Over the last couple of years, we have been working with elementary teachers to ensure that all students having access to computer science ideas and practices early on in their education. Our teacher partners have been leveraging both unplugged (without a computing device) and plugged (with a computing device) activities to bring computer science into their classroom.
We have focused this work under the broad umbrella of computational thinking, which includes practices that computer scientists and programmers engage in. We believe that it is important for elementary kids to develop these skills and what it means to think computationally. Some of these computational thinking practices include, problem decomposition (breaking problems into manageable sub-problems), algorithms (designing and using a sequence of instructions), abstraction (reducing complexity by focusing on most essential details), and automation (determining if a computer can help solve the problem).
Below are activities that you can use with your learners some of which require a computing device (laptop or tablet), while other do not.
- Activity 1 :: Drawing from directions
- Activity 2 :: 10 Block Scratch