Computers, creativity and learning

Can retire happy

From a student learning log "The sword was possibly one of the coolest things that we have done so far! Infact I think "Make a glowing sword like "Sting" from the Lord Of The Rings" is THE coolest instruction an educator has ever given me."

My shameless pandering to popular culture pays off once more...

Is 33 too early to retire?

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.

Pride and Prejudice (in which young man changes his mind)

Gentle reader, let me tell you a story. Stories have their place in education after all. Not as data in a scientific sense, but if you consider teaching as an art, then stories about students make up the fabric of what goes in a classroom. We all have stories about the student who found it too difficult, but managed to pass with some extra help, or the student who handed something in at the last moment but got an A, or the student who was doing well but inexplicably vanished. These sorts of stories make up your experience of teaching a particular class, and often are the impetus for replanning your teaching for next time. Unless you have the time to gather proper data and do the analysis, which I will do at a future point. For now, I will tell you this story about how one student changed his mind about Second Life.

Our story begins with a hardworking, clever first year student on my Interactive Systems module. He emailed me to ask if an entry on his learning log was acceptable. It was an article against Second Life in which he wrote about how he thought it was for people with problems, and that he was ethically opposed to it in the same way as he would be opposed to being made to work in a cigarette factory. He also wrote some fairly damning technical comments, which had some truth to them. Now, our student is not native to the UK and wasn't sure whether he was "allowed" to criticise a module in this way so he wanted to check with me first. "Sure", I said, "express your opinion, but make sure your argument is well constructed". I identified a couple of flaws in his argument and he corrected them.

During the module our student came to lab classes, lectures and made sure he kept up with the work. Sometimes he would go home to work at lab times because he got tired of the lag on the island when so many people were working on it. He turned out to be a good programmer. At some point during this period, maybe gradually, his initial prejudice against Second Life changed into a pride in his work.I met him on the island the other night, and he showed me his starfish pet. It was an amazingly imaginative and technically well constructed piece of work which took some lecture material as a starting off point for exploring emergent behaviour. The star fish wanders about the island looking for people to talk to. It also tries to find water to swim in. You can feed it burgers, and it digests them(!). You can play noughts and crosses with it (he has implemented simple game playing AI). It also shows you a movie with little star fish characters, and generates text as Second Life prims. In doing this, the student has discovered some limits of SL and bugs in Linden Script, and written so much error handling code that he has exceeded the max file size in SL.  He told me yesterday that he has enjoyed working on the pet and he thinks he has learned a lot from it. Today he won a class prize for his achievements.

So what does this story mean? You could take many meanings from it, but here are some observations. My sense is that when the student gained mastery over the technical environment, he began to look at SL in a different way. Instead of an instrument of social evil, it became a programming environment which, like others of its kind, has various limitations which need to be overcome. In fact, if you stand back for a bit from the everyday annoyances of working in SL, and consider the ambitiousness of what Linden Labs are trying to do, you can see it as an interesting set of technical challenges and evaluate their solutions in a more objective way.

Perhaps you saw the Guardian article about Second Life yesterday. It was a bit fluffy (like I can talk :-) ) but it did say "While students reacted positively to the experience [of taking a module in SL], getting them into the virtual world can prove difficult, she [Gilly Salmon] says. A recent Jisc/Mori report indicated that Second Life remained the least popular technological pursuit among students." Indeed, only 38% of my students who completed an online survey said they liked Second Life. On the other hand, their rating for the module itself and lab classes were exceptionally good. (More of that in another post). This isn't necessarily what you might expect from reading the literature. You might expect it to be a more stongly motivating environment. I suspect there is a feeling among students that Second Life is sad. They may feel self concious about using it, or worry that they are wasting their time. In fact, after just quickly casting my eye over the module feedback forms there are some comments that the students don't see how it helps them for employment. They may be prejudiced against it. But if they make the effort to engage with it, then they can change their opinions and really benefit. In short, there is not a straightforward effect for motivation here, and I look forward to picking it apart with some heavy duty data analysis. First the story, then the research.

Virtual crufts

Today was my last class for Interactive Systems: the eagerly anticipated event of semester - Virtual Crufts! (Anticipated by me, anyhow). Above you can see the winning entry in the Visual Appearance Category. I wanted to post pictures of the other two winners but Aggie the Rabbit wandered off, and Phantom the Starfish was "too tired to play with me". I kid you not. That is the problem with autonomous creatures. They do their own thing regardless of your convinience.  While the students were presenting their pets in class for the virtual crufts awards, a giant camel kept wandering up and humping my avatar. I believe its motives to be innocent, but still... how embarrassing.

If you want to know the sober and serious reasons for my virtual crufts madness, see a draft teaching pattern about it which Yishay is helping me with.

[Actually, while I was writing this the star fish wandered up to see what I was doing in Second Life, so I got a screen shot of it after all.  Aggie's whereabouts remain unknown.]

