STEMcoding is officially listed as an instructional support in Ohio

The Ohio Department of Education issues guidelines on which topics need to be covered in various math and science courses and they also provide instructional supports and resource lists to provide quality materials for teaching those courses. A series of meetings with dozens of science educators took place in 2017-2018 to update these documents. These meetings produced the revised Ohio Science Standards, which were released about a year ago. And they produced an updated list of instructional supports for various subjects but the release of these documents were delayed. This month the updated instructional supports for physical science were published on the Ohio Department of Education’s website.

STEMcoding activities are listed in three places in the new instructional supports for physical science. A reference to our first hour of code activity is mentioned in the section talking about velocity and acceleration.

There is also a reference to our fluid mechanics interactives in the section that talks about phases of matter.

And there is a reference to our wave interference activity. In 2017-2018 when the meetings happened to update the documents, our wave interference activity was one of the few HTML5 compliant wave interference interactives on the web (meaning that it works on Chromebooks and most other operating systems). PhET had not yet migrated their wave interference interactive from a Java applet to HTML5 which prevented it from working on Chromebooks and newer computers. A frequent topic of discussion at the meetings in 2017-2018 was issues around Java applets and flash media that teachers had been relying on but were not working any more on Chromebooks and recent computers.

We are proud and excited to be listed officially as an instructional support for physical science in Ohio! We anticipate that our activities will also be referenced when the instructional supports for physics are released later this year.

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