CS principles goes to middle school: learning how to teach "Big Data"

  • Authors:

  • Philip Sheridan Buffum;Allison G. Martinez-Arocho;Megan Hardy Frankosky;Fernando J. Rodriguez;Eric N. Wiebe;Kristy Elizabeth Boyer

  • Affiliations:

  • North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA;Meredith College, Raleigh, NC, USA;North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA;North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA;North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA;North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 45th ACM technical symposium on Computer science education
  • Year:
  • 2014

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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.