Despite widespread adoption of the K-12 Computer Science Standards published by the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) in 2017, there remain few validated assessments for computer science that researchers and educators can use to measure students' conceptual understanding. Traditional assessments that do exist tend to consist largely of multiple-choice questions that do not adequately measure students' programming skills or their use of the computer science practices described in the standards. This project aims to develop and iteratively refine a mixed-format assessment for middle school computer science. The first phase of this work unpacked the middle school (6-8 grade band) CS standards to develop prototype items, including live coding tasks, that would assess the learning outcomes addressed therein. In phase 2, we tested the prototype items with students through cognitive interviews to better understand their response processes and the complex problem-solving and reasoning they demonstrated while taking the assessment.

There has been significant progress in increasing the access to computing education for many K-12 students, including states adopting computer science (CS) standards and/or requiring CS courses. This includes the creation of block-based programming languages to make programming more accessible to younger students. Despite this progress, a new challenge has emerged: Students often struggle to transfer conceptual knowledge when transitioning to a new programming language (e.g., transitioning to a text-based programming after learning a block-based programming language). This poster presents the results of teacher interviews regarding the examples of knowledge transfer they observe in their classrooms. These interviews are part of an overarching project that aims to address the challenge of knowledge transfer between programming languages by developing a framework to support such transfer and deliver curricular supports that can be used to aid students' productive knowledge transfer between programming languages.

The Latinx population is underrepresented in secondary computer science (CS) courses as well as in the STEM workforce. By exposing Latinx students to positive coding experiences and encouraging a growth mindset earlier in school, Latinx participation in CS may likely increase. This poster presents the results of examining the reflections upper-elementary students recorded in their journals after completing a structured Scratch coding project. Students were prompted to share problems they faced, how they responded to those problems, and what they were proud of in their project.

One of the most efficient ways for elementary school students to gain exposure to computational thinking is when it is integrated into other disciplinary areas; however, elementary school teachers often lack the necessary resources to do this effectively. By leveraging the motivation force of narrative to engage students and the scaffolding affordances of block-based programming to support students, computationally-rich narrative-centered learning offers promise to address this need. In this work, we review design principles from prior work for engaging elementary students in computational thinking as well as results from initial pilot studies to investigate how computationally-rich narrative-centered learning in the context of science problem solving can support the integration of computational thinking into other disciplinary areas.

Computational Thinking (CT) is being infused into curricula in a variety of core K-12 STEM courses. As these topics are being introduced to students without prior programming experience and are potentially taught by instructors unfamiliar with programming and CT, appropriate lesson design might help support both students and teachers. "Use-Modify-Create" (UMC), a CT lesson progression, has students ease into CT topics by first "Using" a given artifact, "Modifying" an existing one, and then eventually "Creating" new ones. While studies have presented lessons adopting and adapting this progression and advocating for its use, few have focused on evaluating UMC's pedagogical effectiveness and claims. We present a comparison study between two CT lesson progressions for middle school science classes. Students participated in a 4-day activity focused on developing an agent-based simulation in a block-based programming environment. While some classrooms had students develop code on days 2-4, others used a scaffolded lesson plan modeled after the UMC framework. Through analyzing student's exit tickets, classroom observations, and teacher interviews, we illustrate differences in perception of assignment difficulty from both the students and teachers, as well as student perception of artifact "ownership" between conditions.

Many institutions have little to no access to parallel computing platforms for in-class computational science or parallel and distributed computing education. Key concepts, motivated by science, are taught more effectively and memorably on an actual parallel platform. LittleFe is a complete six node Beowulf style portable cluster. The entire package weighs less than 50 pounds, travels easily, and sets up in five minutes. LittleFe hardware includes multi-core processors and GPGPU capability, which enables support for shared and distributed memory parallelism, GPGPU parallelism, and hybrid models. By leveraging the Bootable Cluster CD project, LittleFe is an affordable, powerful, and ready-to-run computational science, parallel programming and distributed computing educational appliance.