Computational Thinking and Robotics

I almost always introduce computational thinking and its model as though I'm pitching a self-help strategy regardless of who I'm talking to. This almost always lands with other teachers because it's not too hard to connect what I do with computational thinking as a strategy to solve problems large and small. When talking to my middle school students, I actually reference the skills contained in the computational thinking as a way to manage their own mental health, particularly when we look at the skill of decomposition: breaking large problems down into smaller pieces to solve. This is something I have managed to connect to mindfulness training as a teacher and it truly helps to make the ADST pieces irrevocably cross-curricular in their scope.

I do wish that someone had sat me down as a child and assured me that no matter the challenge, it could likely be conquered and overcome if I recognized that things could be broken down into smaller pieces. It's paid off in spades in my work life and in my personal relationships. To think that something so seemingly detached from human emotional processes could be so effective at managing them!

The other aspects of computational thinking, patterns & generalisations, abstraction, and algorithmic thinking, give us the tools to create and overhaul our processes for efficiency.

The robotics piece in the curriculum seems like a subset of the larger ADST/Computational thinking umbrella. From a logic standpoint, most of the field of robotics falls into the realm of computational thinking, but not all computational thinking need connect to robotics. Applied more broadly, the computational thinking approach can be applied across the curriculum.

Most of my students, by the time they get to 8th grade, have had some exposure to robotics learning. While I'm quite sure that all of them know what a robot is, not all of them have a clear sense of how computational thinking plays into robots or would know where to begin when it comes to programming the behaviour of a robot. Many of the elementary schools in our district purchased Cubetto sets for their kindergarten classrooms, and I believe that this is a fantastic starting point to introduce the sequencing and patterning skills (along with algorithmic thinking) in a safe and exciting way for students.

Some of the schools have elected to let Cubetto "live" in the library learning commons so that the TL can introduce the ADST curriculum as part of a library prep. Students seem to love having the robot move around as they sequence the moves of the robot and I've seen some instances where they use Cubetto to tell a story through the programming and with custom-designed mats for it to move around on.

Question: How can we ensure equity of access for something like robotics if it is to serve as a means to understanding computational thinking skills? How can we help to ensure that students arrive to a high school robotics program with comparable experience along the way?

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Works Cited

Hamlin, Jon. "The Truth Behind Computational Thinking" CodeBC. codebc.ca. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1zMWFi2OxKy5Qq1f_PT60Iiw_B71pt2Qoz9GceW9bIFk/present. Accessed 20 July 2021.

Primo Toys. "Meet Cubetto." YouTube. 31 October 2016. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kp1p2lh2D64