The 3C Model: Revolutionising Coding Education in Primary Schools with Peter Curtis

In this episode, we dive into the "3C Model"—a teaching pedagogy reshaping how coding and computational thinking skills are taught in primary schools. Join us while we talk to Peter Curtis, a teacher and researcher with the University of the Sunshine Coast who developed the 3C Model. Peter's teaching and research  interests include mathematics, science  and technology. He has recently retired from classroom teaching after some 42 years. 

In this episode, Peter explains why he developed the 3C Model and what each of the 3Cs stand for with real classroom examples. His research has found that the 3C Model is a tailored pedagogy and sequencing strategy that promotes deep, collaborative learning and sparks high levels of engagement in young learners.

To find out more about the 3C Model, check out his recent publications:

Martin, D. A., Curtis, P., & Redmond, P. (2024). Primary school students' perceptions and developed artefacts and language from learning coding and computational thinking using the 3C model. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcal.12972

Martin, D.A., Curtis, P., Redmond, P. & Byrne, M. (2024). The 3C Model for Teaching Coding and Computational Thinking with an M in STEM Focus. In J. Cohen & G. Solano (Eds.), Proceedings of Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference (pp. 2162-2172). Las Vegas, Nevada, United States: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE). https://www.learntechlib.org/primary/p/224275/

Curtis, P., Moffett, B., Martin, D. ( 2024)  Integrating  mathematics and digital technologies; a practical teaching approach using the 3C model Australian Primary Mathematics Classroom (APMC) 29 (1). 

Transcript

Natalie McMaster: Welcome to the AARE Technology and learning SIG Podcast. My name's Natalie McMaster, and today I'm talking to Peter Curtis from the University of the Sunshine Coast. I've invited Peter to the Podcast to talk about his research and in particular, the research that he's conducted on learning coding and computational thinking, using the 3 C model. So welcome today Peter.

Peter Curtis: Gidday Natalie. Thank you very much for having me. It's a it's a real honor.

Natalie McMaster: Fantastic. So I guess we'll start by talking about why you embarked on this particular piece of research.

Peter Curtis: Okay. Well, Nat, to be honest with you at the end of the day I'm a teacher. I do work in the university, but recently retired from full time teaching, and I'm old enough to remember when the digital technologies curriculum kind of landed in schools and the kind of chaos that it created a little bit for teachers. So we were watching teachers open up a new curriculum that was completely unfamiliar to them. They'd had new science curricula, but they'd taught science before. All of a sudden now they had a curriculum with words like iteration and looping. And, to be honest, the the the implementation of the curriculum was fairly light. There wasn't too much on offer for teachers. And so we kind of sat back and had a bit of a look at how teachers manage this. Teachers are good people. And they do their best with things. And what I do know is that, look beginning teachers these days working with people like yourself have just such an advantage because they do get that background work. But teachers who were in schools really had nothing to go with. And so after about a year, we stopped, and we saw that they were kind of a bit of a continua developing here. And this was reflected in the research as well that we were reading at the same time. And it said down at one end, there'll be folks who, it's a completely playful attempt. So basically much in many programs, you might put out some Lego, and then the research called it Bricolage, which I thought was an interesting term, which is a bit like a craft approach and just basically cross your fingers and hope that kids pick it up. And down the other end of the continuum there were kind of 2 extremes. Down the other end was very procedural. Step by step. Put this block here, put that block there, now you've got a stopwatch. And teachers were finding somewhere along that particular continuity to kind of fit in, which is okay. But we were looking at it from the point of view of how the kids felt about all this.  And that's why our research really did focus very much on student voice. So that was kind of like the background. The other thing that we noticed, too, that some teachers did start to pick coding up. But they didn't really know how to teach it. And we thought to ourselves, if you're a science teacher, you've got a way to sequence a unit of work. You've got the 5 E's. If you're a Maths teacher you've got, you know, Kath Murdoch's inquiry model that you can sort of work your way through. And if you're a teacher of coding. You don't have too much. So we wanted to provide teachers with a bit of guidance there. And so that's kind of the background for where we began.

Natalie McMaster: And so with the the 3 C model. What do the 3 C's actually stand for?

Peter Curtis: We kind of thought, well, they need something that guides them through it. But the last thing we want to do is to develop a brand new approach to coding. We thought, you know, teachers are busy people. What about? We try and work with something that's a little bit more familiar. And so we looked around and thought, 'What do teachers already know, and what's coding like?' And at the end of the day we said, well, coding's a lot like mathematics. It's at the end of the day, looks fairly symbolic. But the symbols stand for things that you actually do. And you know, good maths teaching. We basically said to ourselves, What's good maths teaching involved? And we realised a couple of things. Thing one was that don't start with the symbol. The language model mathematics says, the best way to teach maths is, start with hands-on, metoric movement ideas, bring in the language and then end up at the symbol. But for God's sake, don't start at the symbol. So we thought, well, that's something the teachers know and understand. And then we thought, what else do they know and understand? They realised that from the 21st century model our own Shelley Doll and Marilyn Goose, the context is everything when you're teaching maths. If it's about nothing, or if it's about the symbols themselves, then it's every possibility kids will be disengaged. Kids won't be able to transfer the ideas. Kids will.

