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

The ASCD Staff Development RSS feed is one of my new favorites. Recently I was sent a notice of an article written in Educational Leadership (their journal) by Marc Prensky entitled “Turning On the Lights”. Read it.

One paragraph for me really speaks to what I believe in and what I hope CSTA and organizations like it will work to change.

“School is certainly not about the future, which kids tell us is their most pressing concern. If schools were future oriented, they would be full of classes in programming, multimedia literacy and creation, astronautics, bioethics, genomics, and nanotechnology. Science Fiction and fantasy literature would be a part of the curriculum, as representative of alternative visions of the future. Students would be learning and practicing such future-oriented skills as collaborating around the world electronically and learning to work and create in distributed teams.”

So, how can I as an educator make my classes in this image? I recently added the developer ap from facebook to my profile. I hope to spend some time creating content - activities, lesson plans, assessments that introductory students can do to write their own facebook applications. I wish there was a way that they could take the java programs they write for me and create a “My Programs” collection on Facebook that they could share with each other. I’m not talking about all the programs I give for assignments - clearly some of them are meant to reinforce basic skills and have little outside appeal, but my course assistants and I are grading the students GUI projects where they work in teams and are allowed to choose their own project. Some of them are awesome! I want a way that the students can easily (or even with some basic directions) put them into Facebook and share them with the others in the class and their friends.

I also like what Marc says about students growing up “in the light”. For them mass amounts of information searching and retrieval is ubiquitous. Google, Facebook, the search function on their DVR at home, wikipedia - all of these tools that they learn to use (with or without teachers at school) filter information for them from mass quantities of data. Why shouldnt we be building lessons and activities for them around that math and science along with our programming?

And so it becomes time for class.. More about this later I think.

My RSS reader is pointed to several education news agencies as well as the professional blogs that I read. I am often surprised by the number of organizations and people who are releasing statements about how we need to train the current generation of students to be ready to use 21st century skills when they are done with their education.

First of all the association link that sponsored this post is: The Software and Industry Association’s K20 vision. They are making a statement about educational institutions having software frameworks that encourage students to meet the goals of their vision. The goals are varied and some are clearly administrative in nature, ways to use software to help inform teachers about how best to teach, but some are about how technology should be available for students, and that the technology should be used as a part of the educational process to help engage and instruct.

There was a recent post to the AP Listserv today about a teacher attending a meeting whose goals are the fundamental principals of what the CSTA is working for. It would be nice if there was some way we could all pool our resources and ideas and work together to solve the issues that are being identified by so many different organizations. Two heads may be better than one, but only if they work together and pool their resources.

I highly recommend you watch the video “A Vision of K12 Students Today”.

So much of what the students are expressing in the video is related to technology and its presence in their lives. In what ways does computer science education foster or reinforce skills that students need to have to be productive members of the society expressed in the video?

I read an entry on 2 Cents Worth asking Whats your story?

One of the things that struck me (and I commented on it) is that facts are now cheap and understanding is expensive. Prior to the internet and the Information Superhighway, we needed to expend real time to find a fact we did not already know. Travel to a library and read through reference material until we found the exact piece of information we needed and then try to assimilate it with our current knowledge in some way. Instead now facts are cheap. Google, wikipedia, the world wide web all provide us with sources to obtain facts easily and quickly either by computer or internet capable cell phone.

I can understand “fact frustration” expressed by so many students. Why do I have to memorize this when it will always be at my fingertips? Perhaps our standards need to emphasize not the repetition of information, but instead its structure and how to assimilate new information into that structure.

Back to Computer Science. Many of the topics we talk about are how to organize information, how to retrieve it and process it - especially when its size becomes too big for humans to handle, how to categorize things and store them away efficiently, and also how to evaluate what the technology is telling you and its ethical use. (Look at the K12 model curriculum put out by ACM and CSTA) Arent these core foundations for all students to have? Regardless of their “programming” ability.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/20/us/20chess.html?ex=1363665600&en=2418e92a38e752eb&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

yea. and we cant get them to support computer science in schools? Clearly chess has much more value for our next generation. I see its appeal but… still…

So, if your students are looking for something interesting to do outside of your regular assignment, Microsoft is holding a Mash-up competition. You can find out information here.

I have to confess I have never used Silverlight, but there seems to be plenty of materials and examples for students to work with (especially the self motivated ones).

So in the process of cleaning out my email inbox I just ordered a video from ISTE - “Bold Visions: Women in Science & Technology”. They are giving away 500 copies for free to members who call and still had some this morning.

Call 1-800-336-5191 and speak to a customer service representative.

I’ll let you know if its worth buying once I get it and watch it, but not turning down a resource like this when its free If you know of any good videos I highly recommend that you add information about them to the CSTA repository. (hint hint - Alfred I know you were giving away videos of the game conference at SIGCSE - add it to the repository!!!)

So.. this is piggybacking off of something that Alfred Thompson posted about the possibility for allowing students 20% time to work on projects of their own.

Being a constructivist I am wholeheartedly in support of students finding meaning from self directed activities.

Having been a high school teacher for 10 years the part of me that needs to justify their outcomes with grades shudders violently at the thought of 20% to do whatever time.

So instead I humbly offer my personal solution to the 20% time which I implemented first as a final assignment in my AP class for the time after the exam, and then built an entire 1 semester post-AP course around the idea.

For their final assignments AP students were required to write a proposal and have it approved by me for pursuing any topic they chose. It did not even have to be a program, but it had to further their knowledge of computer science. The materials for the project can be found in a word document here.

There are some keys to this type of assignment. First, notice on the outline page that the due dates are spaced so that some measurable progress should be reported each week. (aha! theres the assessment we can use to monitor student learning) Secondly, before the students even start on the creation/programming part the project in full detail needs to be approved by me. In 4 years of giving this assignment NO ONE ever had it approved on the first try. The questions read like a grant application and with good reason. Even the approximate schedule needs to be detailed. I want at least two to three paragraphs about what they want to learn out of the project - it shows me they clearly thought it out.

Notice also there is a “share with others” question on the application. Students need to start thinking that their work has impact outside of the classroom. How will their work not only be seen and evaluated by themselves, but also on a larger scale by others. What will the evaluation criteria be?

I think this is a good framework for an educator to implement something like 20% time. You could create a new assignment each quarter and devote one day a week for students to work on it. (just match the desired learning goals to topics covered in that quarter and you will find you are not actually giving up any instructional time)