While only a fraction of students will go on to careers in computer science and actually write code, all students can benefit from an introduction to the foundational skills needed to be a computer scientist. Among others, these durable skills include being a critical thinker, identifying and solving problems, breaking down complex tasks into simpler steps, and thinking through tasks logically.
Fortunately, you don’t need to be a computer scientist yourself to help students develop these skills. You can achieve this by utilizing a very simple and common tech tool: presentation software in the form of Google Slides or Microsoft PowerPoint. With this approach, you can use simple technology to activate complex thinking.
What might this look like?
Essentially, you can have students teach each other content standards from your subject area by creating an interactive learning experience using either Google Slides or Microsoft PowerPoint. In its simplest form, students can create a few slides that teach a concept by including text, images, and video on the informational slides. These slides can then be followed up with an interactive quiz embedded into that same slideshow.
For the quiz portion, students could create a slide containing a multiple-choice question. The question might be at the top, with answer choices listed at the bottom as text or as buttons created by utilizing shapes in the slideshow platform.
The magic happens when students link each answer to other slides. If there are four choices, the three wrong answers would be linked to a slide that says something like, “Sorry, that’s not correct. Please try again.” To take it a step further, each wrong answer could link the user to a slide explaining why that answer is incorrect. This could be a great reteaching opportunity.
Similarly, when students click on the correct answer, they would be taken to a slide congratulating them on choosing the correct answer. From there, they would click a button that would navigate them to a slide containing the next question.
In a big-picture sense, students are creating interactive learning experiences by presenting content and then linking clickable answers and ideas to different slides in a presentation, which redirects users to feedback slides based on their answers. In many ways, this is basic computer programming. Students are designing and creating a series of if/then conditions. If a student clicks on a certain answer, then they are taken to a corresponding companion slide. If they click on a different answer, they are taken somewhere else instead. It’s a fairly simple product, but the process of designing and implementing it is cognitively challenging.
While this type of question-and-answer kiosk format is a great starting point, you and your students can make the experience as complex as you’d like. For instance, for your teaching slides, you could go beyond static text and images and make the learning slides interactive as well.
Students might utilize images with hyperlinked hot spots on them that take users to slides breaking down a linked part of the image in more depth. For example, when students click on the mitochondria in an image of a cell, they could be redirected to a more in-depth study of the mitochondria on a slide dedicated to that specific part of the cell. This process could then be repeated for other parts of the cell. Another option would be having your students create an entire Jeopardy! board-type quiz game, with a wide range of questions and answers, as well as more complex branching. The possibilities are nearly endless.
How do students create these?
One of the benefits of this approach is that most of our students already know how to create basic slides by adding text, images, shapes, arrows, and videos. While they will need to use these basic skills to design each slide, you probably won’t need to spend valuable class time teaching this.
The key technical skill that they will need to make the slideshow interactive is hyperlinking, so you may need to spend a little time teaching this. Students need to know how to make an image, area, or word clickable so that when clicked upon, it redirects the user to a new slide. In most programs, this involves highlighting a word, object, or area, and then clicking the link icon. From there, you would choose the destination slide. If someone clicks a linked item, then they will be taken to the corresponding linked slide. As a practical matter, you’ll need the destination slide created before you can link to it.
You can usually select an object by clicking on it or a word by highlighting it. If you want to get a little more advanced and have a portion of an image be clickable, then you’ll need to insert a shape over the desired portion. In most cases, you can select basic shapes, like rectangles, triangles, and circles. You’ll want to make sure that these are transparent and then draw them on top of a portion of the image. Then, to link them, simply click the shape and use the link icon as you would with text or other objects.
What skills will students be developing?
The technical part of this project is fairly simple. Once students know how to hyperlink slides, they can begin designing their learning experience. The complicated part becomes the planning and designing, and these are powerful cognitive skills to develop.
To make their interactive slideshow, students need to design the learning pathway, and they need to consider some key questions:
- What content will be presented?
- How will the content be presented?
- How will I design my multiple-choice options?
- What choices will I provide, and where do I need to redirect the user based on their selection?
- What kind of feedback will I provide for each linked choice?
In many ways, by working through this problem-solving process, students are learning the foundational logic of coding. They are writing a series of if/then statements, similar to what someone would do when creating a computer program. The beauty of this slideshow experience is that the tool is simple, allowing students to spend their cognitive energy on logic and planning, rather than on trying to figure out what buttons to click in a program.
To break this down even further, here is a list of foundational computer science thinking skills that students can develop by designing and building slideshow kiosks:
- Algorithmic Thinking: Students structure their slides in a logical sequence, much like an algorithm, to ensure correct navigation and user flow.
- Conditional Logic: Students use clickable regions (linked buttons) to create different outcomes based on user choices, mimicking if/then logic in programming.
- Decomposition: Students break down a larger problem (the interactive experience) into smaller components, such as slides for content, decision points, and feedback.
- Pattern Recognition: Students identify common structures for navigation and feedback that can be reused across different slides.
- Abstraction: Students design a system where specific details (such as slide content) are secondary to the overall interactive structure.
- Debugging: Students test links and fix errors in navigation to ensure that the user experience functions as intended.
- User Experience (UX) Design: Students think about how users will interact with their slides, including intuitive design, clear choices, and engaging navigation.
Teaching computer science skills does not require you to be a computer science expert. Even if you’ve never engaged in computer programming yourself, you can have students use a simple presentation tool, like Google Slides or Microsoft PowerPoint, to apply computer science thinking skills at a very high level. And you can do this while engaging students at a very high level and achieving your core content standards at the same time.
AVID Connections
This resource connects with the following components of the AVID College and Career Readiness Framework:
- Instruction
- Rigorous Academic Preparedness
- Opportunity Knowledge
- Student Agency
- Insist on Rigor
- Align the Work
- Advocate for Students
Extend Your Learning
- Google Slides (Google)
- Microsoft PowerPoint (Microsoft)