Print (“Hello World!”)

12. November 2010 · 5 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , ,
A graph of enrollment of Computer Science by g...
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I spend a lot of time these days doing two things–learning to program and thinking about the best way to teach computer science.  In case you didn’t know, not only is there a decline in the number of women in computer science, which interests me greatly, but there’s a general decline in people of any gender interested in computer science.  The reasons for the decline are complex.  Some of it is undoubtedly, the dot com bust of the late 90s when there was a kind of glut of CS majors and/or CS enthusiasts.  That left a lot of unemployed programmers around.  That, in turn, lead to a cooling of interest at the college level and CS at the high school level has either evolved into teaching applications or disappeared entirely.

At the high school level, I feel like there are a number of issues that keep CS from becoming a more popular subject.  One, there aren’t a lot of qualified teachers around.  In this, I feel like part of the problem rather than part of the solution, but more on that later.  There aren’t a lot of CS majors who choose to go teach CS at the high school level.  I know several students who thought about it, but then a lucrative opportunity presents itself and they leap at the chance.  And I don’t blame them.  Two, CS has to compete with a lot of other things: math, science, biology, English, art, music, etc.  To get CS into a curriculum, something has to give, either for an individual student or for a school as a whole.  Those are hard decisions to make.

I just spent the day participating in a conference for K-12 CS teachers.  Mostly, it was meant to inspire us and help us get more girls interested in CS.  Since I teach all girls, it’s not about the proportion of girls in CS, but numbers.  I got a lot of good ideas for helping sell the idea of taking a CS course to young women.

And then when I got home, I finally got around to reading this article about the importance of CS to a non-CS person.  Carey makes a good point about getting kids to understand the logic behind programming, to understand how things work.  That’s something I’m really focused on teaching at the middle school level.  I find students don’t know very basic ideas about computers and networks.  And in this way, I think, I’m not entirely so far off because I’m not a “programmer.”  In many ways, I have always been influence by CS even when I wasn’t doing what most people would call programming.  I’ve understood the inner workings of a computer since I was in junior high.  By college, I really knew how they worked, tried out another CS course, wasn’t interested and moved on to writing poetry.  But, as I was telling a young woman today, back in the good old days, you had to have some knowledge about the inner workings of computers and networks just to log onto a computer.  There was no double-clicking an icon to connect to something or as it is now, just being always on the network.  I had to know not just a login name and password but a network address for where I was logging into.  So long before I saw my first URL, I understood the blah.blah.blah structure.  Sending e-mail required similar knowledge.  I worked on a variety of machines even then.  I readily switched from a Mac to a PC to a Linux machine to a SPARC to a NEXT (remember those?).  And while having that capability does not make me a computer scientist by any means, it gives me an understanding of computers that many students today lack. And I think it’s worth having that skill today.

A stat I heard today that surprised me and that had I heard it back when I was in high school might have sent me in a different direction was that only about 5% of the population is equally skilled in math/science and verbal ability.  And that those skills are especially useful in digital media work.  Being able to translate between the computer geeks and the business people and vice versa is huge.  I do that.  I’m doing that now.  It’s what teaching is, really.  Had I known how valuable that was to a technical career early on, I might be in a different place.  I might not be coding in my off hours to keep ahead of my students.  But I really wouldn’t have it any other way.  I love my job, and part of what I love about it is that it’s about translating something complex (and sometimes intimidating) to people.  I need to remember to give those good messages to my students.  That’s what I missed when I was in high school.  I got put in a particular box, even when my actual skill set showed that there were other possible boxes for me.  Or better yet, a life outside the box, which, in a way, is where I am at the moment.

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Reflecting on the first third

10. November 2010 · 2 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , ,

Next week I’ll have my last classes of the first trimester.  It’s been quite a ride so far.  I would say that it’s been mostly successful; however, there are things I definitely want to change for the new trimester.

6th grade web design.  In this class, I had stepped through the process of creating the content from word processor to using Weebly for creating simple web sites.  We added everything to the word processing document and then moved it to the web.  Two snags really created problems for us.  One was that creating the charts and graphs proved more difficult than I thought.  Not only was making the chart/graph difficult, but converting it to a picture was hard, too.  In some cases, we actually took screenshots.  We made it through that part, though, and I want to keep it, just with some modifications.  The second big snag was the wiki.  I then wanted to put everything on a wiki, allowing everyone to edit each other’s work.  First, the kids got confused when their pictures didn’t copy over.  The pictures had to be reinserted, which caused everyone great consternation.  Second, no one really got around to editing each other’s work, so the whole point of the wiki was lost.  And then, when we moved to Weebly, we had to go through the whole process again, and so more consternation.   On the plus side, they love, love working with their websites.

Things I’m going to change:

  • Starting with the web, not word processing.  We’re actually going to start with html and css, so they know what’s behind their web sites.  I’m also going to review some basic concepts like url’s, searching, local vs. remote storage, etc.
  • No wikis, but I will do a website review (which I’m doing today in class) using a Google form.
  • More work with images.  I thought we’d get to more of this, but we didn’t, so I’m going to add in creating a header for their page and some other basic image editing techniques.

