work, you're not doing any busy work. Your goal is to create materials that you could turn around and use as a teacher, and through our peer review assignments, be able to share those ideas and materials with other teachers. So I hope you'll enjoy joining us and learning about nested loops, events, and variables.
