Slides for AMS 2009 workshop

These are the slides for the "Computer Science Education in the Montessori Classroom" workshop that I presented yesterday at the AMS Fall 2009 conference.

I added an extra slide to include a diagram of a ripple carry adder.

Slides are available in the following formats:

• OpenDocument (.odp) 945K
• PDF 448K
• PowerPoint (.ppt) 1409K

Note that the PDF and PowerPoint versions were converted from the original OpenDocument format file. Because of the conversion, a few of the slides look a bit funky in the PowerPoint version. If this is a concern, please use the OpenDocument (using OpenOffice) or PDF (using Adobe Reader) version.

How Computers Work (high level)

This is an activity for 3 students to work together as a group. Each student takes on the role of a different part of the computer:

• CPU
• ALU (& memory)
• Graphics display

They work through the project with the CPU running the "program", the ALU performing the math and keeping track of the variables, and the display plotting the values as needed.

The purpose of the activity is to give the students a sense of how computers work at a reasonably high level.

I created this a while ago, but neglected to actually post the information here. Full information about this activity can be found at http://cse4k12.org/how_computers_work/index.html.

Computer Science Education in the Montessori Classroom

I gave a "Computer Science Education in the Montessori Classroom" workshop at the American Montessori Society (AMS) Fall conference yesterday.

The workshop description that we submitted (oh so many months ago) was:

How can we better prepare our children for life in a high-technology society? How early should we teach them computer and pre-programming skills? How can we integrate computer science education into Montessori classrooms? This presentation of Montessori-friendly and age-appropriate activities will include stand-alone activities and extensions to existing classroom curricula as well as a take-home list of some useful online resources for teachers.

Looking back at this, it sounds sufficiently vague that I probably could have talked about anything as long as I mentioned computers every so often.

The following would perhaps have been a better overview:

Why aren't we teaching pre-programming skills (binary, boolean logic, transistors) to our children during elementary school? Why don't we teach students how computers actually work instead of simply how to use them? In this workshop, we will show (1) how computers work and (2) how you can teach these concepts to your elementary/middle school classroom.

A part of me wants to say something more confrontational like "how we're failing our students by not providing a solid understanding of computer technology", but I'll resist the urge and hold off on that rant (until another time perhaps ^_^).

I'll be posting the slides here once I get a chance to upload them.

cse4k12.org vs. cse4k12.com

Grrrr....

cse4k12.org is supposed to be the main URL for the website and cse4k12.com is supposed to simply redirect to .org.

Unfortunately, it looks like things are set up screwy and .org no longer redirects to the right place. I'll have to fix that but in the meantime all of the cse4k12.org links in the blog were not working.

Temp fix: change all the links to .com. I'll change them back once I fix the issue with .org, but for now if you have problems with any .org address, just change the "org" to "com" and it should work.

[Update: This has been fixed. All .org links are working again.]