Computers, creativity and learning

Pie bribery

Today some of my first years made me a pie. I am off sick, so the PhD students took it hostage! Does it seem wise to you to steal a pregnant lady's pie?

If this confectionary related bribery worries you, you will be horrified to learn of the cakes I am making for Crufts (student show case of virtual pets) on Wednesday which happens to be the only day left to hand out student feedback forms. (Actually, the official forms are online now, and should have been filled in, so no need to mail the HEA in protest).

Games in schools – sugar coated learning?

[cross posted on CACM blog and Adventure Author]

Do computer games have a place in classrooms as learning tools? Or do they act as a mere sugar coating to learning? That is: if computer games have a motivational effect on children are they worth using at school? Or do they have to improve learning outcomes to be worth it? This old chestnut crops up regularly, but a recent example in the Scottish press caught my eye this week as an illustrative example.

On one side, we have Learning Teaching Scotland (LTS), a government organisation whose purpose is supporting curriculum development in the country. They have a unit called the Consolarium which enthusiastically and energetically promotes the use of game based learning in schools. They have conducted some research into the use of common off the shelf games in classrooms, particularly relating to the effect of brain training games on mental arithmetic.

On the other side we have Professor Della Sala, a cognitive neuroscientist at Edinburgh University publically “slamming” (don’t you love newspaper headline verbs?)  a recent brain training study by Learning Teaching Scotland at a conference for Scottish head teachers. He does quite a lot of public engagement around debunking brain myths (such as you should drink more water to help your brain function as it is 80% water).

 Ho ho. A little spat between a government quango and an academic: could be entertaining. Let’s look a bit more closely at it.

LTS conducted a study of 634 ten year old pupils in Scottish primary schools, spending £33, 000 of public money. The control group took part in classes as normal with no treatment. The experimental group played the consoles game Dr. Kawashima’s brain training for 30 minutes a day, 5 minutes a week for nine weeks. They measured pre and post tests of accuracy and speed of mental arithmetic and some attitude and self concept measures. They report that there are significant improvements for the experimental group in speed and accuracy i.e. playing the game made the kids more likely to get their sums right and do them quickly. Interestingly, there were no differences in the children’s perceptions of their own mathematical ability between groups, although there was a slight but significant improvement in attitude to school for the experimental group but not the control.

Our neuroscience professor dismisses the findings and methodology of the study as “flim flam”. For some reason he thinks there was no significant difference on mental agility between the groups (as interviewed on the radio show "Good Morning Scotland on 20th Nov 2009). This contradicts LTS’s report, so I am not sure what his source for this is. I can’t find any of the actual data published to check it. He also criticised the control group’s complete lack of treatment for comparison. (In my view he should be grateful for this, because in a pilot study LTS had a brain training group, a control group and a group who did Brain Gym ! Yes, Brain Gym, that  bizarre set of exercises which have no scientific credibility whatever. Doh! What a weird choice of comparison.) LTS are “disappointed” and claim the Prof is being “disingenuous”.

You may be less amused by this piece of local squabbling than me, but there are more general points to consider. Firstly: the professor commented that the children might enjoy it, but it is not a suitable educational tool. We do need to consider whether increases in motivation are sufficient reason to introduce games into the classroom. Suppose LTS had not found improvements in performance, but the kids had enjoyed it and had a more positive attitude to maths afterwards. Would that be worth having? In my own opinion, it probably would be beneficial because negative perceptions of maths at an early age may well put people off pursuing it later in life, to the detriment of society in general. However, what LTS actually found was more positive attitudes to school but no difference in self-perception of maths ability.

Secondly, and more importantly, I have to ask why we care about speed and accuracy of mental arithmetic anyway? Have these people not heard of calculators? Seriously, as ACM members we might value children knowing, understanding or devising an algorithm, or even comparing multiple algorithms for the same task, but do we really care how quickly and accurately a human can compute using them? Humans are better at other more interesting tasks. Perhaps it is not surprising that children end up avoiding maths if their educators confuse it with mental arithmetic. Maths can be so much more than that. Maybe computers (and games) in the classroom could be used to explore bigger ideas, as Seymour Papert has been arguing for some time.

Technology- teaching feedback loop

I have been vaguely noticing an interesting feedback loop in my first year class which is technology based, so I decided to blog about it to help me think about it more.

