The purpose of this article is to provide awareness of the danger of design fixation and promote the uses of brainstorming early in the design process--before fixation limits creative ideas. The authors challenged technology teachers to carefully limit the use of design examples too early in the process and provided suggestions for facilitating brainstorming sessions to help generate innovative ideas. The authors are not suggesting that teachers never provide design examples; in fact, this article highlights techniques for providing students with authentic examples and the benefits of this

Driven by scholarly work that promotes incorporating the study of social justice issues in the engineering curriculum, this work-in-progress paper focuses on teaching social and critical consciousness in engineering. The purpose of this study is to discuss and compare the implementation of social and critical consciousness in a first-year general education engineering course and a senior design engineering course.

This paper addresses the need for enhancing our awareness of user‐centered design in educational technology through a more explicit and systematic alignment between the needs of educational technology users (learners and educators) and the affordances provided by the technology. First, we define the term “affordance” and discuss it from the perspectives of cognitive psychology and user interaction design. Next, we propose a taxonomy of functional affordances that builds on prior research and reflects the current trends in the design of educational technologies. The paper is concluded with an

In this paper, we share our experiences implementing a professional development program in two school districts with middle school teachers who integrated an introductory computer science curriculum into their teaching. The 15 to 20–hour curriculum was based on students collaboratively creating mobile apps for socially relevant purposes with MIT App Inventor. Eleven teachers infused the curriculum into technology, math, engineering, library and art courses. We investigated how teachers modified the curriculum to fit their respective standards and students’ needs. We discuss the challenges they

In this chapter you will learn how a community college in rural Wyoming is implementing professional development resources in Computer Science and computational thinking skills for middle and high school teachers in their communities. The objective of the community college was to build relationships with schools to teach Computer Science concepts and computational thinking skills in the classroom. In this day and age, many people young and old are spending time on playing games or simulations. Why not teach Computer Science concepts and computational thinking skills through gaming and

This article examines teacher preparation and teacher change in engineering and computer science education. We examined culturally responsive teaching self-efficacy (CRTSE), culturally responsive teaching outcome expectancy (CRTOE) beliefs, and attitudes toward computational thinking (CT) as teachers participated in one of three treatment groups: robotics only, game design only, or blended robotics/game design. Descriptive data revealed that CRTSE gain scores were higher in the robotics only and blended contexts than in the game design only context. However, CRTOE beliefs were consistent