Computers, creativity and learning

Seeking computer science students to inspire children about computing

 

When I was a lecturer in the Computer Science department at Heriot-Watt University, one of my favourite courses to teach was Computing in the Classroom. This was a fourth year course where students spent 40 hours helping out in a high school computing class. The students really loved the course, and I enjoyed seeing how much they learned as a result. Now I'm at Edinburgh, in the School of Education, and we're offering a similar course. This time we're looking for Edinburgh based CS/Informatics students to sign up for a course to work with teachers and help out with computing in primary school classrooms. This course isn't credit bearing (so no essays or presentations!) and it is open to students in all years of study. And -let's face it- primary aged kids are soooo much more fun than high school students.

Here's some reasons why it's a good idea:

• Help to inspire and mentor children in the subject you love.
• Show children that computing can be for everyone.
• Explore whether you'd like to be a teacher one day. One of my previous students wrote about the Computing in the Classroom course “The course gave me the opportunity to see what it is like to be a teacher and has convinced me that this is something I would like to do for a career. I understand there are negatives to being a teacher but the joyous feeling you get when someone learns something you taught them can’t be beat”
• Get out of university and meet new people. As one of my students said “Overall the Computing in the Classroom course has been a very positive and rewarding course and it is something that I will remember for the rest of my life. I like the idea of being out in a real-life working environment and doing things out side of university".
• Meet software developers who have also volunteered to help - useful for networking.
• Build your cv. Students from my previous courses told me that they really appreciated the chance to develop their communication and organisation skills, and that employers were impressed by them at interview.

To apply for a place, download this form and email it to me: ComputationalThinkingCourseAdvertCSStudents. You can also see the official advert for teachers here. 

Ranty paper about why HCI with kids researchers need to do better evaluations

In my continued campaign to alienate colleagues and generally stir up trouble, here is our journal paper which was just accepted in Journal of Child Computer Interaction. The main point is that IDC is old enough now to be doing respectable, replicable longitudinal research in ecologically valid settings.We need to get away from the emphasis on cute technology innovation. If you want to try embedding your research in a real world classroom setting, in a sustainable way, give our Train the Teacher Method a go!

 

Robertson, J., Macvean, A. and Howland, K. (2013) Robust evaluation for a maturing field: the train the teacher method. International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijcci.2013.05.001 Download CCIPaperForWeb (close to final version)

Abstract:

This paper highlights the importance of evaluating educational technology for children in naturalistic classroom contexts. We present the Train the Teacher Method (TTM) which formalizes a method for IDC researchers to use when deploying and validating an educational system. Our key findings indicate the need to work in partnership with classroom teachers, providing both initial training and continued support. This will both result in more valuable research data, and address a gap in teachers’ continued professional development. The TTM aims to ensure that teachers, students and researchers can benefit from innovative educational systems deployed in real classroom contexts. We believe that the TTM could be adapted to other domains of study within IDC.

The paper goes on to argue the more general point that the interaction design and children community should shift emphasis away from technology innovation and towards reporting replicable longitudinal research findings from real world settings. We discuss possible approaches to achieving this, for example through changes to reviewing criteria and by actively supporting data and source code sharing.

Inside the Coder Dojo

[cross posted from my CACM bog]

There is a buzz inside the Coder Dojo. The kids have been coding html 5 for the last 40 minutes and are testing their first web pages in Chrome. Some of them are showing off their geeky prowess by introducing font tags with colour values in hex. Others are clearly bursting to point out the mentor’s missing “</p>”. The lead mentor, who looks like a small boy from the ‘50s in his fair isle jumper and dark rimmed specs, starts a lively debate about the relative merits of different browsers, teasing Opera users for their poor taste.  In the next hour or so, the kids learn how to apply a simple css style sheet. The web is their oyster. “Who wants to come back to Coder Dojo Edinburgh?” asks the mentor. The air bristles with hands. Witnessing this, I am drawn in. I find myself volunteering to help run the sessions in Edinburgh despite the million other things I need to do. The passion and enthusiasm of the mentors is infectious.