Snow globe: visual indicators of student progress

A theme which you have no doubt noticed in this blog is that of me keeping track of student progress in Second life by strolling round the island looking at what they have made recently.

Yesterday in class I showed them how to make particle systems (visual effects) through scripting. I set a challenge to make a snow globe for their snowman. This morning there was a snow globe waiting for me, along with some smoke particle systems. I know that various students had already taught themselves how to do this before the class, because I could see devil dogs belching fire, or fireworks being displayed when baby creatures were born. So I can get an idea of what skills people have developed reasonably quickly because of the shared work space and the graphical nature of what they are building.  This is perhaps similar to art and design courses where the staff can browse the shared workspace of the studio to see progress. They can also, as I do, comment on work which is under progress. I do this a lot by instant messaging the owner of a SL creature I like. 

This is probably old news for people who teach in discipline sother than computer science. But I find it endlessly fascinating because it's rare to so easily see the students work progressing in our other learning environments.

Virtual pet progress

In the labs today I was amused to glimpse a dragon on the island next to a squirrel. There was an acorn beside the dragon labelled "squirrel bate". I began to have a bad feeling about the poor squirrel, and further investigation revealed that -indeed- the squirrel is programmed to be lured towards the acorn where it will get crunched up by the dragon. When I went back to get a screen shot, the squirrel was gone. Eaten? Does the dragon look guilty?

This example of virtual nature's cruelty was inspired by a class I did on artificial life (boids and such) where I was trying to inspire them to set up eco systems on the island, and explain the concept of emergence.  You can see a video of my example cookie monster mating behaviour here: http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~judy/InteractiveSystems/cookimonster.avi.  You can see the slides:

Download Class9.ppt if you are interested in the code. It is a very cool example of emergent behaviour - the monsters unexpectedly go mental and have loads of babies all in a row. It was a surprise to me when it happened when I was recording the screen cast.

At the moment the students are trying to get their pets' tails to wag. This turns out to be ridiculously hard in Second Life and requires more maths than is good for me (or the students). I had to come clean the other day and admit that I was still researching how to fix a problem with code to do rotations of linked prims. (If anyone know how to do this, let me know). There is a silver lining effect which is that three students have researched this for themselves and come up with three different but viable solutions which they have agreed to share with the class. There are some very nice examples of peer collaboration, self motivated research and applying knowledge from classes to new situations here. I will write these up a vignettes sometime, but in the mean time I have a frustrating weekend of trying to make a cat's tail twitch.

Ravings of a cookie monster

I just spent the last hour explaining how to feed a cookie monster in Second Life, and how to have a caterpillar make babies. The lecture ended with a discussion of how you would script the monster to leave droppings.  I think I am going mad.  Maybe working from 7am to 10pm yesterday is taking its toll.

Having said that, there are perfectly legitimate computer science concepts behind these bizarre examples which I will get round to sharing some day.

The snowmen armies: reflections on teaching first year computer science in Second Life

Somehow I have inched my way towards week 6 of semester, clinging on with my fingernails. Next week I am not in the office, so I don't have classes to prepare and I can take the opportunity to think about what has happened with my monster class so far, and where to take it from here. Monster class?  I am referring to the number of students (138) rather than their natures (mostly quite sweet).

Second Life Teen rage

I have HAD IT with Second Life teen grid! Linden Labs could not organise a booze-up in a brewery. Or more accurately, they would advertise a free booze up but they wouldn't bother giving people clear instructions for finding the brewery, and then charge them a fortune for it when they got there.  My teeth are gritted and my belly is a burning ball of white hot rage. (Well, kind of...)

We have paid for the Teen island. We have paid for background checks for staff. Now it would seem that they expect the teenage students to have paypal accounts in order to create Second Life Teen accounts.   To create a paypal account you need a credit card. If you are under 18 you can't get a sodding credit card! Am I meant to create accounts using my paypal account and have my students merrily skipping around SL on a shopping spree funded by me? I think not.

Now you would think that I could just have a nice live chat with one of the Lindens to sort it out. I would, except that I can't currently logon and reissuing my password is obscurely hard. Aarrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggggggg.

I has teen island (finally)

At last! My background check has cleared so I can now log onto my Second Life teen island and survey my royal domain. I am Queen of all! Queen in a pink spotty dress, it would seem. No one else will disturb my solitude. No one else can log in. Yet.

I suppose I shall have to give our under 18 year old students access. As soon as I do the landscape will be full of flying snowmen armies, quick as a blink. Oh well, I shall maintain my delusions of grandeur for another few hours.

$40 per background check and several weeks for this much. Thanks, Linden Labs!  I had to get two done, because I use my maiden name at work but all my official documents are in my married name. Bah! After all this hassle I shall be extremely short of patience with local authorities who won't use SL in schools because of child protection issues. There is a double layer of protection: background checks for all adults using it PLUS estate managers can control access to their land to only avatars they trust. In fact, as I have discovered it's almost impossible to get on the flamin' teen grid in the first place. :-)