Natalie McMaster: There's no meaning to it. Yeah.

Peter Curtis: Meaning. Yeah, let it be meaningful. And the last thing we looked at the work of Seymour Pappett, and Mindstorms. Which basically said, look good coding rather than good mathematics now is going to involve something that Seymour called the Syntonics. So it'll be ego syntonic. We said, well, that's meaningful. Yeah, that has a connection to 21st century model. It said it would involve movement. And we thought, Well, okay, that's kind of in there with the representation side of things. So those kind of things mixed together, we said, here's a starting place rather than let's, you know, start from a brand starting place and make the life of teachers even more difficult. Let's go with something that they know. So then we got to the question of.

Natalie McMaster: What do the 3 C's stand for.

Peter Curtis: Okay. So you can see with the 3 C's just overall. The 1st C stands for context. We can kind of see where that comes from, which model it comes from. The second C stands for capability. And in this instance it's the capability of the device itself. So if you look at a device, it can do certain things. We use that one, because if I look, for example, at a Lego brick, and I point it at something and I have the proximity sensor on. I look at the brick and it says, Oh, the walls 3 meters away! What we found was that this was very coherent with the language model mathematics. Because what you're hearing is kids, teachers modelling and kids saying. 'If' I point it at the wall. 'Then' it will. And we thought, hang on. That's the language of coding, and that's a branching statement. And what we found was by just giving kids devices that were pre-programmed, they'd notice things, and they'd articulate things that was heading them towards the symbolic block. And when we found that we modelled that  it kind of, you know, helped them along the way. So context. Capability of the device and the last C was Computational thinking. So that was, if you like, bringing together their movement, acting out the code. Bringing together the words that they generated in terms of 'If', 'then', 'when' all those sorts of statements, 'until' and bringing all that together, and saying well. That those ideas can be represented symbolically in the same way that 3 apples plus 5 apples equals 8 apples. So that was the path that we kind of traced. And again, we've sort of said to ourselves hopefully, that will be relatively familiar to teachers. It's not that new, it's scaffolding, or something they already know.

Natalie McMaster: And so what did you find that the students liked about learning within that 3 C's model, in comparison to the 2 other extremes of the continuum.

Peter Curtis: That was the major part of the study was to find out, what is it that the kids liked? Because the kids also had experience in doing the, you know, follow the steps. 3 things that came out of it. Number one, kids liked the contextualize and creative struggle.  So, for instance. instead of making a generic stopwatch or something. That they had no input into, they tended to make devices that meant something to them. I'll give you a perfect example. Often the context that 1st see was either from the curriculum, from a health area or a science area, or sometimes it just came from the kids own experience. There was one lad, I remember said to me, his young brother he wouldn't. He had to toddler brother, and he wouldn't eat his breakfast. It was a real struggle at home, and so we were working with micro bits at that stage. And so there was the context. I can't get my brother to eat his breakfast. And what we showed him was that if we took a micro bit and we moved it within the capability of the device. We showed him that the micro bit could count how many times it was moved. It's got an accelerometer in it, and it also could respond to the count. In other words, if it, moved 10 times, it could display something and make a lovely sound. And so he designed at the end of the day a little wristwatch for his brother. Where, if his brother took 5 teaspoons of his breakfast.

Natalie McMaster: Of his cereal.

Peter Curtis: It would display a smiley face and play a song. And so the 1st thing that kids liked was, that was hard to do. It was much harder than following a series of directions. But they liked the struggle. That was the 1st thing. And they liked having an input into what the product was going to be. And that was also coherent with the digital technologies curriculum which said, this should be about making our life better. This should be about problem solving. You have kids come up with some fabulous ideas. Can I give you one more.

Natalie McMaster: Yes, yes, that'd be great, and it does sound like the engagement actually increased because they had that autonomy to make a decision about what their project was about.

Peter Curtis: Indeed, that's precisely it. We worked with another group of kids. They used to have to go down and tap on the rainwater tank to work out how much water.

Natalie McMaster: Okay, was in the tank. Yep.

Peter Curtis: It was a nuisance of a of the job. No one hated going under the house where the spiders were, but they worked out that if they pointed a Lego brick with the proximity sensor on it. It could tell them exactly how far the water was, and so they made a wee model. That it sort of bounced. And it said, the water is this far away? And they all said to themselves, Well, if the water is that far away? That means there must be that much water in there. A little bit of maths in there. The context was the water tank, the capability. They worked out what the thing could do. We acted all of that out. We used all of the language. 'If' we get a message. 'Then' it will tell us how much. And then we basically took that experience and joined that in with the blocks. And they made a fabulous little device that you could press a button, and they did a bit of maths also to work at how much you know. If it's that far, how big is the tank. They did a bit of mathematics there to work out how much water was left in the tank. Interestingly, I saw on Instagram the other day that that's actually a device you can buy now.

