Chapter 6: Re-Making Education in Stem Classrooms with Computational Making

Increased attention to computational thinking and its relationship to STEM teaching and learning has surfaced opportunities to explore and complicate fundamental assumptions about computation in disciplinary inquiry. Particular attention to how systematic patterns of exclusion and oppression persist in STEM and computer science requires consideration of expansive notions of computation, making, and disciplinary inquiry. This chapter describes computational making, drawing from architecture, computer science, and engineering, to define and explore ways of incorporating computation in STEM classrooms through the iterative explorations of phenomena using different tools and materials. Our goals are to support teacher learning through designs that center computational making as a means of integrating computation into STEM classrooms. We present a model for re-making STEM through professional learning by asking teachers to (re)negotiate relationships to tools and materials, to disciplinary thinking, and to students through computational making. The chapter describes the theoretical rationale for the approach, the four phases of our professional learning model, including computational play, co-learning with students, reflection, and curricular design and enactment. Examples of teachers negotiating their relationships between disciplinary activity and making are presented to show how the model supports teachers’ efforts to re-make STEM learning in their classrooms.