Schools across BC are transforming their learning environments to match not only the new curriculum but the learning needs of our 21st century students. As educators, our goal is to make future ready citizens, and in today's digital world, having a solid foundation in digital literacy is essential!
Digital literacy includes many streams of thinking from one’s digital footprint to digital citizenship to navigating and critiquing sources. But it also includes the skills needed to navigate and design technology. That is where Computational Thinking and Robotics comes in!
In an elementary school, students will mostly be provided with opportunities to explore design ideation and build the skills needed to be the critical thinkers required of their future selves. Across the K-7 curriculum in maths and language arts, we see many areas for students to be critical, creative, collaborative and computational thinkers! Learning these skills early on will allow the students to build upon these skills as they get into higher level design, prototyping and building experiences.
It isn’t until the grade 6 & 7 ADST curriculum where we see a cross over of computational thinking and robotics. At this point, students should have the thinking skills to begin exploring their application using robotic tools. I don’t believe that this means we should not be exposing our students to “robotic” activities! In fact, my grade 4’s are able to use SPHERE and Lego Mindstorms in ways to show their understanding that I never could have imagined. I feel it is important that we expose our younger learners to these tools in ways to build on their computational thinking strategies, through guided lessons and through play.
I feel that it is important as teachers to remember that the new BC curriculum is not designed as a stagnant set of criteria from which we need to teach, but that we can take the Big Ideas, Core Competencies and Learning Standards from different content area to build rich, cross-curricular, expeditionary learning opportunities for our students. I was surprised that because of this openness and push for inquiry learning, robotics wasn’t included in the earlier grades ADST curriculum as well. I believe that many teachers feel some restriction in their lesson planning from the curriculum, and that they may feel they shouldn’t be or cannot access robotics resources to support their lessons.
In my school, I feel incredibly lucky to have an administrative team who encourages rich, cross-curricular approaches, even if it means accessing resources that might be for different grades or that may seem obscure. If we can make a competency connection and we have the know-how to use the resource, we are pretty much given the go ahead!
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