STEMcoding project

Chris Orban, Ohio State University-Main Campus

Program Description

Groups like code.org have revolutionized computer science education for the elementary school and junior high levels. But for the most part the revolution has not yet reached high-school STEM courses like physics, math and chemistry. The STEMcoding project exists to re-imagine introductory STEM courses with computer science in mind. Many schools are unable to offer computer science for various reasons, but they may have a physics, or chemistry or math teacher who could integrate coding into some part of their course if there was coding content that was well aligned with the learning objectives of that course.

Program Purpose

Relatively few groups are working to integrate coding into introductory STEM courses at the high school level. There is a lack of content, and high school STEM teachers are often very uncomfortable with coding themselves.

We specialize in creating concise coding activities that illustrate science and math concepts while hiding extraneous code that only distracts from this objective. As an aid to teachers and students who may be weak or absolute beginner programmers, we record coding tutorial videos and post them to the STEMcoding youtube channel http://go.osu.edu/STEMtube. Importantly, we feature a high percentage of underrepresented groups in STEM in our videos in order to reflect the reality that all different types of people pursue STEM careers.

Program Goals

Our goals are to (1) create coding activities for intro STEM that reinforce the learning goals that already exist for these courses (e.g. NGSS), (2) to perform educational research to determine the effectiveness, perceived difficulty and attitudinal impact of these activities, (3) to do everything we can to make it easier for teachers to incorporate coding content into intro STEM courses by producing coding tutorial videos, lesson guides, running workshops and professional development and providing free tools like our STEMcoding learning management system and (4) to reflect the reality that all different kinds of people pursue STEM careers by featuring a high percentage of underrepresented groups in STEM in the videos we produce.

Program Activities

Right now many but not all of our coding activities are designed for physics and physical science. We use these coding activities extensively in freshman physics classes at Ohio State University's Marion campus and and the University of Mt. Union in Alliance, Ohio. We also work closely with two high schools in Central Ohio, and there are other schools across the country that use our content.

The STEMcoding youtube channel http://go.osu.edu/STEMtube is an important resource. Another crucial piece of our project is a custom-designed learning management system http://stemcoding.osu.edu which facilitates using coding activities in medium to large courses by making it easier for teachers to look at and run student codes and provide feedback or grade their coding assignments. This site also has links to assessment questions.

Notes and Tips

We produce coding activities that reinforce existing learning objectives by showing velocity, force and acceleration vectors throughout. We feel strongly that exercises that produce simple interactive games like Asteroids or Angry Birds, will be more effective than coding exercises where students modify and run a code, but only passively watch the result.

In creating coding tutorials we highly recommend setting up a dedicated green screen studio using a regular webcam and a $60 green canvas. Having a dedicated studio makes it much easier to accommodate student and faculty schedules.

One strategy that we have used to get the word out about our resources, is to create coding tutorial videos for special days like Pi day and Earth Day. In the days leading up to those holidays we reach out to various organizations (AAPT, NSTA, Ohio Dept. of Education, etc.) to let them know that the coding tutorial video & activity exists and to ask them to share the resource with their members. We have found educational organizations to be very receptive to this approach (e.g. with retweets and e-mails to members) and this has helped us to bring our resources to the attention of more teachers. As a result, in spite of our tendency to focus on physics and physical science, our Pi day 2018 video is currently our most viewed coding tutorial.

Evidence of Success

There are a couple pieces of evidence that our program is having a positive impact. In a survey of students in physics at Ohio State Marion from 2015-2016 with over 80 respondents, most students did not find the first coding activity in the sequence to be "difficult" or "extremely difficult" in spite of a number of students reporting little to no prior programming experience and many found the activity to be "fun" or "enjoyable" https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.01867. We now have similar data from the University of Mt. Union that is likewise encouraging in terms of the perceived difficulty. There are also written evaluations that students provide that often mention how enjoyable the coding activities were.

During summer 2017, we provided an intensive professional development course to four high school physics teachers. One of the four teachers, Lauren Seas from North Union High School in Ohio, without any prodding or financial incentive from us, decided to use nearly all of the coding activities for physics in her non-AP physics course because of how closely it aligned with the learning goals of the course. She talks about this in our STEM for all video submission, which also features a testimonial from one of her students http://stemforall2018.videohall.com/presentations/1270. We are in regular contact with two of the remaining three teachers who are planning to voluntarily use some of our activities in their courses in the 2018-2019 school year.

We are still securing permissions to release assessment data from North Union High School. But anecdotally we can share that the ASPIRE physics camp for girls at Ohio State https://u.osu.edu/aspire/ uses our coding activities extensively and on the last day of the week long camp the girls are allowed to choose to spend more time on one of four different projects, of which our coding project is one option. Our coding activities are one of the most popular choices for this additional time. The coding activity involves adding projectiles to the asteroids game, which requires critical thought about both physics and coding.

Because we have posted some of our activities on hourofcode.com as essentially the first physics-focused coding activity there, we get e-mails from educators around the country and the world asking about our lesson guides and solutions. These educators often join our e-mail list, which now has over 200 members. Our youtube channel now has over 600 subscribers and growing and we have over 250 followers on twitter, many of them educators.

Future Work

The data indicating that our exercises are at an appropriate difficulty level are spurring us to take further steps to assess how well the activities reinforce STEM learning goals like understanding velocity and acceleration vectors, etc. We are building custom-designed animated questions to do this because we think that this will be the best way to probe these concepts.

We are significantly expanding our summer professional development in summer 2018. Twelve teachers will earn free grad credits from Ohio State for completing our activities and another fourteen will earn CEUs. We are working to record coding tutorial videos for many of the remaining activities to facilitate this work.

References and Accessory Materials

STEMcoding project website: [http://u.osu.edu/stemcoding

STEMcoding youtube channel: http://go.osu.edu/STEMtube
Physics-focused coding activities: http://go.osu.edu/physics_coding
Math-focused coding activities: http://go.osu.edu/math_coding
Lesson guides and solutions: http://go.osu.edu/teacher_coding (e-mail orban@physics.osu.edu for password)
Twitter: http://twitter.com/STEMcoding
STEM for all video showcase submission: http://stemforall2018.videohall.com/presentations/1270

STEMcoding learning management system: http://stemcoding.osu.edu
Hour of code activity (now on hourofcode.com): http://go.osu.edu/hourofcode