Callicore

A classroom-oriented open programming curriculum for math teachers

Para ler este documento em Português, clique aqui

Para leer este documento en inglés, haga clic aquí

(image by Charles J Sharp - Own work, from Sharp Photography, sharpphotography, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44542354)

Why?

High school teachers are often intimidated by programming, but children are expected to learn computational thinking from an early age. In particular, brazilian teachers don’t learn programming as a part of their academic training, but many schools expect them to work with new media, including interactive tools. This project was born out of a desire to help teachers understand critical programming skills that would allow them to design beautiful, engaging and active learning tools.

Specific skills for teachers

Learn how to use programming to create constructive activities, not just interactive ones
Apply computational thinking in the classroom
Promote digital literacy among teachers and students
Learn how to apply debugging concepts and techniques to teach: reframing errors as a natural part of solving problems

Content

Our content is focused on the activities proposed around the math curriculum for 15 to 17-year-olds in Brazil. The course can be followed by undergrads who are training to be teachers, or by teachers who have never had any training on programming.

The content is designed from proposed classroom activities; we work backwards to ensure teachers have the knowledge to mod- ify and create similar activities on their own.

Check out the full content here

Tools

We rely heavily on Jupyter Notebooks and the ipywidgets tools to create content that can be used in two ways:

The content can be used as is, without too much trouble;
Activities are heavily customizable

Goals

This is very much a work in progress! We expect collaboration and welcome feedback and ideas.

Accessibility. Our materials need to be accessible by people with low-end devices (smartphones)
Internationalization. Currently, the material is in Portuguese and English. We hope we can get support for multiple languages.
Focus on active learning. The curriculum is built around concrete examples that can be included in the classroom.
Teaching creative teaching. The examples are meant to encourage creative learning and exploration, not just executing
tasks.

Contributing

Anyone is welcome to contribute; there is no required minimal level to be a contributor. If you catch a typo, have a better idea for an activity, found a bug or would like to make a request, we'll be happy to hear from you. Please be mindful of our Code of Conduct.