Natalie McMaster: Oh, wow!

Peter Curtis: What the hell? Yeah, all sorts of things. Kids made possum boxes where when the possum went inside and they made a floor. The floor rocked. They worked out the capability of the device was that it could sense when the possum was in there and the micro bit then just sent a message, and the kids kept a track of when the possum was at home. It drew a little graph for them because they worked out that was its capability. 

Natalie McMaster: Fantastic. So it even sounds like the when you give them the ability to make that decision about the context that they're going to be working within. That they've even made their task you know, given themselves the task with a lot more rigour than possibly we would have done as a teacher, if we'd have kept with the same sort of topic or context that we had decided on.

Peter Curtis: Indeed. So what we found was that we gave them a context at the beginning, but when it got to the end they would branch out into things that we had you know, no thoughts at all. Look, the other thing that kids noticed too. Back in the early bricolage approach, the main resources for that were a screen or a teacher. and unfortunately, the teachers sometimes were struggling themselves, you know, to sort of stay with it. What they found, what the thing they reported here, too, was that the resources for solving the problems kind of moved away from that. And there were 2 ways they could solve the problem. Number one was to go similar to mathematics. If a kid can't get subtraction, what do you do? You go back to the representation. You know, we used to have kids acting things out. We have kids focusing on the language. And the kids said, Look. When we noticed them doing it. You know, we were recording them doing this. We'd often see them move away from the tech. And go. And well, okay, if I walk towards the wall, then what will happen? And they tend to do it in a very metoric way. We didn't really intend to do that. But we then grabbed that with both hands and thought, well, okay, everyone's every learning area needs a method of differentiation. It makes sense. If kids don't get the block to forget the block and go back to the language and go back to the representation, act it out and then move your way back forward. So yeah, kids reported that the resources that they tended to use were each other, and simply act it out, and going back to those sorts of approaches which was interesting.

Natalie McMaster: And I guess that too, takes the pressure off the teacher as well in terms of their sort of coding knowledge and skills as well, if students are using each other as a resource.

Peter Curtis: Precisely. That was the thing we very much found that that look. If you break coding down, there's really only 3 or 4 really big ideas. Looping. Keep doing it until something happens. And if you put it in those words it's much easier to understand. Branching. You know, if you're driving around. You're branching every day. If you're driving around a car park looking for a a car parking spot, you'll keep looping until you spot one. I think, to see it that way. It was also a little, you know, a little opening for them, too, to understand that the block. Is not that scary and not that frightening. And it actually means something that's quite everyday and familiar. Algorithms, a big word. But it's needn't be that scary.

Natalie McMaster: Oh, fantastic! So it sounds like the 3 C's model. Not only has an impact for students, but also for teachers themselves in understanding the coding and the computational thinking skills as well.

Peter Curtis: Indeed, it kind of tended to demystify it, and I guess that was the reason that we were looking for models that teachers already knew. Teachers understood that if you just taught an algorithm mathematically, from a procedural point of view. That kids can do it. But they have no idea what they're doing. Nor can they be creative with it, which is pretty much what the design and digital technologies curriculum demands. Yeah, it did free teachers up a little bit, which was nice.

Natalie McMaster: Oh, fantastic! I like it. So I guess my last question today is, how could your research be built on further, do you think? What are some of the things you might like people to think about, you know, in using the 3 C's model in future.

Peter Curtis: Yeah, look, most of our research was fairly small scale and and focused on very much approach with, you know, with children. What we do need to do, I suppose, is broaden this out and work with a greater number of teachers, I'm getting too old at this point, and thinking about retiring. But this is certainly a direction I'd like to see this go. Unfortunately, these problems are still the problems of teachers using bricolage or using, you know, a very procedural approach still exist broadly in schools. There are, of course, pockets of innovation, but I think what's happening here is the teachers again, teachers are always looking for a better way or a more efficient way to do things. And so, yeah, I guess broadening it out to the the teaching population, who are a little hard to reach sometimes. But perhaps a good way to go is to approach beginning teachers, who are probably a little bit more open, and have a little bit more time to engage with these sorts of things before they hit the schools.

Natalie McMaster: Oh, fantastic. Well, hopefully, today, after our podcast, we will get some more information out there for teachers on the 3 C model. And I also know that the 3 C model itself has been in a conference paper as well as a teaching magazine as well. So we'll put those links down below so that people can go and have a look and yes, start using the 3 C model in their practice.

Peter Curtis: Cheers, Nat. That'd be great. You know, teachers are great people, and they just need a little bit of a leg up I think sometimes.

Natalie McMaster: Fantastic. Thank you so much today for your time, Peter.

Peter Curtis: Thanks, Natalie, a pleasure to talk to you, and thanks for the opportunity.

Natalie McMaster: Thank you. Bye, for now.

Peter Curtis: Bye-bye.