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My future goals revolve around growing the computer science departmental offerings and improving the quality of my personal instructional methods. I believe strongly in the benefits of studying computer science for the numerous and varied future job opportunities in the field. However, I also strongly believe that there is value for all students in studying computer science since the core computational thinking skills of CS such as the decomposition of complex problems, logical thinking, debugging of prototype solutions, and the like are critical elements in every successful career path.
"Mi Vida Loca Movie GIF." Found on Giphy and used under Fair Use.
First, I would like to work towards improving the computational thinking unit within our freshman introductory computer skills class to focus on CT skills along with and through game design. Secondly, I would like to improve my personal coding skills so that I can better teach students the skills and competencies that will actually matter in the real world. Lastly, I would like to round out the CS curriculum at my school by creating a web design & apps course in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, a game design course in Lua, and an entry-level programming course in Scratch for those students not comfortable enough to take the mainline first-year programming course.
"Game Design and Problem Solving" by Kevin Streeter is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA.
The computational thinking unit of my freshman computer fundamentals class is currently centered around game design and creating fully-functioning games in Scratch. The lessons do focus on problem-solving generally and I do want to continue this concentration, but I want to dramatically expand the coverage I devote to intentionally teaching other computational thinking skills like decomposition and designing algorithms to solve problems.
I want to do this in order to more solidly make the argument to students and parents that studying computer science is one of the best ways to learn CT skills which may then be successfully transferred to applications in other domains. I will use my experiences and learnings from my most recent graduate school class (Computational Thinking for K-12 Educators) as the basis for making the desired adaptations to the class.
A second of my goals is to become a more active and better programmer in general so that what I teach the students is as applicable to their futures as possible. One of the fascinating things about computer science (and somewhat maddening from a lesson planning point of view) is that what computers can do and the ways that they do it are always changing.
To make a comparison with mathematics, pi will always be 3.14 and the Pythagorean theorem will always be a2 + b2 = c2. However, the evolution and adaptation of the syntax and capabilities of a particular programming language (and even which languages are used) is a never-ending process as better and newer ways to do things are designed.
I taught myself to code using Harvard's CS50x course which is readily available online. It is also the basis of my curriculum for my first-year programming class. One thing that I like about the materials is that since it is an actual university class, a newly updated version is released every year so that the syntax and practices stay current. There is also a game design course, a course in Python, and a web development course that I have dabbled in, but want to add these skills also to my repertoire.
"Web Development" by bookdragon is licensed under a Pixabay License.
"griffpatch RPG Tutorial-- YouTube Capture" by Kevin Streeter is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA.
My final goal is an extension of the previous goal. I want to build our computer science department into one of the strengths of our school. We currently have a well-developed freshman intro to computing class and I am developing the first-year programming class. In future years, I want to add three more classes: a web design and web apps course, an upper-level game design course, and an intermediate programming class based on game design in Scratch.
In addition to the resources mentioned above, one resource that I have used to grow my Scratch programming skills is a series of tutorials from a user named griffpatch.
Being someone who loves to learn new things and loves to share the things I have learned with others, I am excited about the future and what I can bring to my students. I look forward to refining my freshman introductory CS class so that it is more engaging and applicable for all students, even those who are not considering careers in computer science. I look forward to becoming more of an expert in programming myself and connecting with people who are currently working in the sector so that I can pass on my knowledge to the students. Finally, I look forward to building a CS program that will be viewed as a tremendous asset. I want Valley Lutheran to be known as one of the area leaders in computer science. To the future...
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