Computational Pedagogy: Fostering a New Method of Teaching

Teaching with technology still remains as a challenge. Making judicious choices of when, what and how specific tools and pedagogies to use in the teaching of a topic can be improved with the help of curriculum inventories, training, and practices but as new and more capable technologies arrive, such resources and experience do not often transfer to new circumstances. This article presents a case study in which computational modeling and simulation technology (CMST) is used to improve technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) of teachers. We report findings of a summer training program for both preservice and in-service teachers in the Northeastern United States. CMST has shown to be effective on both teaching and learning. Results show that it helps teachers to integrate technology into their teaching in a more permanent, constructive, and tool-independent way. It has also shown to improve student learning in a constructive fashion by first enabling deductive introduction of a topic from a general simplistic framework and then guiding the learner to inductively discover underlying STEM principles through experimentation.