Seow Sen Kee, Peter

With the prevalence of online communication in recent years, many teacher professional development (TPD) activities occur in blended learning environments which combine face-to-face (FTF) co-located experiences with online experiences. However, many scholars point out that blended learning environments need to be thoughtfully designed in order to integrate FTF learning with online learning experiences, and that there seems to be a lack of designs that pertain specifically to in-service teachers. Professional development is crucial for inservice teachers who are at the forefront of learning and teaching in the classroom. To impact student learning, deepening content knowledge and upgrading pedagogical skills are pivotal to teachers’ professionalism. Building professional development communities through blended learning environments is a core strategy for teachers to grow their professionalism, considering the multitude of demands faced by teachers, especially in Singapore. With the aim of designing more supportive and sustained TPD communities through blended learning environments, we undertook a review of the literature. This review has resulted in a five R conceptual framework. We synthesised from the literature the observation that the design and development of sustained blended TPD communities involve multifaceted and complex issues. Such communities would need to hold strong relevance for their members, encourage close relations between members, enable rich reifications of artefacts, be well recognised by important stakeholders, and lastly, be equipped with structural, digital, and human resources.

This paper presents experiences from a seamless mobile learning project in Singapore. Although the project included a variety of seamless mobile learning designs, this paper focuses on only one, and that is a mobile learning application SamEx in support of a specific learning scenario – an outdoor ZOO field trip. The paper describes SamEx design by focusing on virtual badges gathered by the students during their ZOO trip. The trip was structured by the teachers and scaffolded by SamEx system contextually triggered questions and prompts. The paper describes experiences from the ZOO trip done with SamEx, gives an elaborate example of a student’s learning experience during the trip, and concludes by examining different types of student profiles according to their badge usage and SamEx social engagement.

Learning is interweaved into and across students’ everyday life activities. Technology that is used to support learning should be integrated with everyday life in the same way that learning occurs in everyday life: seamlessly. Mobile technologies, with their reduced size and ease of use, provide the potential to extend students’ learning spaces and enrich the learning experiences in their daily lives where they move between locations, switch from one topic or context to another, and interact with different social groups. This paper proposes mobile technology-supported seamless learning and presents learning scenarios from our research to illustrate how learning occurs seamlessly across time and places mediated by mobile devices.

Over a year of time, we co-designed primary three science curriculum to integrate 1:1 mobile technology with teachers. The form teacher of the experimental class in a Singapore school enacted the curriculum as her regular teaching. This paper proposes a cyclic model of how to “mobilize” the curriculum in align with the national primary science syllabus. Preliminary results of the enactment are also presented.

The purpose of this study is to explore the complex nature of Singapore teachers’ beliefs about knowledge and learning and how these beliefs influence pedagogical practices in their classes. This paper presents findings from a large-scale survey study with 1806 teachers in Singapore. Data revealed that while teachers’ beliefs about pedagogies, knowledge and learning were largely consistent, they also believed and practiced both teacher-centered and learner-centered pedagogies and assessment methods.

This study was performed to explore the views of preservice teachers of computational thinking (CT) through a pilot survey. A total of 329 preservice teachers from the National Institute of Education Singapore took part in this pilot survey. These preservice teachers were trained to teach STEM and non-STEM subjects. The overall findings showed that the preservice teachers do not yet have an adequate understanding of CT. Most of them perceived CT as logical thinking or reasoning. This is followed by no idea or no understanding or not sure, using ICT or computer, coding or programming, problem-solving and so forth. Besides that, STEM preservice teachers had different views of CT compared to non-STEM preservice teachers. These initial views of CT among the preservice teachers can serve to inform the design of teacher preparation programs, policies and syllabus materials to support the preservice teachers to infuse CT into their future teaching practices.

