Yes..to launch this project we have AMNH staff who both developed the curriculum and taught it the first two times. We worked closely with Project GUTS to learn the tools and all of the capabilities and working with co-PI Irene Lee, I might say that we even pushed the boundaries a bit. What say you Irene? (I wish there was a way to tag you in this comment). Our hope is that after the pilot period, we can consider adapting this in partnership with the NYC Dept of Education for use in schools. To that end, we have four lead teachers as co-researchers on the project. I can tell you more about that if you are interested!

Thank you for the response!  Having teachers on board is so important, and incorporating this into NYC schools would be quite the bump in scale! Very exciting. I am looking forward to following your project's progress and learning more. 

Hi Anita, Great to see you here!

I met with Gabrielle Rabinowitz, the lead curriculum designer / instructor for the DecodeNYC project, to review StarLogo Nova models, pedagogy, and learnings from Project GUTS. We did not run through the Project GUTS PD in full. As an experienced CS instructor and scientist, Gabrielle was adept in understanding the Use-Modify-Create progression, the models, and the Project GUTS approach.

In Project GUTS, we engaged students in reasoning about what an agent did (how it moved and interacted with other agents) from an "execution of code" perspective. In DecodeNYC, we go deeper and have students identify the scientific process that this action/interaction represents. Gabrielle did a wonderful job weaving this connection between mechanisms in code and the scientific processes they represent throughout the DecodeNYC curriculum.

--Irene

Thanks Irene! I'll add that other educators at AMNH were also trained to teach the DecodeNYC curriculum. In addition to learning StarLogo Nova, they were also introduced to the Use-Modify-Create process and the nature of decoding. This was pretty intuitive for them, especially since they typically followed U-M-C themselves while learning the software!

Hello Channa! I'm the educator who wrote and facilitated the curriculum. I'd be happy to tell you a little more about the use-modify-create process. We're building on the work done by Project GUTS which established the U-M-C process as one that scaffolds increasingly deep interactions with CT. I agree that it has a lot in common with design-thinking!

The decoding aspect of the process hasn't been studied as extensively as the simpler Use-Modify-Create flow and we were curious to see if emphasizing the mapping between real world scientific phenomena and a computational model would help learners develop a stronger understanding of both the science and CT.

Computational thinking is a skill that young people will be able to apply to a wide variety of academic and professional fields, so we hope that empowering them to feel comfortable with it early on will set them up for success. It's another tool in their toolkit for inquiry.

The scientific processes we focused on in the curriculum were ecosystems, population dynamics and disease transmission. We taught these concepts in a variety of ways, including hands on activities and a virtual "field trip" with tick researchers. We also believe that decoding, and modeling in general, encouraged students to engage deeply with these concepts.

I'll let Preeti and Irene speak to the measurable impacts from the instruments, but I can say that students certainly learned a lot about both modeling and ecosystems and how to use one to study the other!

Maybe you can help me understand this  - I'm still confused about the different representations. There's the code, the visual simulation of red ticks etc, and then something else related to the real world? Are they connecting among 3 worlds? If it's only two (code and sim) then I don't understand why they're figuring out "what maps and what doesn't" - surely the sim just shows what they've coded?  A related question I have is: how is this different from, say, using Scratch? Are there some initial parameters you set that reflect an ecosystem rather than simple programmable objects? Maybe it would help me to hear a couple of concrete examples of the kinds of things youth do in the different representations, and what they infer. Thanks!

Hi Sue Allen,

The code controls everything that happens in the visual simulation. There is code to place the ticks, turn them red when infected, tell them how to move, etc. This is the agent-based model. Students are making connections between this model (at both the agent-based level and the code level when they have learned more) and the real world ecosystem. An example of that mapping might be: "The model needs to include code to turn mice red because this represents what happens in the real world when an infected tick bites a mouse", or "Since in the real world we can put pesticides on deer, we can add code to the model so that some ticks disappear when they collide with deer." Students might also make discoveries about the real world based on what they observe in the model. For example, "I noticed that deer never turned red. That makes me wonder if they can be infected too."

The biggest difference between StarLogo Nova and Scratch is that StarLogo Nova is built with scientific modeling in mind. There are easy ways to add line graphs and encode the kinds of behaviors typical of agent-based models. In SLNova there are no initial parameters. Everything is built from code! Each "breed" of agent and all of its behaviors are encoded based on the code blocks.

I hope that helps!

Extremely helpful, thanks!

Hi Nickolay, 

We have several types of collaborations. The collaboration for the design of the curriculum and the associated study is between American Museum of Natural History and Project GUTS. We also had collaborators at Columbia University to support our scientific work and to ensure our models were accurate and representing actual research. We had collaborations with schools from which we recruited students. We also have four teacher co-researchers who have been instrumental in supporting the research work and will play a deeper role in the coming year to support our thinking on how this work can impact formal school settings. And to put it in context, it all happened as the pandemic started. So the collaboration work is always hard but was a bit more complex due to the constraints of the pandemic. In terms of process of writing the curriculum, there was a lot of back and forth and organizing of goals and writing of outlines and proofing and vetting and you get the picture. What stands out when doing this type of innovative work is the importance of being organized, meeting weekly during the process and crafting a team of people with different talents and expertise.

Hi Leah,

We chose Lyme disease spread for a couple of reasons- partially because the ecosystem involved can be found locally (on Staten Island) and also because of the scientific expertise of our staff scientists and collaborators on the project.

While we didn't use a lot of numerical real-world data, we did encourage students to look for evidence of real-world ecosystem dynamics in the output of their models. Additionally, students tested real world Lyme disease intervention strategies (such as vaccinating mice or putting pesticides on deer) using their models in order to evaluate their efficacy. When students added their own species to the Lyme disease model near the end of the program, they learned about those animals' real-world interactions with the Lyme disease ecosystem and then worked to model those realistically. 

Your project is very exciting as well! I love the inclusion of video evidence of the phenomena alongside the modeled behavior. Let's definitely stay in touch!