How did you get into CS?

I'm originally from California and grew up in the heart of what’s now Silicon Valley; at that point in time, it was the Valley of Heart's Delight, filled with orchards when my parents moved there. The area slowly turned from that to electronic companies and then tech.into pre-computer companies.  I do think I was exposed to kind of thinking in middle through high school was influenced by that. Computer Science was a budding career, but not a field I would have ever expected to go into; I was ‘bad’ at math and also grew up at the tail end of the time when a woman’s options were to be a nurse or a teacher - so I became a teacher.

I taught mostly primary grades in California and my classes did a lot of hands-on learning. We had a Life Lab garden, which led to troubleshooting; how much did our kohlrabi weigh? Why did it grow less in one area? It wasn’t called STEM, but that is what it was, we were problem-solving with tools. Of course, the technology of the time was less advanced than what’s available today, but nothing we were doing required an iPhone - and neither do the activities that children in the 4-7 age range should be engaged in today. What my kindergarteners were doing then is still very much in line with the CS preparation and still benefits young children in the present.

I earned my teaching certification at UC Berkeley and I earned my Master's in Administration at Santa Clara University, as well as my certification to teach ESOL. Frustratingly, when my husband's job transferred us here, Maryland required me to redo some of  the certifications I’d already done in California. I didn’t want to repeat all that, so instead, I went to UMCP and worked as a lecturer and earned my PhD in early literacy. I briefly worked at the Maryland State Department of Education, and was excited to apply to Towson when there was an opening; I’m now going into my 14th year there. I’m in the Department of Early Childhood Education, where I teach and research literacy methods for second language acquisition. 

About 5 years ago, I got involved with CS/CT on a grant with Dr. Mahnaz Moallum the Chair of  the Department that includes educational technology. She needed people from each department in the College of Education. I was flattered to be asked to represent Early Childhood and thought it sounded interesting, but knew very little about computing at the time and just hoped I could step up to the challenge. On that first grant, our group designed a one-unit, credit-bearing course on CT for undergrads and graduates. Through that process, I got more and more interested in what CS ed looks like for young children and realized how much I already knew about computational thinking without realizing it; if I’d had that language back in California, I would’ve been able to infuse it into our gardening activities. 

What are some successes and challenges that you've experienced?

Something I see a lot in my work is misunderstanding of what academic rigor should look like in early childhood classes. I invite readers to look at Piaget’s stages of development and remember Maria Montessori’s quote “ What the hand does the mind remembers.” Kids that age need to be active in their learning, so why, WHY are we having young children in seats being quiet? I think about how Steve Wozniak of Apple was in his garage with his dad, working on electronic stuff, thinking and designing in a hands-on way, and I wonder if his creativity would have been killed in a modern learning environment. 

Often, people are disappointed when they hear me say that young children need to be doing hands-on (rather than screen-based) activities, because they think I mean that they’re too young for CS or CT - which isn’t the case! Administrators and educators working at higher grade levels also frequently have a hard time picturing what an appropriate pathway in those topics might consist of without a background in developmental theory. I'm one of three people in Maryland who were chosen to rewrite the national CSTA Standards. Out of the 22 total people from across the country, 9 of us are in the elementary band, and only 2 of those have experience with  4-6 year-old’s. Even within that broader group of standards writers- and they’re smart, awesome people- explaining what CT and CS can and should look like for little kids sometimes needs to be explained. Happily, I have the tools to do that after a career spent in early childhood education, and it’s a lot of fun having something new to work on at this stage in my career. 

What do you find compelling about computer science?

I mentioned the other standards writers I’m collaborating with; working with CS teachers in different places is a lot of fun, and I love how the PD I’m starting to do around that is all about understanding the conceptual underpinnings of CS. It's not didactic or stagnant. It’s giving  the teachers fish, and feeding it to their kids - because it’s all about their unique context and children and know how to fish on your own. 

