Bricklayer now in nearly 50 schools

Last spring, a ten-week pilot study conducted in the Omaha Public Schools culminated in an Open House held in the Durham Science Center. UNO faculty members, Betty Love, mathematics, and Victor Winter, computer science, along with mathematics graduate student Davina Faimon, teamed with Deanna Moisset (MAT 2008) to develop and implement an instructional unit on Bricklayer coding to OPS GATE (Gifted and Talented Education) students in twelve elementary schools.

Building on the success of that pilot, Love says, "Victor and I now have teachers using Bricklayer in close to 50 schools in eastern Nebraska. We’ve done presentations with an OPS teacher at the Nebraska Ed Tech Association (NETA) conference and the Colorado Association of Gifted and Talented Education conference. In the spring we’ll be doing another presentation with teachers from Nebraska City and Papillion-LaVista at the spring NETA conference."

Bricklayer (bricklayer.org) is a system developed by Dr. Winter, to help novices, especially K-12 students, learn how to code. Bricklayer programs can produce LEGO® artifacts, Minecraft artifacts, and even artifacts suitable for 3D printing. Bricklayer programming ranges from the very simple through various levels of mathematical complexity starting with a simple two-dimensional coordinate system and extending to a plethora of geometric concepts such as lines, circles, cubes, spheres, and fractals. By programming in Bricklayer, students learn logic and computational thinking, as well as numerous mathematical concepts.