This Coder Dojo session was held inside the Scottish Parliament and was sponsored by two members of parliament. It was attended by various guests from industry, government, education and of course by local young people. It was a very high profile way of highlighting how important computer science is to this country’s economy. Initially I wondered how Craig Steele, the founder of Coder Dojo in Scotland pulled this off. But after chatting with him for a bit I realised how. He – like the other Coder Dojo mentors – just go for it. They see kids who are desperate to learn how to program, they see young computer scientists who love to share their passion and they put the two together. No learning outcomes. No syllabus. No assessment.  No underestimation of children’s ability. No red tape. Just learning. It feels liberating.

“There is only one rule of the Coder Dojo” says Lindsay Macvean earnestly. “Be cool”.  Their charter, I learn, is free open learning through peer instruction. In the dojo, as in martial arts, everyone is a learner and a teacher.  In Lindsay’s dojo in Cork, Ireland, you might find a 9 year old teaching his friends Ajax, while an eleven year old rebuilds a PC in the corner. One of his new recruits recently released an app which became the bestselling game on the App Store in Ireland. Although the idea began in Ireland, it has spread quickly. There are coder dojos held in the Microsoft HQ, Twitter, and McAfee. There are 70 dojos in Ireland, and around 150 worldwide from St Petersburg to Tokyo. All are run by volunteers, students, recent graduates, established software developers, or anyone else with a love of coding and a little bit of time to donate.

If you’d like to get involved, visit http://coderdojo.com/dojos/ and see if there is a dojo near you. If not, why not start one? All you need is a venue, some mentors and some kids.

Turing's sunflowers

[cross posted from my CACM blog: http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/148589-turings-sunflowers/fulltext]

It’s the Turing Centenary Year. Why not plant a sunflower to celebrate? Manchester University, Manchester Science Festival and the Museum of Science and Industry are asking people to grow sunflowers and count the number of spirals in their seed heads in order to test Turing’s  theory that the seeds grow in Fibonacci sequences.

 

Turing was greatly interested in mathematics in nature, studying geometric patterns in flowers from an early age . At the time of his death in 1954 he was working on a problem in phyllotaxis: whether the seed patterns in sunflower heads (and other plants such as pine cones) conform to Fibonnaci sequences. If this were the case, what could it tell us about the growth of plants? Within the centre of a sunflower, there are interlocking spirals in clockwise and anti-clockwise directions. The number of spirals in each direction (referred to as the plant’s parastichy numbers) are usually consecutive Fibonacci numbers. The ratio of one Fibonacci number to the next is an approximation of the aesthetically pleasing golden ratio, which might explain why people like admiring flowers.  You might wonder why sunflowers bother with the maths – why not just grow random numbers of spirals? One theory is that growing them in Fibonnaci sequences allows for more efficient packing of seeds, hence more baby sunflowers, hence greater evolutionary advantage. 

As far as we know, the last empirical work on sunflowers was conducted in 1939, when J C Schoute scrutinised 319 seed heads.  Now the team in Manchester (where Turing did his work on phyllotaxis) have hit on a fantastic idea to run a citizen science project to involve members of the public in helping to finish off one of Turing’s last projects.  It should result in a dataset of thousands of seed heads, which may be deeply exciting to phyllotaxologists everywhere.  Hopefully the family friendly activity of planting a flower will whet the curiosity of young people, and introduce them to the rest of Turing’s work.  These beautiful flowers planted in Turing’s memory will be a fitting tribute to the man to whom Computer Science owes so much.