This year we persuaded computing services to open up the wireless network so students can use Second Life on their laptops. This helps us in lab classes if they are too full, and also lets the students who live on campus work in the evenings when the labs shut. It also has a slightly unanticipated consequence of enabling them to come into Second Life during lectures while I am also logged in and demoing on the projector. This can lead to much hilarity as students walk past to get a "mention" or come and interact with objects which I demo them. It also has interesting implications for learning which I haven't quite exploited fully. During my classes I set regular mini-problems throughout the class so students have to put into practice or link together concepts I have just introduced. For example, they might have to write the code to feed a cookie monster to practice using the listen event handler in linden script. They can either write it on paper and try it out in the labs, or they can type it into their laptop there and then if they have one. An interesting aspect of SL is emergent behaviour; sometimes the students on their laptops notice interesting side effects of their code while programming in the lecture and ask me about it. For example, if you have two cookie monsters (or any object, let's face it) both talking and listening in close enough proximity you get an infinite loop of babbling. My student noticed this on his laptop and so I was then able to point it out to everyone on the projector and get them to hypothesise about why this behaviour happens.

As an interesting follow-up to this particular incident, another student wrote about that lecture in his learning log and how he had enjoyed this part of the class. I have the logs on a feed-reader so I can keep a vague eye on what the class is up to day to day. This form of feedback is useful because it lets me stamp out problems before they get too difficult (such as students who couldn't work due to technical errors in SL) and guage the pace I should teach at in the next class. In fact, one of my students performs the (unwitting) service to me of reviewing each of my  lectures afterwards. This helps her to revise the concepts she learned but also gives me feedback on how it went from the students' point of view. In addition, the learning logs from last year gave me such in-depth insight into the students' learning that I was able to re-structure the lab exercise for this year to make the increases in difficulty between exercises easier to manage.

So there are three levels of feedback from the students to me here: at an immediate time scale, feedback in SL during classes, at a medium scale, feedback from learning logs between classes and in the longer term, feedback from learning logs reflecting on the whole module after the semester is finished. I know that the current mania for feedback in HE is usually considered to be feedback from the teacher to the learners, but this is really only half the equation. If you haven't been subject to this mania, let me quickly explain: lecturers now live and die by the National Student Survey which is convenient way for national newspapers and other people with too much time on their hands to rank Uk university "quality". One of the questions is about how much feedback the students get from us, and how promptly. As far as I can see, there are a lot of universities which do poorly on this, including my department. So there is now a drive from senior managers for us to do better with feedback. The drive mostly consists of people saying we should do it without offering practical suggestions for how you do it effectively with large class sizes and working hours which challenge the nature of the time/space continuum. But I digress.  Usually feeback is meant to be all about the student: how they could improve their performance, what their strengths and weaknesses are and so on. I'm not arguing that it is part of our job to provide that. I am, however, pointing out that teaching is as important as assessment and that if you are going to teach well you need some way of knowing how the students are coping with your classes. The three ways I mention above are handy ways to do so, although there are face to face ways which work well such as relentlessly checking off lab exercises until you know each student's progress inside out (appropriate for first years). Of course, there are various ways to cope with getting feedback to large classes which I have been experimenting with but that can be the subject for another post.

OMG - IEE teaching award

OMG! I just got a phone call from a very nice american lady telling me I have won the IEEE computer society Computer Science and Engineering undergraduate teaching award!

I am very pleased about this, but also deeply astonished because I don't recall entering for it. Apparently one of my colleagues nominated me. From this point forward I resolve to stop moaning about my colleagues. I love them all! I get some prize money and a certificate and to go to Denver in June to collect the prize. I will get more info today in an email.

[Edit: due to my obsessive habit of email archiving, I have tracked down the mystery. My boss nominated me in July 2008 but one of the reviewers must have missed the deadline, and my app was carried forward to the next year I think. And Flexible Learning Pal wrote me a lovely and eloquent recommendation which must have stunned the committee into giving it to me. She is the Bard to All Teachers and has been duly rewarded with animal biscuits.]

Conference for computing educators

Alright you lot: seeing as I have invited everyone else in the known universe this afternoon - come to my computing educators' conference! It'll be great.

(It may also be notable for being the first baby sitting appointment for judy.children[0]'s grandparents.)  

"You are invited to a one day conference for Scottish Computing Educators on June 11^th 2010 at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland. We are very pleased to have a line up of international highly respected speakers including Karen Brennan from MIT to talk about the educators' community in Scratch, and Jane Margolis and Alan Fisher to talk about gender equality in CS instruction. There are also various panels with input from industry, and also from the SQA about upcoming changes to computing qualifications. For more details Download ComputingEducatorConference2010."

