Welcome to Computational Thinking for K-12 Educators: Conditional Loops, and If Statements. This is a course for educators, for people interested in learning how to teach other people to learn block based programming. That said, no prior experience with block based programming is required, but even if you already know how to program, you'll still learn a lot. In this class we're going to have you learning with some better pedagogies for teaching programming than maybe we would experience ourselves or are commonly used. Like explaining a concept and having people write a program that uses that concept. We're also going to feature for you my debugging expertise and many, many years of teaching novice programmers as wells as the research literature on the various challenges students have particularly with conditional loops and with if statements. And let met tell you, there is a lot for conditional loops. Finally we're going to prepare you to run classroom discussions, where you're going to engage the students in constructively building their understanding. And developing their analysis skills through discussion with each other. So we'll start off with conditionals, and one of the cool things about conditionals is this is going to allow us to play games on the computer. This is something where students will really like. And it lends itself really nicely to an unplugged activity that we'll start with. Secondly, I wanted to feature again the fact that there's going to be a lot in here about bugs that students commonly face. Conditions and boolean conditions, whether they're applied in conditional loops or in if statements, are a real challenge for our students. So there'll be plenty of extra materials on how to help students really get into their understanding of boolean expressions. Again, we'll do most of our programming in Snap and learning in that environment but you'll also get to explore code.org curriculum as well. Let me tell you, this is one of the worlds, from the if statement, lesson in code.org, and if statements can be a real challenge to teach students In the context of block based programming, where we're often not really focused around variables. Because they kind of lead where's the conditional, where is the possibility that one thing might happen or not another thing. In regular block based languages it's often around, is there a user input or did some event occur? The code.org curriculum I think does a particularly good job of having an interface that just naturally lends itself. To saying, we don't know what's going to be behind that cloud. We have to wait and have a conditional to find out. In our pedagogy portion, we're going to look at the peer instruction pedagogy, which has been shown to be very effective in university settings, but you'll actually remember it as the classroom discussion part that we've been doing all along in this course and in previous courses. For our equity section, we'll have you working on recruiting students to your class. If you don't go out and recruit in the United States with both counselors, parents, and administrators. You're going to tend to get a very white, and Asian, and male class, and we really want all students to recognize that they can program. And that they might enjoy it, and they all need to know it. So until we have requirements in all of our states, or in our countries, then you're going to have to focus on recruitment, so we'll give you an exercise to help you prepare for doing that. Finally, remember all of the activities that we have you do here. Especially through our peer review process, is designed to engage you in sharing ideas and materials with your community of peers, who are also looking to learn how to teach kids to program in block based languages.