For more information

Follow @TuringSunflower on twitter, and tweet your sunflower news to #Turing #sunflowers

http://manchestersciencefestival.blogspot.co.uk/

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/8479/title/Math_Trek__The_Mathematical_Lives_of_Plants

 

The way forward for CS Education in the UK

[cross posted from my CACM blog but the links are screwed up for some reason]

The last week has seen some interesting developments in Computer Science Education in the UK. Or at least, there has been some public hand-wringing about the poor state of computer science education, some sensible proposals for what could be done about it, and some government promises to dramatically overhaul the school ICT curriculum. This could be enormously beneficial for computer science, assuming the momentum is kept up. The hand-wringing is along the lines of “We used to do this so well. Look at Alan Turing” and “Think back to the glory days of the BBC Micro project in the ‘80s”. And then there is a public shaming of the geeks in the nation by the CEO of Google who rapped us on the knuckles, and admonished us for “throwing away” our “great computer heritage”. The Guardian newspaper has embarked on a Digital Literacy Campaign which has a comprehensive selection of articles from kids, politicians, teachers, parents, academics and business people all bemoaning the state of computing education in schools. All this does seem to have had an effect; the Secretary for Education (Michael Gove) announced last week that the current ICT curriculum would be scrapped, and more high quality qualifications in CS developed with freedom for schools to develop their own curricula. Fortunately, the Royal Society published a report on Fridaywhich brings reason, evidence and considered recommendations to the well intentioned but confused discussions. It clarifies the terminology, distinguishing between “Computing”, “ICT”, “Computer Science”, “Information Technology” and “Digital Literacy”. It recommends that school children in the UK should be educated in digital literacy; in the same way as they become fluent in reading and writing text, they should become fluent in using computers confidently. The existing ICT curriculum attempted to do this, albeit in a boring, simplistic and out of date way. A real contribution of the Royal Society report is to argue that children should also have the opportunity to study Computer Science as a rigorous academic discipline and that the curricula and qualifications should be restructured to reflect this. The report recommends that the shortage of specialist Computer Science teachers should be addressed (alarmingly, in England, 66% of teachers of ICT are not considered as qualified by the Department of Education), and that teachers should have greater access to continuing professional development, perhaps offered through industry sponsorship. Resources should also be improved in terms of increased access to software and hardware, and a loosening of network security restrictions which currently hamper access to online materials. Extra-curricular computing activities should also be encouraged. Less cumbersome assessment methods should be developed. So maybe - just maybe- the much lamented golden age of UK computing can return. If we follow these recommendations, our schools will be full of little Alan Turings and Ada Lovelaces all busy in their sand pits exploring the fundamental nature of computation.

Foggy futures: the confused computing careers aspirations of twelve year olds

[cross posted from my CACM blog]

Can you remember what it was like to be 12 years old and have an infinity of possible careers in front of you? What made you choose computing? Was it a positive choice, or did you drift into it? I have been thinking about this today because I have been listening to recordings of interviews with 12 year old boys and girls about their attitudes to computing, and their future career choices.

I chose computing because it was difficult. I wanted the challenge. I distinctly remember trying to work out how to write a sorting algorithm as I trudged along my morning newspaper delivery route. Naturally because it was so hard it seemed the obvious thing to want to do with my life. (Go figure!) Back in those days, computers weren’t part of everyday life.  My exposure to computing was from learning to program at school, and from watching my dad type expert systems code from the back of a book into an Amstrad word processor.  But now, children’s exposure to computing is ubiquitous and centred around the use of computers rather than more fundamental computer science concepts. In our recent interviews with 12 year olds who had just completed a game making project, we asked them about what they understood by the term “computing”. It became clear that their understandings were partly related to the label for the subject on the timetable – such as “ICT” or “Information Technology” or “Computing Studies”. None of the classes were labelled as “Computer Science”.  When asked what they might expect to do in a computing class, the children typically told us about using applications: spreadsheets, databases, Power Point, Word, sound recording packages. The “Internet” was often featured, in the sense of learning to use Internet based applications safely and effectively.  They thought that in a computing class they might learn how to use computers in general, and learn to use programs they had not come across before.  A couple of students mentioned learning about what computers can do, and what parts are inside them. Oddly, no one mentioned that they would expect to study the fundamental properties of computation, or the patterns for effective software design.

