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PAsmart Professional Development at IU13

Home > Educators > Teaching & Learning > STEM Solutions > Computer Science & Computational Thinking > PAsmart Professional Development

Teacher in Computer Science clsasProfessional development opportunities will be facilitated and/or hosted by IU13 to support districts who aim to increase the number of educators prepared to teach CS/STEM courses, integrate CS/STEM principals into their courses, and expand access and opportunities to high-quality CS/STEM programming for all students.

IU13 will offer districts a series of professional development and hands-on workshop sessions in order to:

  • Examine, use, and demonstrate knowledge of the Computer Science Teachers Association Standards (endorsed by Pennsylvania, January 2018), the K-12 CS Framework and the Computational Thinking Toolkit, developed through collaborative efforts by CSTA and ISTE.
  • Understand the need for computer science & computational thinking as a core literacy
  • Develop a vision and comprehensive plan for computer science using the SCRIPT framework
  • Explore and begin to use resources and hardware to design and implement CS/STEM learning opportunities for ALL students.

NO prior experience with computer science is required; the professional development and hands-on workshops offered by IU13 are meant for educators who are or soon will be teaching computer science.

The K-12 CS/STEM Professional Development offered by IU13 to support districts who receive PAsmart Targeted Grants will include four required days as well as a series of district-selected workshops on computer science curricular resources and hardware solutions aligned to the CSTA Standards and K-12 CS Framework including.  Although participants will take a deep dive into the CSTA standards on Day 1 – all professional development activities will incorporate elements of CSTA standards and provide participants opportunities to explore concepts within each strand: Algorithms and Programming, Computing Systems, Data and Analysis, Impacts of Computing, & Networks and the Internet as well as time to explore opportunities for intentional integration of CS into other content areas.

Session Overview

Day 1: Unpacking the CSTA Standards (endorsed by PA 2018) & K-12 CS Framework *required

Day 2: CSforALL SCRIPT Workshop *required

Day 3:  Computational Thinking – An Essential Skill *required

Day 4: Engineering Design + Computer Science: Hands-on Design Challenges & Project Based Learning *required

It is recommended that districts send participating teachers to at least one curricular resource-focused workshop and two hardware-focused workshops; however, each district will have the opportunity to customize their professional learning pathway.

  • Getting Started with Block Based Coding (PreK-2)
  • Code.org Fundamentals (K-5)
  • CS First with Google (4-8)
  • CMU CS Academy: CSO & CS1 (7-12) *2 day workshop

Hardware-focused workshop offerings will include:
*workshop fees vary; cost of each includes the associated device

  • Code & Go Mouse OR BeeBot (PreK-2)
  • Ozobots Evo (K-6)
  • Dash | Wonder Workshop (K-5)
  • SAM Labs (K-8)
  • Sphero BOLT
  • Hummingbird (4-12)
  • Raspberry Pi (6-12)
  • Makey Makey
  • Micro:bit

Learn More

Check session dates/descriptions and register.

For additional information:

Explore PAsmart Professional Development