Getting back on track

25. February 2012 · 3 comments · Categories: Uncategorized

This has been my first free weekend for about a month.  My intentions when I set my goals/resolutions were that I’d work at them a little every day.  That hasn’t happened with the decluttering/housecleaning.  I got so behind at some point that it was overwhelming to even think about digging out.  I knew a mere 15 minutes wasn’t going to do much.

Today, I began to change that.  Using the 15 minutes rule, I spent 15 minutes in each room.  When I finished each room, I made a note of the areas I’d most like to tackle when my decluttering time.  In living room, that’s the closet and a storage cabinet.  In the dining room, the two china cabinets.  I still have a couple of rooms yet to go, and I think I’m going to give it another pass tomorrow, but it feels better already.  The truth is, I don’t want to spend more than 15 minutes or so cleaning each day and yet, I still want my house to be neat and organized.  But in order for that to be a reality, I need a good baseline.

I’m getting there.  I hope, then, to have more time to work on some of my other goals, learning more programming, playing with my arduino, hanging out with the kids.

Is Computing Like Eating Vegetables

24. February 2012 · 5 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , ,
English: Dagwinkel foodstores fresh fruits & v...

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I’ve been having conversations with various students about learning Scratch.  I find it really helpful just to ask for honest answers, and I love that most 8th graders will actually be honest.  The main answer I get about learning Scratch is that students find it too hard.  It’s too much work, they say, to get any good results.  Or it’s too tedious.  I find this interesting because they’ll do math and science that’s also pretty hard.

It’s a possibility, of course, that I’m the problem.  It’s also probably a contributing factor that this course isn’t an academic one and only meets once a week.  The first thing I might be able to work on.  The second is out of my control.

Reports abound that CS is a great field economically.  Yet, it’s not filled with women.  It’s also not gaining too much traction in high schools.  We keep telling people that CS is “good for you” but people aren’t engaging.  Is Scratch like putting ice cream on brussell sprouts?  Or worse, maybe it is brussell sprouts.  If that’s true, I’m not sure how to fix that.  Look at what’s going on with nutrition these days.  Eat your vegetables has been a mantra for years and yet, our obesity problem increases.

Teachers and companies are trying to make CS fun.  Gaming, graphics, the Kinect, robotics, e-textiles have all been put forward as ways to increase CS interest and enrollment.  Maybe it’s going to take a while for all that to have an effect.  I know my Upper Schoolers are pretty engaged, even as we get to more difficult concepts, so maybe it’s just 8th grade.  Maybe I need to engage them with something other than Scratch.

 

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A Different World

21. February 2012 · 2 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: ,
Sunset on Vermont Road by lorda
Sunset on Vermont Road, a photo by lorda on Flickr.

I spent the long weekend in Vermont, visiting a college with Geeky Boy and seeing my old friends, Bryan and Barbara. It’s another world up there in many ways. Slower, calmer, a little colder. Stunningly beautiful even in the dead of winter. I couldn’t help but take photos out the front of my car window as we drove back from skiing. Geeky Boy asked me if I could live there. I said I thought I could. Ten years ago, I would have said, “No way, not enough going on.” But now, I appreciate a slower pace, less stuff around. Both Geeky Boy and I commented on how much stuff is built up on our land around here. You can’t even see the land, really, for all the stuff.

I had to come back to a rush of classes and meetings and planning, but through it all, I tried to step back and remember the calm landscape of Vermont, just sitting there in the cold, waiting for spring.

Wonder

17. February 2012 · 3 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , , ,

This morning, I happened upon Michael Wesch’s post, a recollection, really of a conversation with Gardner Campbell.  Wesch ends with this, which captures, I think, not only Gardner, but an essence we all need to try to capture and maintain ourselves:

In short, Gardner is a great example of somebody who lives in wonder, and it is wonder that we need more than ever to inspire in our students. It starts with ourselves. If we don’t live with wonder, we will struggle to inspire it in our students. The stakes are high. Wonder allows us to see the world for what it is, and for what it might become, while also inviting us to recognize that we are its co-creators. The alternative is disengagement and alienation. Today’s world is full of seductive technologies that will magnify this difference. Those living in wonder can harness and leverage the bounty of information and tools to learn and create like never before. The rest will merely be distracted and seduced by its growing offerings of passive entertainment.

