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

So I am reading Frank Pajares’ paper entitled Self-Efficacy Beliefs in Academic Settings for a very interesting course I am taking on Learning and Motivation.

Pajares states:

Researchers have reported that the mathematics self-efficacy of college undergraduates is more predictive of their mathematics interest and choice of math-related courses and majors than either their prior math achievement or math outcome expectations and that male undergraduates report higher mathematics self-efficacy than do female undergraduates

This is really interesting to me. Other places in the paper it makes reference to the fact that in general men have higher self-efficacy than women. These two things combined and the perception of computer science, engineering and physics as very mathematically intensive courses of study may be contributors to our low perceptions. I think it would be really interesting to run a large scale assessment of undergraduate self efficacy (across a number of universities) and see if student’s self efficacy for simple computing tasks also correlates to math.

Theres lots of other interesting things in this paper as well as one by Barry Zimmerman entitled Self-Efficacy: An Essential Motive to Learn I highly recommend them to anyone doing research (or considering it) into why there is such an ethnic and gender disparity in computer science enrollment.

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.

I wanted to take some time to reflect on the second two days of the summit before posting. After the second day (tuesday) there was some pushback from the group due to the process that we were engaging in. Many people were impatient about engaging in goal setting and creation of action items to pursue. Unfortunately that didnt even begin to happen until Wednesday morning. While I see that there was benefit in the process, it begged for a few more days of time. IMHO I believe that the problem wasnt the activities we engaged in, just the overall percentage of time spent getting to work.

On the second day we engaged in more discussion about what the future we imagine would look like in 2012. Its hard to believe thats only 3 years from now (sounds like some futuristic sci fi date..) but that influenced the dreams that some had. It seemed like some were aiming for 2020 or more with their visions, but still helpful to look ahead.

I believe my phrase for the week was “bubbles of excellence”. A common theme amongst the people who have been involved with this for more than 3 days is that we are having a problems with scalability. There are lots of great things going on in small places but its hard to replicate that from our current interactions in the CS Ed community.

One of the groups from the summit decided to work on a repository (and whether that means making a new and different repository from the existing projects, or to create something that can serve as an aggregator for what already exists) is part of the discussion. I find that to be an important project and hope that this project is one that moves forward.

The group I chose to work with was the elementary education group (which we defined as K-8). We felt it important to not try and reinvent the work others was doing and so a number of our goals are about identifying what is appropriate for K8 as well as promotion and teacher training for CS integration with currently taught subjects.

You can see the beginnings of what the groups have defined as goals on the Rebooting Computing website under community. If any of the defined groups catch your interest and you would like to help I can put you in touch with someone from that group if there is not contact information on the web.

One of the most satisfying things for me during the seminar was the personal contacts I made. I have a passion for educating teachers (it was something I was doing long before teaching CS) and its something I believe needs to be a key part of any effort to make CS education more pervasive in our schools.

What do you think needs to be a key part of any plan to EXPOSE every child to CS in a K12 environment? (does not necessarily mean teach everyone to program by the way)

I spent today at the first day of the Rebooting Computing summit in California. Its been an extraordinary day in so many ways.

First, the organizers of the conference assigned the group to tables, and each table has a mix of education, industry, students, and everyone else. There was media and government representatives there as well.

The day started out slowly, but quickly got interactive. First of all they asked us to do one on one interviews with the person sitting next to us to find out how they got into computing and get an idea of what inspires the magic in them. My interview partner - Vin Cerf - in case you dont know - he is the man who invented the internet. I’m not kidding.

One of the common themes at our table is that the moment of decision - when CS became important in all their lives was when they were first able to CREATE something that before that did not exist in their personal sphere. Reflecting on the current status of introductory CS education - we have gotten away from this idea that students can create from the beginning and we mostly ask them to reproduce. I think this may become one of my driving principles when constructing assignments for my students in the future - how does what I ask them to do give them the opportunity to CREATE and not just replicate what I have in mind.

We spent a lot of the rest of the day sharing with both our tables and the room what got us interested in CS and also what we hope to accomplish in this summit. So many different responses that I cant list them all here - but I was greatly impressed by the importance that the group put upon education in the K12 arena.

We also did an exercise where we wrote down important events in each of 5 time segments (CS infancy - pre 1935, Toddler 1935 - 1950, Youth 1950 - 1970, adolescence 1970 - 1990, Young adult 1990 - present) There were 3 categories - general historical/social events (like WW1), computer science development, and finally events in our own life that contributed to who we were today. I have to take some pictures tomorrow and post them of this room-long time line of computing we created.

There are two management specialist directing the collaboration at the conference through a process called appreciative inquiry. It is an excellent process to this point at identifying common themes. It will be interesting to see if any obtainable action items come out of the conference and make the kinds of changes people are talking about. With the caliber of the participants I think it just might.