In need of a Base Case
Comments about coding, research and life

This is in response to Mark Guzdials blog post about “What are we? Chopped Liver? CS Left our of National Academy STEM Standards”.

First of all the standards are not billed as STEM, but “Science Education”. There has been a lot of buzz in the past year of how we have aligned ourselves with the mathematics community - to the point that the new national standards in Mathematics list CS as a potential 4th year course in its sequence. Can we offer outrage that “computer science” concepts are not included in the K12 science standards if we are also making the argument that we belong with the math folks?

We need to decide what we are. Are we math? do we belong in math? are we science? are we our own discipline? Because if we argue for belonging to everyone we end up looking like a 10 year old who argues that they should get chocolate sauce on EVERYTHING! Because chocolate sauce is important. The adults know that they can eat a lot of things without chocolate, and have done just fine without chocolate, so even though the 10 year old says they will DIE without chocolate, our own experience teaches us otherwise.

Now in a health model, where the conditions for what makes us healthy do not change, and reflecting on our own experience and things that we were taught years ago is viable, however our society and economy is a moving target. Yet, even then the 10 year old’s argument would still appear to be self-serving and frivolous. Now imagine the 10 year old wanted something less popular. Something like coconut-pomegranate sauce. You and I may not even believe that anybody would like the sauce in addition to not believing its necessary. And this is where we are.

Regardless of my own personal opinion of how we should move forward - this is the circumstances we find ourselves.

What is my opinion? Stop beating up the math and science educators. They have enough content to try and deliver to students as it is. They work hard and retraining ALL of them to correctly integrate appropriate and accurate computer science into their classes would be costly and meet with lots of resistance (both from the educators themselves and from a good portion of the CS community who believe that in order to teach any CS you need a bachelors degree in cs).

Let’s make use of another opportunity. Lets push for the literacy course in computing. Let’s shift the computer applications course to computing. Yes that means that at the K8 level they will learn some computer applications - but they need that! and use of tools is the first step to understanding the tools themselves. Spreadsheets can give us some early models of computation - especially if they are used smartly and the projects are designed with care - does anyone debate that we could teach prediction models and simple machine learning fundamentals in excel? And guess what - that aligns with the modeling and simulation strands that are showing up in the new math and science standards - look! the course may even get support from other teachers for such a curriculum if students could then use those skills in their other classes.

We are our own discipline. We should not have to piggy back onto another in order to achieve our own goals. We also need to pay attention to the two economic models of schools - student time (seat time/learning time) and money (teacher salaries and training). Ideally would I wave my hand and have CS fully integrated throughout the curriculum? sure. Do I still think we would need our own class to teach certain skills explicitly? as a cognitive scientist - absolutely (they will never learn it otherwise). Have I found the correct incantation and hand waving pattern yet? no. And so I style myself a realist, and try to use my experience in addition to my overall desires to evaluate the movement to get more students exposed to rigorous computer science and give all students an idea of what CS is.

Earlier this morning Marcia Linn gave the Keynote at ICER entitled “Learning to Teach Computer Programming”. The work that she talked about, while containing some historical perspective about teaching computer science, was mostly about a new report “Fostering Learning in the Networked World: The Cyberlearning Opportunity and Challenge” and two initiatives: Computational Thinking and 21st Century Skills Movement.

I have not read the Cyberlearning report, so I do not have a lot to comment about it.

As far as the Computational Thinking and 21st Century Skills movement - first I was very happy to hear the “21st Century Skills” agenda introduced at a computer science. She even gave a link to the 21stcenturyskills.org website and showed their “rainbow” curriculum model.

Marcia showed us a simulation from the WISE collection of Science simulations and tried to model how this was a computational thinking/21st Century Skill activity. (It was about global temperature and you could control the amount of C02 that was added to the environment) I was not convinced that it was truly a computational thinking activity. One of the features of computational thinking that I was struck by the first time I heard Jeanette Wing speak about it was the idea that Automation was one of the three key aspects of computational thinking. Its not just about looking a representation of information, but it is about somehow automating some process. The WISE collection of activities is great, but I’m not sure its really computational thinking.

Marcia also talked about a cycle of knowledge building that can be used through a tutor or electronic environment where students go through a 4 stage process of generating ideas, adding ideas, evaluating those ideas and finally sorting the ideas based on the evaluation. This reminded me a little of the misconception research that says you need to expose student’s misconceptions in order to move past them, however it was unclear how incorrect ideas in this process would be “weeded out”.