It makes me sad when my students aren’t engaged, don’t see the wonder in what we’re doing.  And I know that, it might be because I have lost that.  But, of course, there is an intricate dance that happens between teacher and class, so I know it’s not all me, but as the grown-up in the room, I sometimes need to tap into a deeper reservoir than is available to my students.  An example.  In 6th grade, I have students write HTML and CSS.  We do it together using notepad.  When we’re all done, we save the page as html and then we all open it in a browser.  They are amazed.  They go and change the colors and the font sizes.  It’s easy to maintain a sense of wonder in the face of that.

With 8th graders, it’s harder.  They are world-weary, tired of middle school, ready to move on to the next thing, frustrated they’re still doing “kid stuff.”  They don’t articulate this ever, but that’s my (and many of my colleagues’ sense of things).  I see moments where wonder returns.  But it’s actual work to maintain it.  I know sometimes I feel as world-weary as they do, where I want to let them just play games or whatever.  And frankly, sometimes, even when I do feel that sense of wonder about what we’re doing, and convey it, it doesn’t quite rub off on them.

But I do think we have to keep trying to inspire wonder.  Too often we frame things in terms of “needing to know” in order to succeed in the world.  That’s not appealing to most kids.  How about the idea that knowing how to build web pages, make a video, program a game is just cool and fun?  Maybe it will be useful, maybe it won’t.  Doesn’t matter for now.  I just think it’s cool that I can draw a ball on the screen and with one line of code, move it around–like magic.  Or that I can use my SmartBoard for a virtual Pin the Tail on the Donkey game, created with just 10 lines of code.  Or that my computer or robot can play a song, using a series of tones determined by hertz.  Or that a page with brackets and words that don’t make sense can appear as a colorful and informative page on the web, that anyone can see.  I just have to recapture that every day and inspire my students to recapture it as well, to give them a safe place to wonder about technology.

More on problem solving

13. February 2012 · 4 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , , ,

I did a little reading on teaching problem solving.  As nicole pointed out in her comment to my last post, it might be necessary to be explicit about the steps involved in solving problems.  Those steps might include defining the problem (i.e., what are you trying to do), breaking the problem into smaller steps (especially important for programming), propose possible solutions based on what you already know, and try those solutions.

One of the things I haven’t done enough of is getting students to start with pseudocode, which would break their problems into manageable parts.  Now that we’re into bigger projects, this might be especially useful.  Asking questions along the way like, “How would you do x?” (x being something they know how to do) would also help.  And I do some of that, but I know how frustrating that can be, and frankly, there’s often not time to do that.

But I can try to keep teaching the process.  As I know myself, it can take time to feel confident in your problem solving skills.

Problem solving

12. February 2012 · 1 comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , ,

I had promised a post on problem solving, somewhat of a response to this post, where Dave Burkhart puzzles over the problem with students who can’t seem to solve the problems put before them and instead wait for the teacher to give them an answer.  I see this all the time across all my classes.  Younger students are particularly dependent on answers from the teacher.  In my 6th grade class the other day, where we were coding up simple html and css pages, my students had their hands up almost every time something didn’t work, despite having detailed handouts in front of them which they could look at and figure out what went wrong.  I finally stopped and said, “I see a ton of hands up.  I want you all to put your hands down, look at your handouts or use Google to try to figure out what’s wrong.”  It’s somewhat excusable for students that young doing something that’s fairly difficult, but still, I constantly point out that they have the power to figure something out themselves if, by no other means than using the powerful machine that sits in front of them and which they often see as primarily something that they play games and write papers on.  That it might contain the answer to their question is astounding to them, it seems.

My high school level students are all doing projects of their own choosing.  I often don’t know exactly how to get them where they want to go.  Like Dave, I have students who wait for me to help and those that constantly ask what to do next.  To some extent, I think it’s a confidence issue.  They aren’t sure of their own ability to figure out the problem.  Most of my students do actually try a few things before they ask me for help.  But almost none of them spend time looking at the online resources or Google the answer. And, of course, it’s faster to ask me.  However, what I often do is ask questions.  ”What are you trying do?” “Okay, what do you think might work there?” “Okay, you have to loop through this.  How do you do that usually?”  Some of it is learning concepts in one context and then having to apply it to another.  In other words, it’s about abstracting knowledge.  And that’s a challenging thing for many students.

