A Framework for Integration

Enhance

Integrating on this level includes developing additional tasks or lessons that enhance the concept and provide clear connection to computing concepts. You can enhance units by

Embedding tasks within an existing lesson that complements the activity with CT concepts
Using technology to perform a particular task first done by hand, or to further a concept.

Example

To engage students more directly in CT, we enhanced the Oh Deer! lessons to include a broader study of the data they collected during the activity. Here, we extended the unit to include new activities that had students producing graphs, reading them, seeking patterns, and trying to explain them. The act of explaining the patterns in the data reinforced the observations they made while playing the game, and by extension, to the underlying concepts of the lesson.

Students practice creating graphs by hand first, then recreate using the spreadsheet.
The ability to create line graphs of multiple sets of data gave students the chance to see and discussion more broadly the interaction between the populations in the game.
Students can connect the graph and the data to the game they played, and see how observations made from the game are represented.

For instance, students hand-drew a bar chart based on the data they collected from the game. We enhanced the lesson by having students use a spreadsheet to create a chart of their collected population data, similar to this one. Their teacher then led a class discussion asking students to describe and analyze the patterns they saw in the chart.

Students made observations such as “both the blue line and the orange line go up and down” and “the blue is like the orange line, only upside down, at least at first.” These observations led to a class discussion of the interdependencies of populations, such as:

when the resources were low one year, the deer population would go down the following year because they wouldn’t have enough resources to survive.
when the deer population was low one year, the resources would go up the following year because fewer deer were around to consume the resources.

Students also discussed the effects of local extinction of the deer population on wolves and resources, supporting a separate goal of the overall unit that links the concept of localized extinction with the broader idea of global extinction.

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