Professor Marina Bers, chair of the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development, has been teaching the course Technological Tools for Playful Learning every spring for the 20 years that she has been at Tufts. In the class, students are tasked with creating a curriculum around ScratchJr — a coding software that Bers helped develop — and using those lesson plans to teach children ages four to seven to code.
Typically, Bers’ students teach in person at various elementary schools in the area, but this year the vast majority of schools that had previously allowed Bers’ students’ lessons chose not to participate. In order to give her students practical teaching experience, Bers redesigned the curriculum to have her students teach over Zoom, using resources from the Eliot-Pearson Children’s School and DevTech, a Tufts-based research group for which Bers serves as the director.
The Eliot-Pearson Children’s School serves both as an early education school and as a laboratory for Tufts’ child study and human development department.
“[EPCS] is our lab school: a place for experimenting new things or demonstrating new methods of teaching or learning,” Bers said.
The Children’s School had been a partner school for Bers’ class in past years, and is accustomed to experimental teaching methods. In keeping with this innovative spirit, Bers worked with the school’s director, Hanna Gebretensae, to continue the program at EPCS virtually during the pandemic.
Gebretensae felt confident that Bers’ students could make online coding lessons engaging and exciting for the children, especially given the regular collaboration between EPCS and the Department of Child Study and Human Development.
“We knew that we couldn’t bring [the Tufts students] in person,” Gebretensae said. “But we decided that would definitely not stop us from doing [the program].”
EPCS had been holding in-person education since the fall, so by the time Bers began teaching Technological Tools for Playful Learning this spring, the staff at the EPCS had already had a semester’s worth of practical experience teaching young children during a pandemic.
Gebretensae has found flexibility to be a crucial aspect of teaching during a pandemic.
“There have been times here and there when cases would come up,” Gebretensae said. “So, when that happens, and we have to close for a day or two … [and] we’ll go virtual.”
This experience adapting to quickly changing circumstances made moving coding lessons online less intimidating for Gebretensae and the staff at EPCS.
“We were able to minimize the number of kids that are working with the [Tufts] students, so that we can have a table of two kids with one or two students [on Zoom], but spread them out in the classroom, so they can really have their space,” Gebretensae said.
Both Bers and Gebretensae cited the importance of starting technology-based education early as a driving factor in their decision to continue the coding lessons virtually.
“Coding is a new literacy,” Bers said. “So, if you learn how …….