With 24,000 students, Springfield Public Schools is usually among the three largest school districts in Massachusetts. Our students are spread across 31 elementary schools and a total of 70 schools. It’s no exaggeration to say that computational thinking plays a part in all of them. Fortunately, the district earned a grant that allowed us to offer computer science at every grade level, starting as early as pre-K. Because many of our teachers had no background in computer science, though, this large-scale implementation was no easy task.
Meeting standards and managing devices
One of our first challenges was that Massachusetts has specific digital literacy and computer science standards that are a bit different than the national CSTA standards used by many other states. Our department combines digital literacy and computer science, so we have four different strands that encompass digital citizenship and computational thinking concepts.
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