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| Photo: Tara García Mathewson |
In Peter Nilsson’s classes, students use computers to help them analyze text. Nilsson is an English teacher by training, but he has embraced the “digital humanities,” teaching students how to code to answer questions about books, speeches, news coverage, rap lyrics and more.
One of his students analyzed the text of all presidential inaugural and farewell addresses to identify common and unique themes among them. Another compared the tone and frequency of New York Times coverage of Harvey Weinstein before and after the emergence of the #MeToo movement, by analyzing every word in every article filed under the Times Topic “Harvey Weinstein.” A third explored which rappers most use internal rhyme, by importing lyrics, converting words to phonemes and analyzing from there.
Nilsson teaches at Deerfield Academy, a private school in western Massachusetts. The type of text analysis he guides his students through is far more common in colleges and graduate-school programs, but the coding that makes it possible is an increasingly popular skill to teach children...
Pat Yongpradit, chief academic officer for Code.org, said Nevada is the only state so far to embed math, science, English language arts and social studies into its computer science standards. (Editor’s note: We have since learned that Virginia also does this.) The standards create a roadmap for teachers to start teaching coding in their classrooms, specifically connecting computer science with what is being taught in the other subjects in the same grade level. For every overlap, teachers have a concrete opportunity to introduce computer science in more traditional subjects.
Yongpradit has come across a number of lessons in U.S. schools that combine elements of computer science with other subject areas. There are music classes that let students use computer programming to compose songs. There are science classes that let students code their own simulations to explore natural phenomena like chemical reactions, the water cycle or predator/prey systems. An algebra course that uses programming to teach functions and variables has actually been found to improve student understanding of those concepts over traditional math instruction.
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Source: The Hechinger Report
