In an ever-increasing technological society, teachers have now, more than ever, a vast offering of educational technologies made available for classroom use. However, the time necessary for vetting and developing rigorous lessons with the usage of such technologies can be overwhelming for a classroom teacher. Still, teachers need the opportunity…

This paper describes a unit designed to promote the development of narrative writing skills among 5th grade students through the use of LEGO robotics. Over the course of four, two and one-half hour sessions (one day per week for four consecutive weeks), the students learned how to construct and program robots, write and present a proposal to…

Because fractions and percentages can be difficult for children to grasp, connecting them whenever possible is beneficial. Linking them can foster representational fluency as children simultaneously see the part-whole relationship expressed numerically (as a fraction and as a percentage) and visually (as a pie chart). NCTM advocates these…

As a fifth-grade mathematics teacher, the author tries to create authentic problem-solving activities that connect to the world in which his students live. He discovered a natural connection to his students' real world at a computer camp. A friend introduced him to Alice, a computer application developed at Carnegie Mellon, under the leadership of…

In the first issue of "Australian Educational Computing," in 1986, Cumming and Abbott reported a controlled comparison of top-down and bottom-up teaching strategies for Grade 5 and 6 students' use of a simple logic programming language. They found that both strategies were rated highly by students and teachers, and gave useful learning;…

Discusses storytelling as a medium for learning about identity and communication. Presents an approach to interactive storytelling called SAGE (Storytelling Agent Generation Environment), an authoring environment for children to create their own storytellers to interact with. Results from empirical studies with fourth and fifth graders are…

Discusses concurrent, or parallel, programming languages; explains the design of the MultiLogo programming language; and describes a study of fourth and fifth graders that used MultiLogo to control robotic devices built out of Lego bricks. Three categories of MultiLogo programming bugs are described, and implications for changes in design and…