We highlight ways to support interest-driven creation of digital media in Scratch, a visual-based programming language and community, within a high school programming workshop. We describe a collaborative approach, the programmers' collective, that builds on social models found in do-it-yourself and open source communities, but with scaffolding…

Research on the design of learning environments for K-12 science education has been informed by two bodies of literature: inquiry-based science and Constructionism. Inquiry-based science has emphasized engagement in activities that reflect authentic scientific practices. Constructionism has focused on designing intuitively accessible authoring…

Learning to code has been an increasingly frequent topic of conversation both in academic circles and popular media. Learning to code recently received renewed attention with the announcement of the White House's Computer Science for All initiative (Smith 2016). This initiative intends "to empower all American students from kindergarten…

Pat Yongpradit is the director of education at Code.org. He leads all education efforts, including professional development and curriculum creation, and he builds relationships with school districts. Pat joined "Educational Horizons" to talk about why it is important to teach computer science--even for non-computer science teachers. This…

This article describes how adolescent students learn to question their lives and contexts through the "Crossing Boundaries" podcast assignment. In the assignment, the students pick a topic, design a project, interview at least one other individual, and analyze their data. The students do not realize they are engaging in original…

"Charm City: Down to 'The Wire?'" is the title of an elective class developed by Sarah Taylor, a teacher at a private school in Baltimore. In the class, students explore their city and social justice issues from a framework that correlates to Westheimer and Kahne's (2004) concept of justice-oriented citizenship. Not only do students…

The study investigated pre-service ICT teachers' perceptions of algorithm visualization (AV) with regard to appropriateness of teaching levels and contribution to learning and motivation. In order to achieve this aim, a qualitative case study was carried out. The participants consisted of 218 pre-service ICT teachers from four different…

This work investigates the effectiveness of simulated robots as tools to support the learning of programming. After the completion of a systematic review and exploratory research, a multi-case case study was undertaken. A simulator, named Kebot, was developed and used to run four 10-hour programming workshops. Twenty-three student participants…

This paper presents a qualitative case analysis of a new and unique, high school, student-directed, project-based learning (PBL), virtual reality (VR) class. In order to create projects, students learned, on an independent basis, how to program an industrial-level VR machine. A constraint was that students were required to produce at least one…

We discuss the design, creation and implementation of an instructional game for use in a high school poetry class following a commitment to an educational game design principle of "alignment". We studied groups of instructional designers and an interactive fiction computer game they built. The game was implemented in a 9th grade English classroom…

Due to a program reform in Israel, experienced CS high-school teachers faced the need to master and teach a new programming paradigm. This situation served as an opportunity to explore the relationship between teachers' content knowledge (CK) and their pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). This article focuses on three case studies, with emphasis…

The article is an introduction to The Ohio Department of Youth Services librarians and the services they provide. Information about each juvenile prison facility is revealed and provides an explanation of guidelines and standards for prison libraries. Sixty-eight questions were asked in four in-person interviews to present a profile of the…