Skip Navigation
Join The Tech in celebrating CSEdWeek!
December 5, 2024
- Related Topics:
- What's New at The Tech Interactive,
- Education
Computer Science Education Week (CSEdWeek) presents an opportunity for learners to explore and practice problem solving skills core to many computer science disciplines and beyond. Here at The Tech, you don’t need to be a programmer or computer expert to have fun during CS Ed week! Computational thinking (CT), the skills foundational to computer science, can be applied to a wide variety of fields including biology, social studies, and data science.
Below are some fun experiences and activities you or your learners can do to practice CT skills - you might already be thinking like a computer scientist without even realizing it!
Start Small
Not sure where to start? Don’t get overwhelmed thinking you need to have coding skills to engage your learners in computational thinking. Pattern recognition is an easily identifiable CT skill that is valuable for computer scientists when they are trying to define problems.
You and your learners can practice pattern recognition skills together by trying out a Data Talk! These quick, bite-sized activities encourage everyone to think about and analyze data. Check out our Pick + Chews Data Talk about the impact of food on the environment, or use another data visualization about a topic that interests you.
Focus on asking the key questions:
What do you notice?
What do you wonder?
Try Out an Activity
Ready for something more? Try out any one of our free activities and lessons, connecting CT skills to other subjects. Below are some of the newest activities we’ve have published since we last celebrated CSEdWeek!
What’s Happening to the Pikas
Younger learners will love this activity that allows them to learn about the American pika and practice their pattern recognition skills to help identify why the pika population is dwindling.
Data-Driven Energy Exploration
Connect CT skills with the engineering design process in this lesson that challenges learners to create a self-powered vehicle, then record data on how well it performs. Similar to how computer scientists use decomposition to break down steps within their code, learners will use decomposition to break down the different components of their design to determine what is making it successful or not.
Analyzing Patterns in Voter Data
More experienced learners interested in the social sciences will enjoy this very timely voter data lesson where they will analyze voting patterns using CODAP. In a world with a lot of data, abstraction is a key skill computer scientists use to determine what to focus on - in this lesson, learners will use the same skill to decide which details are important when summarizing their findings.
Celebrate at The Tech!
Have some time to stop by? Join us in Tech Studio from Dec. 3-19 to try out some of these new Computational Thinking activities.
Polar Animal Guess Who
In this unplugged machine learning activity, teams will work together to give clues about a polar animal photographed in its natural habitat. Learners will mimic the process of machine learning using the skill of decomposition to break down what they see into bite sized clues.
Robots vs Humans
Dive into AI with us and explore this emerging field of computer science! In this activity, learners will use abstraction to consider the bigger picture of what really makes us human and how robotic AI compares to us.
Can’t make it this time?
- Browse all of our Computational thinking resources
- Try our Machine Learning Unplugged lesson and other AI activities
- Join us on March 28th for National AI Literacy Day to expand your understanding and experience with AI