Still processing what my take away from that talk will be.

So, those of you who have talked to me in the past year or two probably know my opinion about “computing for everyone”. I believe that we cannot push an additional course into the already packed HS student schedule, and should instead take advantage of the computer applications requirement that exists in most schools.

That means re-designing computer applications and providing quality professional development for MANY applications teachers that often have business backgrounds and not computer science ones. I think this is much more feasible than requiring a computer science course for every student in addition to the current requirements and trying to put a qualified computer science teacher in each of those classrooms.

In a resent browsing of academic standards in the 50 states for another research project (that you will hear more about later when it becomes public), I came across a newly minted course description for computer applications in Alabama. Now I know you may say - Alabama? when thinking about rigorous standards and technological advances your first thought probably isnt Alabama (unless you are going alphabetically). Yet they seem to be ahead of the rest of us. The course standards can be found here, Its the Technology Education Course of Study.

Tell me what you think. What are they missing? Why are they good standards for EVERY child in high school? I’d love to start a conversation about the standards (not the tools or languages - I think thats another conversation).

(BTW - I REALLY like this course description. REALLY REALLY… I think all they are missing is a standard about open source at this point.)

So, Semester is over and there are a large number of lessons learned from it. That to be coming in another blog post.

This one is inspired by an online seminar being offered by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills where they are hoping to engage in a discussion about what 21st century skills are and how they should be taught. The link for the seminar is here and you can just click on the link to the right without registering for more information.

If we as a community (the cs ed community) do not engage in this discussion I am pretty sure that we will not be a part of it at all. While CS for CS sake is important, we should also be looking for opportunities like this to offer integrative activities and topics to the larger educational community as well. Register and watch or join in the discussion, its free.

So here is another 21st century skills article, this one entitled “Predicting the Past”.

In it the author argues that what is currently being hailed as 21st century skills is just more of the same for what we have tried to do in education in the past 30 years. I think this is where the maturity of our discipline can be a benefit. 30 years ago computer science was in its very early stages. Computers were still for the elite, and information was not freely accessible.

I strongly believe that an important part of 21st century skills is dealing with information that you couldnt possibly process all on your own. How do we aggregate information in order to make meaning out of it? How do we connect and communicate effectively over long distances and how do we take all of that into account as we think about what the next inventions might be.

Just another thought.

As I watched the inauguration speech of Obama yesterday I was struck by one of the images during the coverage. This image was taken from MSNBC’s feed of Obama’s speech. The picture is of one of the first daughters watching her father give a historic address. For me, If I had been in that situation, knowing that this was definitely being recorded by others, I would have watched to take in the moment.

His daughter was recording the event, or looking through her pictures herself. It struck me that this was a metaphor for the way the current generation of students experience the world through technology.

A generation that has grown up with the technology to interact with their world and measure, record, explain, interact, and evaluate the things around them is hard for us to comprehend sometimes. For this generation technology has always been there. It connects them, it informs them, it shows them their happiest and saddest memories and reminds them just how small the world is when they get an update from a friend who moved away.

We (generically) are still stuck in the model of technology is something that is separate from everyday activities, or is just another thing on the list. I have seen examples of seamless integration of technology into the classroom - done well is rare. Where the technology does not distract from the learning, or vice versa, and where the information shared, shown, or visualized fits effortlessly with the live instructor/class dynamic. (btw - I dont claim to have this perfect yet either)

Perhaps a question for technology education should be how do we take advantage of this view of ubiquitous technology? How do we identify the underlying principles that are lacking from the student’s knowldge of the world and give that instruction to them and make it explicit? After reading Alfred’s last post I feel that ethics is one of those places. Not sure what else is though.

In preparation for writing a paper on developing students critical thinking skills, I read an article? chapter? by LeRoy Hay entitled “Thinking Skills for the Information Age”. It is the second chapter in an ACSD book entitled Developing Minds A Resource Book for Teaching Thinking and if you dont have a copy - you should strongly consider getting one. Not one article from the book has been a waste of time to read.

