Incorporating Computational Thinking in the Classrooms of Puerto Rico: How a MOOC Served as an Outreach and Recruitment Tool for Computer Science Education

This paper intends to share both the experience of teachers and document the research of the design, implementation, and evaluation of a massive open online course (MOOC). The primary purpose of the MOOC was to do outreach and build community to interest teachers from any discipline in Puerto Rico to incorporate Computational Thinking (CT) into their curriculum and peak their interest in Computer Science Education (CSE). Additional objectives were to use CT as a way to build self-efficacy in high school teachers as integrators of this newly gained knowledge while investigators learned the state of CSE and technology integration in schools of Puerto Rico. The MOOC titled Integrating Computational Thinking into the Curriculum was the first free online Professional Development offered to educators in Puerto Rico and has served as the launching board for the Computer Science Teachers' Association (CSTA) in Puerto Rico. This paper will describe the course's development, content and pertinent activities as they relate to the established goals of the project. Finally, it will share some vignettes of the educators' experiences as well as the results of a survey that was administered to 164 participants of the MOOC in its second rendition and had a 32% response rate.