STEM learning is truly nested within our curriculum in the state of Maryland - not just in Science and Math, but also integrated purposefully and with fidelity into our ELA classes, where it’s essential for supporting young children’s literacy. Hands-on lessons that link reading with critical thinking and problem solving are key to helping children become truly proficient readers. Simply knowing how to sound out letters isn’t enough; children need to be exposed to the world through hands-on experience in order to gain the vocabulary, critical thinking skills, and perspective they need to truly comprehend and use what they read. No matter what job you have in the world today, you need to be a critical thinker and a problem solver. With how fast things are changing, that skill set is essential to getting and keeping a good job - which sounds weird to be thinking about for 4-year-olds, but (in a developmentally appropriate way) that’s ultimately what we're working towards.

For students and educators of all ages, CT and CS particularly are very connected and complimentary to other areas of learning. While my department is technically serving children ages 0-8, most of our undergrad students go into pre-K to 3rd grade, and in order to get certified to teach in Maryland need to pass certain assessments (including the EdTPA). With that in mind, I can't just do my own thing; I need to prepare them to pass those exams. But no matter what class I teach, guess what I infuse in my courses? CS and CT! The cool thing about CT is that it amplifies and strengthens what they're doing to meet with success, both on those tests and more broadly in learning how to effectively teach young children.

The perseverance and problem-solving learned through CS are very important life skills. One thing I love about CS is how cool the process of making a mistake is; why did it happen? What are our variables? We can troubleshoot with young children and introduce them to that vocabulary, whether we’re totally unplugged or using something like Bee-bots or Scratch Jr. The debugging process teaches kids not to just write off mistakes by internalizing them as failures, which happens too much in education because so much of our curriculum has no subtlety; you either get a question right or wrong. In reality, solutions are usually more complex and dependent on context, and CS equips kids with the skills they need to succeed in more nuanced problem-solving beyond the classroom. 

The other space I really want to reach out to is the 0 to 4 year range, the home daycare providers, the private preschools. The teachers there usually don’t have Master’s degrees in childhood development, but they’re smart and have a lot of firsthand knowledge about how children learn. I want to get our work into their hands in a way that complements what they already know. 

I remember once during a training, while we were talking about STEM and CT, a home daycare provider asked, ‘Would a fork be a tool?’ She explained how she’d been making the kids' toast one day and it started to smell like it was burning. Without missing a beat, she started talking it through with the kids: ‘Oh no, the toast is burning; do you smell it? What should we do? We need to get the toast out, but we have to unplug it first so we won’t get shocked, and the inside of the toaster is too hot to touch. How can we get the toast out after we unplug it? The kid suggested something, they tried it, and it didn't work. Next, they came up with a fork. She went over the electrical safety aspect again, and then they successfully removed the burnt toast from the unplugged toaster with a fork. Afterwards, she got books from the library about how electricity works and they talked about the other appliances in the kitchen. So when she asked me, ‘Was the fork a tool? Is that STEM? Is that computational thinking?’ I was absolutely delighted, because how she intuitively handled that situation, without any curriculum or fancy supplies, is a perfect example of early childhood CT. The most important thing for young children is modeling problem solving and teaching them how to think.

What's going well for you? What are you excited about?

I’m honored to have had 5 MCCE grants so far. With my first (smaller) grants, I did baby steps with Scratch Jr. and the VEX123 robots at the Towson Child Care Center, which was awesome. We also did some parent workshops, which are a great way to try things out. 

When I got a bigger series of grants in the summer of 2024, I was able to hire one of our wonderful lecturers to help plan a series of lessons: a gardening unit, a Chesapeake Bay unit, getting ready for school, Simple Machines. We did a trial of those and made some really cool kits with manipulatives. Almost all of the lessons were unplugged, and we incorporated a lot of literature (both fiction and nonfiction) into them. My time was up a year ago on that grant, but MCCE let me have another year to finish since I had a little bit of money left; it was great to have the time to figure out how to use it wisely. 