In terms of future careers, the students often explained that while they thought computing was an important aspect of many lines of work, it was not something they wished to focus on. A boy who wanted to be a pilot mentioned that “there are a lot of computers in that. You have to log in when you’re going out and log out and your computer’s inside the plane.” A girl who wanted to be a doctor conceded that she would learn computing if it was necessary to do the job. Worryingly, a couple of the girls had misconceptions about how programming might fit in to careers:

Girl A: To be an optician or a vet, you have to use the computer quite a lot for that.

Girl B: programming and stuff

Girl A: To be an optician you have to program what it is, know what it is, certain parts. Like what’s wrong , how they can help and stuff.

Interviewer: Have you done any programming yet in school?

Girl A: I don’t know

Girl B: We did. We did our own program. “My computer of the future” that was a programming project.

Girl A: We know that programming is like typing and stuff.

Girl B: Is it?

Girl A: So I believe...

Typing? Opticians? This calls into question an attitude questionnaire I recently used which included a perfectly reasonable seeming question about how much the respondent enjoyed programming. The results may not be very reliable if some of the kids think programming is merely typing.

This brings me to a broader point around computer science education. With many excellent initiatives to encourage students to study computing underway, we are going to need to evaluate their effectiveness.  To do so, we need surveys which reliably and validly uncover changes in attitudes to computing. But such instruments will need to be designed very carefully if there is such a mis-match between researchers’ and students’ understanding of basic terms such as “computing” and “programming”. Perhaps vocabulary development needs to be part of the computer science education itself. We need to clearly articulate to pre-teens what computer science is, as well as why it is so important.

 

Slides from "How to Put Children Off Computer Science" talk

Here are my slides from a talk I gave yesterday for my research group:

TITLE:

How to put children off studying computing:  learners' attitudes to computer science after school based game making projects

 

ABSTRACT:

There is a pressing need to interest young people in computer science. A recent popular approach has been to harness learners' enthusiasm for computer games to motivate them to learn computer science concepts through game authoring. This talk will describe a study in which 992 learners across 13 schools took part in a game making project. It will provide evidence from 225 pre-test post-test questionnaires on how learners' attitudes to computing changed during the project, as well as qualitative reflections from the class teachers on how the project affected their learners. Results indicate that girls did not enjoy the experience as much as boys, and that in fact the project may make pupils less inclined to study computing in the future. This has important implications for future efforts to engage young people in computing.

Download VisageMay2011

Game Design through Mentoring and Collaboration

[cross posted from my CACM blog]

I was interested to read about a really fantastic National Science Foundation funded project called Game Design Through Mentoring and Collaboration. Taking place at McKinley Tech and George Mason University, the project encourages young people into STEM careers through weekend and summer courses in computer game design. I particularly like two aspects of Game Design Through Mentoring and Collaboration (GDMC). Firstly, the students learn with slightly more experienced peer mentors as well as an instructor. This can be a very effective model because both the mentor and the mentee can learn a lot, and it gives the teacher much needed assistance in a busy class full of temperamental computers and children. (If you want to know more about different models for effective mentoring Kafai et al (2009) is a good place to start). Secondly, the students also learn about science subjects and integrate their new knowledge into their games e.g. after input from a Federation of American Scientists biologist, the students’ games included accurate information about antibiotics, glial cells and neurotransmitters. If we can’t convince every child to become a computer scientist, any kind of scientist will have to do.

Game design projects are increasingly popular in education, and the evidence is starting to accumulate about the effectiveness of such schemes. In an article published earlier this year in Computers and Education, Vos and colleagues (Vos, van der Meijden and Denessen, 2010) compared students’ motivation and use of strategies for deep learning when they either played a simple memory drag and drop game, or constructed their own such game. The children enjoyed making games more than playing them, and were more likely to use deep learning strategies while doing so. A notable finding from this study was that the children were less motivated in the play condition than by their normal classroom lessons. This just goes to show that if you’re going to spend classroom time on a game, it had better be good, or you might as well not bother. Or perhaps a more positive way of looking at that would be to say it takes a high quality game to beat an enthusiastic teacher.