In my robotics club, I’m seeing huge strides in problem-solving ability.  It’s kind of a chaotic environment (as opposed to a regular classroom).  Each team of 4-5 girls are faced with a challenge: build and program a robot that can complete several different tasks. They aren’t given instructions or drawings.  They’re given a box of metal and screws and nuts, motors and wires.  Almost every time they ask me how to do something, I’ll say I don’t know, and they know I really don’t.  Because when you’re talking about original design, no one knows exactly how to make something happen.  I’ve watched them go from fighting amongst themselves to standing around their robot, saying things like, “Maybe if we put stand-offs here that will stabilize it.” “What if we put gears at the bottom, the objects will be pulled in better.” “Maybe we need to tighten these screws here to keep the structure from wobbling so much.” The ideas bounce around until they settle on something that everyone agrees might actually work.  Considering how hard it was for them to work together at the beginning, I think this is an amazing achievement. And, thankfully, they’re being rewarded for it.

I don’t know what the exact answer is, but project-based processes seem to encourage problem solving more than discrete assignments with teacher-defined goals.  At least that’s been my experience so far.  I want to learn more and see research related to this. I don’t think my hunches are good enough.  And if there’s a way to encourage it across all my classes, that would be a big win.

 

Fun with Fabric and Technology

07. February 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , ,

I so want to comment on this post about problem solving, but I’m going to hold off until tomorrow at least.

Right now, I’m too excited about my plans for what we call Mini-Week, a three-day period just before spring break where we hold basically a three-day workshop on a topic, going on field trips, building projects, and having fun.  Last year, I worked with e-textiles and I plan to do so again this year. There are a lot more resources now, and I have a better idea of what’s involved so I’m doing a modified version this year.

We’re making a trip to the Franklin Institute to see a couple of exhibits related to design, art, and technology. Then we’ll start working on our own projects.  We’ll be visited (hopefully, still not solidified yet) by a UPenn student working in this area who is bringing some examples.  For those who finish sooner, we’ll have a playground with some other tools to play with, like arduinos and maybe a lilypad or two.

If you’re interested yourself in doing some of these things, here are some great resources:

Adafruit: link to their products related to e-textiles, but they also other cool electronic gadgets

Sparkfun electronics:  again, a selection of e-textile products.  They have some cool e-textile kits as well.

Aniomagic: Some very cool e-textile stuff, programmable through the browser!

Lilypond: ideas and instructions and links to more resources.

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Digital Literacy vs. Computer Science

03. February 2012 · 4 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , ,

I’ve had this post open in my browser for days.  I read it, and then let it sit, and I just now went and read it again, and the comments.  I’ve written many, many times about how frustrating I find it that people think Computer Science = Teaching Excel or how to use the Internet.  Computer Science is a very, very broad field, and in fact, I would argue that it can encompass Digital Literacy.  The writer of the post I linked to is frustrated by the lack of distinction, too, which she argues takes away from the importance of Digital Literacy by focusing more on Computer Science.   So she’s on the other side of this issue from me:

It’s dismaying then, to see in a week where we are seeing a huge move forward in the promotion of technology and a fresh look at how ICT as a subject area is designed and implemented in schools, to see digital literacy being used as an interchangeable term for computer science skills.

Her focus is on the British Government’s announcement earlier in January to revamp the ICT curriculum so that its focus is more on computing and computer science, including coding.  That announcement left CS teachers here salivating as they’ve been fighting to get any kind of computing into the curriculum.  ICT or Educational Technology as it’s often called here in the states in “integrated” into the curriculum, sometimes fabulously, sometimes not.  In some schools, it’s specifically taught as a separate class, sometimes not so well.

Here’s my beef with her post and mostly the comments on the post.  Once again, the commenters imagine the lonely coder in a cubicle.  We don’t want that!  We want to teach collaboration via digital tools.  GitHub anyone?  Have they been to a startup?  Do they know about people using chat, skype, etc. to work together to roll out software?  Seriously?  And, it’s not all about coding.  There’s HCI–interface design.  Have you had to use poorly designed software lately?  Do you know that medical software needs to have certain interfaces to make it easier and faster for doctors and nurses?  The HCI person doesn’t usually do the coding, but instead knows how humans actually prefer to interact with computers.  Almost every field and profession could benefit from having its practitioners know how hardware and software works, to have had some experience uploading files to a server or tweaking some javascript or understanding the logic of an “if” statement.

Yes, I think being able to blog and tweet and build documents together online and skype is all good.  And if, as Josie says, it’s about critical thinking and lifelong learning, why is Computer Science not about those things, but Digital Literacy is?  There are people who think that things are done on computers because it would be too hard to do them some other way.  Facebook and Google are the way they are because someone programmed them to be that way, and if we don’t understand that, then we have a big problem.

