Philip Sheridan Buffum
Fernando J. Rodriguez
Eric N. Wiebe
ABSTRACT
Spurred by evidence that students' future studies are highly influenced during middle school, recent efforts have seen a growing emphasis on introducing computer science to middle school learners. This paper reports on the in-progress development of a new middle school curricular module for Big Data, situated as part of a new CS Principles-based middle school curriculum. Big Data is of widespread societal importance and holds increasing implications for the computer science workforce. It also has appeal as a focus for middle school computer science because of its rich interplay with other important computer science principles. This paper examines three key aspects of a Big Data unit for middle school: its alignment with emerging curricular standards; the perspectives of middle school classroom teachers in mathematics, science, and language arts; and student feedback as explored during a middle school pilot study with a small subset of the planned curriculum. The results indicate that a Big Data unit holds great promise as part of a middle school computer science curriculum.
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Index Terms
- CS principles goes to middle school: learning how to teach "Big Data"
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