Introducing 6-12 Grade Teachers and Students to Computational Thinking

Computing disciplines struggle to increase student retention rates. Creating interesting curriculum to attract freshmen and help them learn is challenging. Computational thinking has become a key concept to motivate students with problem-solving strategies and has been used across various fields irrespective of computing majors. This paper describes the vertical integration of middle school and high school students with undergraduate students at a state university in a computational thinking project. Middle school students adopted the role of customers/end-users developing project requirements, high school students were designers, and undergraduate students were developers actually implementing the software system. One of the main themes of this project was the importance of ethics in computational thinking. To this end, teachers were provided with information and coaching on how to teach ethics. Students were provided with introductory ethics discussions and given opportunities to identify and reflect upon the ethical dimensions of computational thinking in the context of several of the aforementioned activities. This paper will briefly highlight and evaluate the ethics pedagogy adopted in this project. The results obtained by carrying out the computational thinking activities among a diversified group of students with varying knowledge and expertise levels were promising. The vertical integration had challenges and research components, which, when unveiled, will attract new students to computing disciplines. Keyword: retention rate, computational thinking, vertical integration, ethics