Rough with the smooth

My last hope of getting the Wretched Crush Area Refurb done before Christmas has just vanished into nothingness at the dire words "inadequate ventilation" intoned by our Estates Office. It turns out that building regulations have changed since the building was first built, and now any improvement work has to fix the lack of ventilation in the space. And as this work and the new ceiling will take at least 4 weeks, we can't do it in the Xmas period. We then have to wait until Easter because there are adjacent teaching rooms which can't be disturbed by noise during the semester 2.

That's the rough. The smooth is that they will pay for the additional building works. So it's hard to say no, especially if the students might perk up with a better oxygen supply. :-)

Why do universities work on such geological time scales? We had our first meeting about this in June 09.  By the time the work is finished, Judy.Children[0] will be born. Apparently it's quicker to gestate and deliver a baby than it is to refurbish one room in a university. I'll let you know which is more painful at the end of April! :-)

What do you call a student social learning space?

Refurbishing the students' scabby old social area ( known as the crush, for reasons which elude me) is like grappling with a slimey octopus with stinging tentacles. My time is sinking into the oceanic depths of this project. Giant immovable whale-like colleagues put obstacles in my way. All the while, hundreds of little studenty-minnows swim in the shallows, wanting and deserving a comfortable place to relax and learn.
In between rather fraught meetings about budgets, wiring and ceiling tiles, I have been amusing myself by thinking up names for the area when it is finished.
Here are my ravings so far. Feel free to comment with more.

General

Think space
Talking Point
Learning Lair

Computer science related

Java joint
Lovelace lair
Dijstra's den
Church-Turing Chillout Zone
Van Neumann's Land

Names to 'honour' high up profs

Aylett atrium
Pooley Plaza
Taylor Territory
DeWilderness
Chapman chatroom

This way madness lies...

Made it!

I is senior lecturer! Which goes to show hellish interview and several months wait paid off after all.

Made it!

I is senior lecturer! Which goes to show hellish interview and several months wait paid off after all.

You know you're old when... you realise students are not invisible in lectures

I am working on a theory that lecturers gain magical powers the longer they stick around in universities. There is a self confessed Gandalf in my department, for example, whose job is to defend the rest of the staff from the Balrog that is the central university. I would quite like to be a female equivalent when I get more grizzled, but unfortunately Tolkien wasn't big into writing female wizard characters. Maybe the White Witch in Narnia? <cackles>.

My reason for thinking I have magical powers is this: I see students in lectures! (Live ones, luckily, although it can be hard to tell). Yes - it's true! When I am standing up in front of the class I can actually see to the back of the class. I can see students in the back row snoozing. Or avidly reading Facebook on their laptops. Or chatting to each other. Once I even saw one read a newspaper. Astonishing, no? All this time students have been assuming their activities are invisible but now I have the power to see them. If only all my colleagues had the same power...

For the sake of my pride, I will point out that the more blatant of these activities tend to occur only in classes where I am taking a guest lecture. Students who take a module with me know I have the unfair habit of making them solve problems in class, or even discussing learning related topics with each other. Like my colleague Wizard Pooley, I even have been known to walk the aisles of the lecture theatre among the masses, looking at their solutions and trying to help. It's rotten of me, I know. It interferes with honest people's sleep and relaxation and destroys their invisibility illusion.

At a class recently I made an epic journey to the back row where I enountered some students staring at blank paper instead of writing code as I decreed. When I asked them about it, they said they were too tired to think. Said I "Perhaps you would be better catching up on your sleep at home if you're too tired to learn". "Oh no" said the student piously , "It's important to attend".

This is an echo of an argument I sometimes have with colleagues. They talk about wanting good attendance in classes. They want bums on seats. I have a naive longing for more than that. I want brains on seats! Attendance is half the battle, of course. But while just turning up in a lecture and expecting that you will understand more at the end of an hour might make you feel virtuos, it is not exactly effective. In my evil White Witch-in-training view of the world, it is not soley the responsibility of the lecturer to make sure that students learn something during a class. At least half of the effort should be going on inside studenty skulls.

My point today, apart from just liking to rant, is that we lecturers (in my dept) anyway have cocked up. We have set our expectations for student behaviour in lectures too low to the point that if you try to do something different to promote more effective learning,the students resent it. You have to have a gentle period of re-training until they arrive all bright eyed and busy tailed with sharp pencils, calling out for opportunities for active learning. My cute little first years are almost there, bless them. Older students continue to cast their cacoons of invisibility.