Developing students’ computational thinking (CT) practices in K-12 education has become more prevalent. The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) recognize CT practices as core scientific practices (NGSS Lead States 2013). Like the NGSS, we define CT practices as creating representations of system models. In addition, we include working with others and using ordered steps to carry out operations to logically organize and analyze data from real-world phenomena.

Many technology tools created to support developing students’ CT practices require teachers to learn new kinds of technologies, which can be a hurdle for implementation. However, we believe teachers can take a distributed expertise approach to lower the technical hurdle.

More on Computational Thinking by Michael Cassidy here.