7th grade digital storytelling.  This class had both conceptual and technical issues.  While digitial storytelling is a great idea, I needed to put more parameters on what they used for their stories.  I have a lot of Glee remakes.  The technical issues are what really put a damper on this class. I decided to use Windows Live Movie Maker because I had easy access to it.  The tool was easy to use and I didn’t have to do a whole lot of instruction on it, but it doesn’t work if your footage is stored on a network drive, which is where the students needed to store their footage.  We ended up copying it over to the hard drive and working from there and then exporting the movie at the end of each day, but many students lost work or lost video because they weren’t careful about where they were saving things.  I have students who have no project as a result. 

Changes I’m making:

  • Having them draw on their English curriculum for stories.  I’m also giving them one or two other options.  They need a framework.
  • Using Jaycut for our video editing tool.  It’s online.  Students can access their work from anywhere, and hopefully, they won’t lose their work this way.
  • Not having a video shoot day.  I had handed out flip video cameras for the students to use and gave them a day to shoot video.  A) They didn’t shoot good video or enough video leading to b) another video shoot day, which result in a) again.  The cameras are available for check out from the library.  If they want to shoot video, they are responsible for doing it outside of class.

In 8th grade Scratch programming, I’m just rearranging the order of some things to take advantage of a game design contest for middle schoolers.  Otherwise the class has gone really well.

In all my classes, I need to have more discrete assignments that can be assessed at the end of every class.  8th grade has more of that than the other two.  I need to have a “By the end of class, you need to complete . . .” objectives.  The classes are pass/fail, so I intentionally made them more project-based, but I need to have the steps more clearly defined for the kids.  They are for me, but I think the kids lose track pretty easily.

I’ve developed my CS curriculum and will present it later this month for official approval.  I’m also looking for grant money to get the program off the ground with the right equipment and facilities.  That keeps me pretty busy outside of my classes.  And I’m also running two robotics clubs, which also keeps me busy.

I’m generally happy with what the students are getting in their technology/CS classes. I wish I had more time with them, but I try to pack in a lot in the time I do have.  I hope that will pay off for them in the long run.  I’m also doing a fair amount of work with teachers getting them to incorporate a variety of technology into their classes.  I feel like a student here will have a pretty good foundation in a variety of applications and computing concepts by the time they’ve completed 9th or 10th grade. I hope to keep building on that.

The rally to restore something

01. November 2010 · 6 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , ,
Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear
Image by Matt Ortega via Flickr

The Geeky family headed out Saturday morning to attend the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.  We made a sign that said, “There’s nothing to fear but fear itself . . . and zombies.”  The other side said, “Why can’t we just get along? Humans + zombies = <3″  I wanted to make a sign that said, “This is not a sign.” But I ran out of time.  I saw that sign there anyway.

We left our house at 8:30 a.m. (1/2 hour later than planned) and did not arrive on the mall itself until 1:45.  Four hours of driving, 1 hour line at the metro, 20 minute metro ride and then, voila, we poured out onto the street along with several thousand other people.  It was quite the experience.  I’m not going to say it was earth shattering because it wasn’t, but it was fun.  Surrounded by thousands of people, I laughed and clapped and w00ted along.  There were lots of different kinds of people, different ages, different races, different political views.  As we left the rally and wandered around to see the aftermath, people were sitting on stairs and curbs and walls, holding their signs, nodding as people laughed at them.  At one corner, a guy on top of a streetlight shouted out state names and people on the street yelled when they heard theirs.  The wait for food at any restaurant within about a 2-mile radius was about 2 hours.  A couple of places ran out of food.  No one cared too much.  They shrugged and tried the next place.

Over at 11D, Laura thinks the rally sounded boring, and disturbingly a-political.  And maybe it was, a little.  I felt no outrage or even earnestness, and I don’t think many other people did either.  As Sullivan says, in his piece, most of the people there feel weird about belonging to any group.  This group was for those people.  I told Mr. Geeky on the way home that it seemed like this was the collection of people who had no where to go in high school or college.  They weren’t jocks or cheerleaders or even completely geeks or brainiacs.  They never quite fit anywhere, or they never wanted to, more likely.  I served as judge of elections for a reason, because I believe the election process should be fair and I liked playing a role in making it so.  I still believe that voting is the most powerful thing one can do.  The things I’m most upset about right now are things that take away that power from the people.  Citizens United and general campaign financing issues are at the top of my list of problems in America right now.  Could the rally have focused on those or other issues? Sure.  But my issues are not the same as everyone else’s.  From the signs, what I gathered were big issues were legalizing pot, legalizing gay marriage, and not hating on the muslims.

There’s debate in the comments about whether those folks who attended the rally were politically active.  Not every person has to volunteer for a campaign or participate in a get out the vote drive to be active.  I suspect that many of the people there were informed about the issues.  You could probably ask any one of them who was running for office in their area and they could tell and tell you what the issues were and where the candidates stood on them.  To me, that’s being active.  That’s thinking about what your choices are and what you think is the best option for the country (often driven by personal needs and desires, of course).  And those people will vote. That’s more than many people will do.

I have to say, I know I’ve changed a few minds over the years just by being reasonable when discussing politics.  I leave my mind pretty open for the same.  If someone comes in with a reasonable argument–and Obama is a socialist is not a reasonable argument–I might change my mind, too.

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