Fostering Computational Skills in Secondary Education Earth Sciences
through Jupyter Notebooks
Abstract
As a multi-year coding in the classroom initiative, the Earth Science
Information Partners’ education committee and community members have
been exploring how to integrate coding skills and computational thinking
within an Earth science context. This presentation describes a Jupyter
notebook project that resulted in a professional development Data to
Action Education Workshop during the ESIP 2019 Summer Meeting in Tacoma,
Washington. The main goal of the workshop was to provide K-12 teacher
participants the opportunity to learn how modify and run code that would
display and analyze data about hurricanes in the Atlantic basin using a
Jupyter Notebook. The topic was chosen for two specific reasons. Middle-
and high- school Earth Science curricula include a learning unit about
weather, particularly hurricanes, as a topic of instruction thus the
content could be a natural fit into most classrooms. Secondly, employing
a familiar content area in a coding-dedicated workshop meant that
teachers could focus on the code itself and bring their knowledge about
hurricanes to create new questions to explore. Workshop participants
included in-service teachers currently instructing in middle and/or high
school geoscience or technology courses, most of whom had very little or
no background in programming. Teachers became familiar with the Jupyter
environment, gained experience in interpreting coding cell content, and
built confidence in manipulating code and parameters to develop
graphical outputs. Through merging coding practice applied to learning
instructional content, teachers were able to experiment and succeed (or
fail) in a safe environment, practicing the skills their students need
to learn. By encouraging teachers to learn how to code, we help them to
foster their students curiosity to be creators, more than just
consumers, of the technology around us and develop skills paramount to
be career- and college-ready. We discuss the pedagogical and technical
approaches and lessons learned through the design, development,
implementation, and evaluation phases of this project.