Today is a Friday in May 2018. It is my 5th year teaching this course, Computer Programming, Systems, and Robotics.
Each year I struggled with teaching this course- trying to make-up for the missing information/media literacy foundation that many of my students did not have. This school did not have a mandatory information/media literacy class in middle school, where all students are taught about operating systems and information architecture. Many students came to me without a basic understanding of operating systems, had an explorer’s understanding of how to access and share information. Their way of navigating was chaotic and frenzied- keep clicking without any direction until you find it and/or simply use “search” for everything which made the organization of information akin to “magic.” Very difficult to launch into computational thinking and complex systems without the basics. To me, it felt like the students were the unintended victims of the long since disproven digital natives/digital immigrants theory.
But here were supposed natives who didn’t even have a solid grasp of the basics of the language of computing- all experiential and no theory in which to help contextualize these experiences.
In the second year of this course, we changed the name and added Robotics. I have three primary units- computer systems, computer programming, robotics.