STEM Fourth Graders Embrace Computer Science Project

Jack Abrams STEM Magnet School fourth graders have been participating in the first Project Lead The Way computer science project during the first four months of the 2022/23 school year.

Jessica Martino, the Innovation Lab teacher at the school, has been implementing an exciting curriculum that has seen students using “pair programming” to create programs on www.code.org.

“Pair programming is when two people work together to create a computer program,” Ms. Martino explained. “One student is the driver; the person who controls the device during pair programming. The other student is the navigator; the person who watches closely and makes suggestions during pair programming.”

The fourth graders have been putting their Chromebooks to good use while working on the project. The Project Lead The Way organization develops STEM related curriculum for the elementary school, middle school and high school levels.

“Students have also been are learning about the difference between information that people understand, encoded data that a computer can understand and how computers translate from one to the other,” Ms. Martino said. “Computers convert all information into strings of 1’s and 0’s, known as a binary system. Students are using an ASCII chart to write their names into binary code to represent how each letter is processed as it is processed by a computer.”

Among the projects learning objectives is:

• Understand how parts of a computer work together to form a system.

• Use scientific reasoning to ask questions, make observations, and investigate ideas to acquire knowledge and solve problems.

• Communicate effectively for specific purposes using the appropriate platform, tool, format, or digital media.

“The project is called Input/Output: Computer Systems,” Ms. Martino said. In this exploration of how computers work, students are encouraged to make analogies between the parts of the human body and parts that make up a computer. Students investigate reaction time as a measure of nervous system function.

“After Mylo suffers a concussion, his friends become interested in how to diagnose concussions and create a reaction-time computer program to assess a baseline before a concussion occurs,” according to a curriculum overview. “Students apply what they have learned to build their own reaction-time measurement devices on tablets. This module has strong connections to the fourth grade human brain module.”