In Hay’s chapter he talks about the emerging need for American Students to have increasingly more critical thinking skills, and how this is a definite shift from the needs of students in the 1960s and 1970s. Anyone who has talked to me about this issue knows that I strongly agree that it is not a problem where our schools are getting worse than they were, but instead are not designed (curriculum wise) to meet the needs of the current population of students.

Hay defines Information Literacy as “the skills necessary to efficiently access information that is accurate and relevant, to apply that information to solving a problem, and to effectively communicate the results in a format that combines language and graphics.” I think this is the cleanest definition of Information Literacy that I have ever seen. He talks about the changing needs of education:

In the industrial-age model of education, all students were expected to master the ability to recall and comprehend information. In recent years, we have added the expectation that students should be able to apply information to problem solving. But mastery of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation skills has been, and for the most part remains, the focus of learning for only the best and brightest. that must change if most of our students are going to be information service workers in the future.

No longer can we rely on a small segment of our population with college degrees to be the thinkers of society. The creme de la creme of our students leave our schools better educated than ever before, with the high-level thinking skills that will serve them well in the information age. The problem is that there isn’t enough cream in the graduating crop to meet the rapidly growing need for information workers. so the real challenge lies with the students in the middle. How can we improve their thinking skills so that they are prepared to succeed in the information-based society of the third millennium?

I’m not even sure what to add to that - it says everything I have been thinking about for the last few years. I will expand it beyond the information literacy definition that Hay gave though and include that students need to be able to reason about how technological tools can act upon their data (and LARGE quantities of that information) in order to produce meaningful results.

What does that mean? That means we need to think about re-emphasizing statistics in our mathematics. We need students to understand the functionality and limitations of computers acting upon data. Perhaps computer applications should be expanded to include simple machine learning (using algorithms already designed and developed to aggregate information). Maybe students need to learn about data storage and retrieval before we teach them how to implement the data types. Maybe we need to focus on helping them understand the applications they already use, before asking them to develop new ones (or old ones).

Every now and again you read something that affirms your beliefs and then at the same time forces you to question the foundations of the system (whatever your beliefs and system attach to). This paper is one of those for me. I have a feeling it will be cited in most things that I write over the next couple of years.

Many of us have probably heard the term “dog and pony show” when teachers are referring to the best lessons that they trot our for observations or special occasions. With the outpouring of recommendations for the incoming administration we are hearing a lot in the education media about 21st century skills.

Just to give you some recent links:
Education Sector - “Measuring Skills for the 21st Century” (*** highly recommend reading this one - its not long)

States keep joining the Partnership for 21st Century Skills I highly recommend you check out their Framework for 21st Century Learning.

Alfred Thompson’s Recommendation for Scratch

and even me in a post to the CSTA Blog about Maryland.

So what is this post about? Nifty links? yes and no. Tuesday I was in a meeting for the new science and technology high school in Pittsburgh (to open next fall). One of the new initiatives across the district is culturally relevant pedagogy. We were given a one sheet of the districts policy about the direction this initiative was to take, and also an article from the magazine “Teaching Children Mathematics” entitled “Creating Cultural Relevance in Teaching and Learning Mathematics“.

Now I applaud the organizers of this who went out to the literature to find examples that others have shown of practices that work. Unfortunately this article was just a dog and pony show to me. Students were asked to take a picture of something in their neighborhood and write a word problem about that picture. This example is only on the very surface of what culturally relevant pedagogy is about.

But this post is not about teaching math with culture - its about 21st century skills. I keep seeing the same kind of dog and pony show type snippets in the media and literature about this process. Teaching these kind of skills is not a one time lesson, or something that you can do once a week. It needs to be an integral part of your classroom, your assessments, and even the school culture to really take root.

Just like anything else we need to work to make this kind of learning explicit to students, develop strategies and give them distributed practice in order to have these experiences take root.

The robotics club I used to run had this kind of culture. We often entered up to 9 robots in competition, each with very different goals and framework. When one team ran into a problem or a challenge I encouraged them to use the whiteboard and other teams to help them brainstorm solutions. Students had to take a variety of factors including cost, feasibility, materials at hand, limitations of construction, and difficulty to implement in code for every project they took on. This collaboration and communication combined with the reasoning the students engaged in is a good example of how 21st century skills were encouraged in that setting.

Do you have any great examples? Or even good examples? I would love to collect a sample and put together a paper of my own