Game genre and graphical quality are likely to be factors here. The simple 2D board game style application in this study looks rather dull in comparison to the sort of action game you might find gracing the screen of a Wii. It may well be that making an online board game is more fun than playing it only because playing it isn’t that exciting to start with. In contrast, the Game Design Through Mentoring and Collaboration students learn a wider range of technical skills which enables them to make 3D games with proper physics. I think this is pretty important because in my experience kids want to make games which look and feel as good as the games they play at home. After all, they want their friends to be impressed when they play them. So hats off to the students on GDMC: your counterparts across the pond in Scotland salute you!

 

Kafai, Desai, Peppler, Chiu and Moya (2009). “The Multiple Roles of Mentoring”  From Kafai, Peppler, Chapman (Eds). The Computer Clubhouse: Constructionism and Creativity in Youth Communities”. Teachers College Press, New York. “

 

Nienke Vos, Henny van der Meijden, Eddie Denessen, Effects of constructing versus playing an educational game on student motivation and deep learning strategy use, Computers & Education, Volume 56, Issue 1, Serious Games, January 2011, Pages 127-137, ISSN 0360-1315, DOI: 10.1016/j.compedu.2010.08.013.

(http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6VCJ-50XS6C5-1/2/06e4ca67e68d2f5495080e31814a2062)

Valuing High School Computing Teachers

[cross posted from CACM blog]

On Friday the  "Look to the Future"  conference for Scottish computing educators took place at Heriot-Watt University. I had been planning this event for about a year so it was a huge buzz to see it come together. We were sponsored by Google CS4HS, and it simply wouldn't have been possible without their support. The money enabled us to invite excellent international keynote speakers on gender and CS (Jane Margolis and Alan Fisher) and the Scratch novice programming environment (Karen Brennan). We also had Keri Facer chair a panel on internet safety in the classroom, as well as a workshop from her on the Beyond Current Horizons project, an update on the new computing qualifications from the Scottish Qualifications Authority, talks on cutting edge academic research and a panel from industry on " a day in the life of a software developer".  There were also workshops on game making and university/school links with input from teachers.

The teachers I spoke to seemed to enjoy their day. They don't have much of a chance to escape from the classroom and talk to each other throughout the year so this was a time to share experiences and find out about new developments. In my view, ,it is particularly important to hear about what happens in other countries because the Scots have a tendency to be insular. (I can say that because I am one; others nationalities should be careful about such remarks about us! )

Almost more important than the networking opportunities and the quality of the content was the aim of making the teachers feel valued for the excellent work they do under rather difficult circumstances. I was aware that teachers' jobs are under threat because of fewer pupils choosing to study the subject at high school, because of budget cuts, because of constraints imposed by the examination system, and because of ignorance of senior managers about the difference between using a word processor and being a computer scientist. So I decided to set up a Best Practice award for teachers with a very a attractive prize sponsored by industry. I got the idea from a literacy award for teachers which had some fantastic entries last year. Sadly, we had only one entry. Yes, only one. Such is the nature of the Scottish teacher that telling others of one's achievements is almost taboo. It doesn't do to "blow your own trumpet", the teachers tell me. Creating a video of a class project and putting it forward for an award seems presumptuous. On reflection, this could be a trait of computing teachers rather than Scottish teachers- would anyone care to comment from their experience?

But on the day of the conference,  I realised that there are other ways of valuing what teachers do, as captured in this story: one of the  first teachers I met on the morning of the conference was my old high school teacher Mr Gladstone. Without him I would not be where I am today. He taught me to program. What could be more important in the development of a computer scientist? When I made the opening remarks at the conference I naturally pointed out Mr Gladstone to the audience and explained how he had inspired me. This got a spontaneous round of applause from the other teachers. They were pleased to be reminded of how important teachers are and what an impact they have on people's lives.  My Phd supervisor was there too, and some of my own students as well as teachers I have trained. This set me thinking about the little tendrils which connect teachers to learners to teachers, binding them together through a shared love  of the subject. This is what teaching is all about and the reason we persevere with it even in difficult times. So why not take a moment to look up that teacher who inspired you to study CS? Drop them a line. Tell them what they do matters.







