Computational Literacy: A Study of the Efficacy of Computational Science in High School Biology and Earth and Space Science Classrooms

The project’s multidisciplinary research and development team has been investigating whether the integration of a specific kind of computational model i.e., simulations into a high school science curriculum, can support students from diverse academic, ethnic, and socio-economic backgrounds in developing computational literacy—a capacity to understand relationships between domain knowledge and the mathematical, algorithmic, and modeling processes that are the building blocks of computational science. The project’s approach to the teaching and learning of computational science concepts, skills, and techniques, is reflected in the four science topic modules—Population Dynamics: Predator/Prey, the Spread of Disease, the Carbon Cycle, and the Rock Cycle —that help to define the Computational Laboratory, the project’s Web site. Centered around a comprehensive visual simulation of computational data, each of the four topic modules encourages users to discover important, but not immediately obvious layers of information by manipulating the scientific, mathematical, and algorithmic elements that underlie the computational model.