Program or be Programmed, Rushkoff’s book, is an apt mantra for today’s world.  We don’t have enough Computer Scientists not just serving as programmers, but working in other fields.  And while I don’t believe that there’s such a thing as a Digital Native, and that we can just let the kids take care of their own digital literacy, I don’t think we can say that teaching DL is more or less important than teaching CS.  I’m watching us all latch onto devices that can’t be easily hacked.  Can you write a script for your iPad on your iPad?  We’re dependent on software developers to create tools just to allow us to view Flash on them.  We’re letting huge companies dictate what we can do with our tools.  We need more people who are, yes, digitally literate, but who can participate in the development of tools that allow us the freedom to work in the world in whatever way we need to.  That’s what attracted everyone to the Internet in the first place.  The Internet would not exist if we didn’t have coders.

/rant

Sorry, but I’ve grown increasingly frustrated by this focus on “21st Century Learning” and “Digital Literacy” without anyone recognizing that without Computer Scientists, we would not have those terms.  I’m watching fellow CS teachers being asked to teach digital literacy classes when they could be teaching Python or Java or helping a kid develop an app.  Many of us feel that we’re being shoved out by the call for “21st Century Learning”.  What’s more 21st Century than knowing how to code, or having a deep understanding of how computers work?  Or having people able to harness the power of computing to solve our biggest problems: cancer, global warming, famine, transportation.  That’s where we’re headed.  Those problems will be solved by people plus computing.

Girls and Computing

01. February 2012 · 2 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , ,

Teaching 8th grade has to be one of the hardest things ever.  I dare anyone who thinks they know what they’re doing in life to put themselves in front of a group of 8th graders (girls, even) and see if they can hold their own.  I’m betting most people won’t last 5 minutes.  I don’t claim to be good at it.  I struggle every day, but I’m determined to reach them.

I teach a required “technology” class in each grade level that meets once a week for 10 weeks.  In 6th and 7th grade, things are going swimmingly.  In 8th grade, things were not.  I teach Scratch in 8th grade.  My plan was to have the girls create 3 Scratch projects of increasing difficulty.  I usually end with having them create a video game.  That worked okay the first trimester, but this one, I got a lot more grumbling after we finished our first project.  I decided not to fight it.  I asked them what they wanted to do.  Tell me, I said, what technology/computing projects would you like to do?  Many wanted to do video projects.  I suggested social media of some kind.  And they jumped all over that.  So, now, I have two groups doing projects on Tumblr and two doing video projects.  I was a little unnerved about this.  What if they suck? What if they goof off?

Today, though, the two groups working on their Tumblr projects were doing awesome things.  One group was customizing their theme, creating tabs, even digging into some CSS.  At one point, one girl said, “This being techie thing is really hard.”  A girl responded, “Yeah, but it’s really fun.”  Girl one said, “You’re right it is.”  Later, someone in that group said something about how many details were involved in technology.  I just smiled.

The other group, which is really just one person, took a bunch of photos and opened them up in a photo editor and started manipulating them to make them more interesting and different.  She was playing with levels and saturation.  And that was pretty awesome.

Maybe they weren’t doing exactly what I’d had in mind at the beginning of the class, but I actually think they’re learning stuff, and for the most part, they’re doing it on their own.  They were Googling the answer to how to manipulate the html to make their tabs work.  They figured it out before I could even help them.  I think that’s pretty empowering.

I also got some feedback from my CS students this week, who are a great bunch of students, really fun to work with.  I wanted to know how they liked the class so far, what I could differently next year for the things already covered, and what they’d like to be sure to cover this year.  I also wanted to know how likely it would be for them to take another CS course in the future, whether with me or later in college.

Here are their thoughts, summarized:

1. They generally like the class and find it fun.  The projects we’re doing are varied and interesting to them.

2. They all hate it when the technology doesn’t work.  I would second that, and I’m working on fixing those issues.

3. They want to go on field trips.

4. They want the class to count for something toward graduation other than a basic elective.  Some suggested language. :)  I laughed because Mr. Geeky tried that same strategy in grad school in order to avoid taking another language.

5. On a scale of 10, with 10 being very likely, the likelihood of their taking another CS course ranges from 4-9.  I thought that was pretty good.  I can handle a moderate likelihood of taking a CS course.  Heck, after my own first course in college, I never wanted to see CS again. You can stop laughing now.

6. Lack of interest is certainly an issue, but lack of time to fit the course in is a bigger one.

7.  They all liked that the class was small (7 students).  I did too!  They emphasized that the small class size meant a lot of personal help, which is important to them.  If the class gets larger, and frankly, I hope it does, I’ll have to figure out a way to deal with that.  Pair programming or peer instruction.  Something.

It’s been fun to teach, for sure, and I hope to improve upon what I’m doing next year.