Encouraging girls to study geeky subjects (part 2): Programmable bracelets

[Cross posted from CACM blog]

Continuing on my musings about ways to encourage girls to study computer science and other STEM subjects, I move on to consider the exciting emerging field of computational crafts, or e-textiles. If you’re new to this topic, have a look at Leah Buechley’s work  and prepare to be wowed. It’s the combination of craft work with electronics with programming. If that sounds boring, here are some examples to bring it to life: a tapestry that changes colour according to the weather or a bracelet which notifies you of incoming tweets.

As a female in computer science, I am quite often asked “how can we get girls interested in programming?” as if being female gives me some special insight into the mind of my clan. How would I know? I like programming already! I am the converted who doesn’t need preaching at. However, computational crafts is something I can get excited by because I find it so appealing to my soft squidgy flower-loving feminine side. The fact that it involves not just making beautiful artefacts but ones which display meaningful information delights my geeky hardcore so-called masculine side, thus uniting the conflicted aspects of my disjointed female computer scientist soul. (Have I offended enough people with this revolting caricature yet?)

I was lucky enough to have a great student this year who was also interested in the potential of computational crafts to encourage girls to take an interest in computer science, particularly programming. Emma Jane decided to develop a programmable bracelet which would enable teenage girls to communicate with each other in secret, based on the Buddy Beads project. The idea is that Alice has a bracelet which has input and output devices on it, such as accelerometers, switches, lights and buzzers. You can get very tiny, attractive versions of these (see http://www.aniomagic.com/) which you can embed in beads or sew into soft circuits with conductive thread. Alice’s bracelet is coupled with Berta’s bracelet and they communicate wirelessly using an Arduino Xbee component. So when Alice wants to attract Berta’s attention to a hot boy (or gadget or equation – let’s not prejudge these teenagers!) she presses switch 1 on her bracelet. The girls have previously specified (or even programmed) that switch 1 on Alice’s bracelet should be mapped to a yellow flashing light on bead 1 of Berta’ s bracelet so Berta is able to interpret Alice’s message and respond if she chooses. Emma Jane made prototype bracelets/armbands from felt  and wrote an interface to enable teenagers to specify the conditions linking input on one bracelet to output on another. 

She then took the bracelets along to a local secondary school where 13 twelve year old girls tried them out in pairs. She interviewed them about their opinions of the bracelet and whether they would like to be able to make their own in class. Interestingly she had a strong positive reaction from the most able female students who were very excited by it. As a measure of their enthusiasm, they reported it was “even better than Scratch”, their previous gold standard.  The less able female students were not so interested or enthusiastic. This does require further investigation with more students but it seems promising because my current concern in recruiting students to CS degrees is to attract more females and the very brightest among school leavers. This is partly because of the bizarre UK situation where universities have a limit of the number on students we can admit and get fined for over-recruiting, even in STEM areas. We can take lots of students, but we can work to ensure we get a mixture of high quality students with different backgrounds.

It seems that there are great opportunities to develop these ideas further. There are some problems which need to be overcome, though. One is that the kit is relatively expensive, which is one reason that Emma Jane’s students were not able to make their own bracelets – we could only afford 2 prototypes for a student project. It’s certainly too expensive to give every child the components to keep after a workshop. It’s also hard to find components which are small enough to fit on jewellery and which look attractive. Another is that sewing soft circuits is extremely fiddly and the components are not always reliable. So the pleasure of the craft work is undermined by the same kind of frustration that accompanies programming when you’re tracking down a bug except that the bug here is probably a giant knot of frayed conductive thread. It’s also time consuming to make a bracelet from starters and it needs some advanced knowledge to work with the Xbees for example. So you could spend a day running a workshop but only get to the main CS content towards the end. We need ways to scaffold the CS learning, e.g. by pre-making some of the trickier craft aspects while still enabling the girls to express their creativity in the design of the bracelet and emphasising the programming aspect. All of which I am happy to experiment with. It’s too cool an idea to waste.