INTRODUCTION/BACKGROUND In 2017, Singapore’s Ministry of Education implemented a new GCE ‘O’ Level Computing curriculum. The new curriculum is a distinct shift from the teaching students on the use of software technology to the development of Computational Thinking skills and programming competencies. Computing thinking skills are associated with problem solving, reasoning and logic skills that all students should develop. As Singapore moves to implement a new curriculum with a greater emphasis on the development of computational thinking and programming, the following are some of the challenges that must be addressed:
1. Teachers’ Pedagogical Knowledge in teaching Computing 2. Teachers’ Competency and Knowledge on Computational Thinking
STATEMENT OF PROBLEMS This project has a focus on using and integrating the unplugged approach as introductory activities for teaching computing as a pedagogy. It focuses on helping students to understand concepts in Computational Thinking. The approach also fits very well to the teaching and learning environment in a typical secondary school classroom. We worked with the teachers from collaborating schools to design and co-design unplugged activities, observed how they enacted the lessons in the classroom. This would help us to understand how teachers interpret computational thinking and adapt the unplugged approaches with their teaching practice. Also, we would like to study students' learning outcomes as a result of the teaching.
The existing practice and research of unplugged teaching has the following problems: 1. There is no systematic integration. Among the many topics in computing, there are not many topics that match unplugged activities. 2. For the first-line teachers, the available public accessible resources do not help much. It can only be used when they encounter related topics. Even if there are corresponding resources on the Internet, many teachers are not keen on adopting unplugged teaching methods, due to the time and effort needed to prepare and to enact the lessons. 3. The existing unplugged teaching resources are designed with the goal of mobilizing students' interest and engagement, and more in-depth practice and research in transiting from teaching with unplugged methods to programming is needed.
PURPOSE OF STUDY The purposes of this proposed research study are the following: • Develop and evaluate pedagogies linked to teaching CT. We introduce teaching unplugged as an effective student-centered approach to introducing computing concepts without the use of computers, and then we design follow-up activities and pedagogies that move students forward in the crucial computational experiences. • Assess the effect on teachers. Teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge will be assessed to understand the level they started with, and the level they would have attained after the workshops and teaching in class. Classroom observations will be held to study the teachers’ enactment of computing lessons. We want to understand the territory of teachers’ dispositions for, attitudes toward and stereotypes concerning CT and Computing. • Assess the effect on students. Students’ work will be analysed to assess their level of comprehension and application of computing concepts, and this will be done through prior experience surveys, pre-post computing perceptions survey, pre-post computing tests, quizzes and computing assignments. These are steps towards developing an assessment framework for CT.

Coding for students is no longer just constrained to software and screen-based text and graphics. Students today use programmable sensors and microprocessors to solve the problems around them. The purpose of this research is to understand how students conceptualize problems and implement solutions with physical computing. Our study is driven by the following: 1) find out what Computational Thinking (CT) competencies, specifically abstraction, decomposition and algorithmic thinking, can be developed by students and 2) to what level students develop these competencies in carrying out physical computing projects. We closely observe how 41 Grade 7 students developed solutions for problems they identify in the physical world around them. Through doing so, we explore how powerful ideas of CT play a role in a project-approach to physical computing. We believe open-ended exploration through a project-approach in physical computing should reinforce practices where CT skills can grow and flourish. Our findings show that much of students’ interaction with sensors and devices is at pre-CT level, where students simply use pre-existing code fragments or templates. As students gain skills and confidence, they can be explicitly guided to develop CT skills with new projects of their own design justifying their choices. We strongly believe that Computational Modeling (CM) could help students develop their CT skills e.g. abstraction, decomposition, and algorithmic approach much more than the minimally guided syntax driven teaching approaches.

In this paper, we describe how the use of physical computing devices like an embroidery machine and TurtleStitch software can be used to engage learners in coding and developing their Computational Thinking (CT) skills. Two lessons are described on how novice learners can create geometric patterns with code while applying CT skills. In the first lesson, students learn to create polygon shapes such as square, triangle, pentagon, and hexagon. Through abstraction, pattern recognition, and algorithmic thinking, they must develop a modularized code block to create a polygon with sides and length of the polygon as input parameters. In the second lesson, they must create pinwheel geometric patterns through decomposition, pattern recognition and algorithmic thinking. The accompanying approaches such as tinkering, creating, debugging persevering, and collaborating were used to develop CT skills as learners generate geometric patterns with block-based codes in TurtleStitch. The use of embroidery machines and coding on TurtleStitch can provide opportunities for novice learners to develop coding and computation thinking skills as they creatively generate patterns with codes that can be embroidered in a tangible textile form.