After discussing safety considerations, such as properly handling the materials and ensuring the materials are in the middle of the table, we give students about five minutes to explore. To ensure students get materials in a safe and orderly way, we have one student from each group come and pick up a plastic shoebox of materials for their group of three or four students. We begin the lesson by holding up different objects (e.g., a large rock, red plastic sealable bag) and telling students we would like them to investigate what happens when they put the objects in the path of a beam of light from a flashlight.
We use a 5E model to begin to teach students about light (partially addressing 1-PS4-3) and then scaffold students to solve problems by communicating with light using CT (1-PS4-4).
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When students are taught how to engage with computational thinking, their capacity to abstract, represent information differently, and problem-solve often improves ( Yadav et al. This can involve breaking problems into smaller pieces, recognizing patterns, and making basic algorithms to solve problems ( see Table 1 for CT ideas for elementary). Computational thinking (CT) is “a problem-solving methodology that can be automated and transferred and applied across subjects” ( Barr and Stephenson 2011). One way to help children think and act like scientists and engineers is to engage them with computational thinking. The Next Generation Science Standards call for engaging students in practices that scientists and engineers use ( NGSS Lead States 2013), but it’s also important to explicitly teach thinking approaches that scientists and engineers use. Even though children interact with the natural and designed worlds daily, they don’t often think and act like scientists and engineers.
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