This summer, I had an undergraduate who got a research grant from Towson. Working off of some bits and pieces I hadn’t had time to develop, she put together a comprehensive lit review on screen time and developmentally appropriate CT for young children, which I’m hoping to continue building on. Next, she worked on amplifying the lessons from the previous summer’s grant; we chose to focus on the Chesapeake Bay unit, since the bay is nearby for most of us and there are so many existing resources available on it. My student made some really rich and engaging lesson plans for that unit, adding in connections to the Maryland Standards for College and Career Readiness, and embedding ELA, math, and environmental literacy. Equity and accessibility have been a priority for us in designing these lessons; we had a lot of really cute materials in the first iteration, but decided to focus on building them around things that would be available to most teachers.

I also was able to hire a grad student, a teacher who's working on her Master's. We're developing a PD for teachers that she’ll be delivering this coming year; she’s also helping to look over our work and provide feedback on classroom application. She wrote a couple of practitioner articles, one of which was published in the TESOL journal. The activities we’ve been working on are perfect for students learning English  because they’re so hands-on and collaborative; language acquisition through meaningful tasks is organic and intuitive. 

We also published a second article in a different journal, Exchange, and the undergrad student and I will be putting together a third article on play and CT this fall for the National Association for Early Childhood Education.

The big goal is to start publishing in academic journals. There’s been a thread of research through all this work; I've collected the reflective journaling of everyone who's been involved, and the next step is to start filing permissions. 

My grant for the upcoming year will partially be about defining CT: what is it in its purest form, and what does it mean for kids? Many educators either don't know, or do, but don’t have the words for it. There will be suggested units and a template unit to provide the concepts teachers need to integrate, but beyond that, it will be very customizable to their unique contexts; we want to teach the teachers to fish. It’s all about understanding the conceptual underpinnings of CS, and I love how not didactic or stagnant it is.

I'll be the PI for that grant, but the lion's share of the work to get it off the ground will be done by the other people who have devised an ambassadors program for in-service elementary teachers. They’ll be helping me review the units we've developed over the last two summers and let us know how it integrates into the scripted curricula in their various school systems. One size doesn’t fit all, so hopefully with their feedback it can be made to serve all teachers. I’m so grateful to be working with them and to have the grant money to pay them; teachers are such sweet people, they’re willing to do a lot for even a small stipend. We’re going to do night book studies, and this fall they’ll also be working with Roger Olivella of Sistema Thead from Spain this fall, an MCCE contact who’s using Scratch Tactile to create hands-on materials that he originally designed for blind children. 

The final deliverable out of this upcoming grant is setting up a place to warehouse everything we’ve done so far so our work can help teachers across the state and beyond; I'm hoping to work with MCCE on how to accomplish that. I'd be doing this work on a much smaller scale without that support, and I feel like MCCE really trusts and listens to us and cares about what we're doing; I hope to be a good steward and have some great deliverables for everyone in the upcoming year. 

Aside from my grants, I’ve been doing presentations at the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) conference, and am actually going to be presenting internationally at the European Science Teacher Association as well. I’ve always had a pretty good record of getting accepted, but lately I've been getting accepted all the time, and I think it's because more people are becoming more interested in early childhood CS and CT lately. Because I’m a standards writer, I also had the opportunity to attend the CSTA conference this summer and  went to some wonderful sessions. I'm hoping to go again and present next year, either by myself or with some of the other Maryland people. 

Any advice?

I want equity in CS, especially for women and other people who are underrepresented; that might not be very popular right now, but I don't really care. As teachers, we work with human beings; we meet people where they are, we love them, and we support them, regardless of policy changes. Things have improved since I was in elementary school, but women are still underestimated and discouraged from entering these fields.  

It’s always important to find out what your students know and then work together to build on it; that's my biggest suggestion for people going into any arena, but particularly CS and CT. The world has changed so much, and my students help me maintain perspective.Often, when it comes to navigating newer technology, I’m learning from or alongside my students. In return, I can help them with the conceptual understanding they need to master (and effectively pass on) unplugged skills like reading a map and writing confidently.

My final suggestion is: don't be in isolation. People are wonderfully collaborative in Maryland and you'll learn more as part of a community. 

Dr. Christenson’s new book on working with young Dual Language Learners: Strength in Diversity is available here:
https://www.gryphonhouse.com/books/details/strength-in-diversity