I have programmed several 1980s video games: pong, frogger, snake. I have arranged for internships for my rising seniors. I have troubleshooted lingo and robot programs. I’ve assisted with several video projects, and attended meetings about next year’s technology initiatives. They created a department for me, which doesn’t mean too much, but it does mean a few more meetings. I’m actually looking forward to the opportunity to work with more teachers, and having more people understand the potential of computing.

On the personal front, it’s been a mixed bag. Geeky boy has been struggling with depression, which necessarily affects our family. We’re all getting through it but it takes work. You likely won’t see me write about it here. Currently things are in a mostly positive place.

I took up jogging through the couch to 5k program. I run every other day, and so far so good. I feel better, and I think I’ve lost weight. I certainly see a difference in the areas I most dislike. It’s also good for the soul. I’ve enjoyed the 1/2 hour or so away from everything, focusing just on getting to the next mailbox.

I also gave up sugar, mostly. I couldn’t forgo alcohol, but dessert? Not a problem. I allowed myself a treat today for Mother’s Day, but otherwise I haven’t had sugar in almost two weeks.

I promise to blog more regularly. As I’ve been curriculum mapping, I’ve been thinking a lot about teaching, but that’s another post entirely.

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And then there’s the later comments that say, okay, so we require CS.  What’s a student going to do with one semester of CS?  She can’t compete with those with full CS degrees.  No, but when she sits on a committee where they’re discussing the implementation of a new student information system or launching a new web site, she will be informed about how those things actually work and can ask appropriate questions and make informed decisions.  Or she will know how to get the computer to work for her, even if she’s not the one who writes the program to do so.

It doesn’t help, of course, that not even the CS people agree about how to approach this issue.  But that happens in every discipline.  Require one or three Writing courses? Writing across the curriculum or no? Technical writing or business writing?  There is no one right answer, but there are certainly lots of possibilities.

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• My CS class is cruising right along, and have begun their final projects.  I’m quite pleased with what they’ve accomplished so far, and am looking forward to their final projects.  They’ve presented their topics, and I like them all.
• One of the surprising things about teaching programming has been the subjectivity that goes into grading the programs.  I could grade them purely on functionality.  If it works, it gets an A.  If not, it’s a failure.  But there’s such a thing as programs that almost work and programs that work, but do so in a really wrong way.  I find myself confronting programs that are complex, but don’t work and programs that work but are too simplistic.  Not that different from grading essays really.
• I’m becoming increasingly aware that I need to reflect a bit more on the structure of this class and make some tweaks to it for next year before I forget.

Mentoring

• This is something I have done a lot of and continue to do, and I love this part of my job.  I’m helping some individual students, and I’m adding some extracurriculars that I hope provide some more informal opportunities for students to be involved with computing.
• I often wonder what I’m mentoring my students into.  The field is still male-dominated, and can be hostile. Though I know they can hold their own on the programming front, I worry about all the side issues: the sexism, the lack of women in the field, etc.

Health and Exercise

• As my clothes get increasingly tighter, I’ve tried to integrate some kind of exercise into my life.  It painful to do.
• I’ve tried to get technology to help me, but it’s imperfect at best.  It still requires me to actually enter information. And tracking calories in and calories burned is tedious.
• What I know I need is better habits.  I’m giving the couch to 5k program a try as a kickstarter, but I’m really not a fan of running.  But if it can get me in the habit of running/walking 3 times a week, maybe it will be worth it.
• On the diet front, I’m not perfect but better.  I find it relatively easy to stick with a decent diet.  Today, I had oatmeal, salad, some chips and guacamole, and a ham sandwich with a side of applesauce.  And water all day.  Where I fall down is chocolate and alcohol.  My hope is more exercise will allow me to have those treats and not put on a pound just for looking at them.
• I try not to think about it, but part of me just wants to let myself go.  Which isn’t a good idea for multiple reasons.

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1. Connect to what women like.  Don’t know what they like? Ask.  Things that work for me:

• Graphics, drawing, animation. Graphics, by the way, is a great way to reinforce math skills.
• Music and sound
• Current movies, books and tv shows.  Think trivia games about these or text analysis.
• Physical object, especially cute robots, Lilypad arduino/soft circuit projects

2. Let them work in groups–at least for a couple of projects.  Women are social.  They like talking to each other as they’re working.  Sometimes they’re talking about their projects, sometimes not.   Note: not all women are social, so allow them to work alone if they want.

3. Assume they know little about the inner workings of a computer–everything from file systems to motherboards.  One of my first labs is to take a computer apart.  Very fun!  And it gets them to understand more about the hardware.  Teach them these things in context, not as a lecture.  As they’re using files in their programs, for example, they’ll get what a full path name means.

4. Give students time in class to work on projects, so that they have your and others’ support.  This also deals with equity issues.  I can’t necessarily expect that everyone has access to a computer at home, so all their projects are done during class time.  It creates a workshop environment that I’ve enjoyed.  Whether that will work with more than 10 or 15 students, I don’t know.  But we’ll see.

5. Speaking of projects, assign interesting projects (see number 1 above).  Recently I did a search of Computer Science projects just to get some ideas to add to my own list and it was depressing.  Calculate the nth prime number? Fibbonacci sequence? A lot of math-related stuff, a hold over I suspect from the days when CS was math.  If students are interested in that, fine, but I’ve had better luck making suggestions, but ultimately letting them choose.  My students have created games (“rock, paper, scissors”, “tic tac toe”, “lingo”) and robotics projects (“navigate a maze”, “dance with a partner”), among other things. 

6. Be flexible.  I’m lucky to have only women in my classes, and while there are definitely differences among individuals that I have to accommodate, they are more similar than not.  Adding boys to the mix complicates matters.  Boys have higher confidence than women when it comes to talking about computing and trying things.  This will sometimes intimidate the women in the class.  You have to be able to pivot and create an environment where this doesn’t happen.  It means creating assignments that appeal across the board, and it means supporting students who do good work, but may not be taking as many risks as those who have more experience and confidence.

7. Don’t get stuck on the language, environment, etc. Especially in middle/high school.  Some other language is going to come along by the time they’re in college or working.  Or what they learn in high school won’t be what’s taught at the college of their choice.  I like Scratch and Alice, Python (using the Calico project for my environment), and Processing (great way to create art).  You’re teaching concepts.  As I often tell my students, “Everyone uses a reference manual.”  While you’ll memorize some things, you’ll never remember the exact syntax for everything.  And if you switch languages, knowing that is very helpful.  There is no right language, though some languages and environments are easier to teach/learn and are more engaging to some people.

For non-students, women who want to learn to code in order to further their careers or just because they’re interested, some of the same things apply.  I’d say, too, that if you can latch them onto a project that has practical application, that they or someone they know might actually use, that’s a great way to get them involved and learning a lot.  One of my first projects that involved data structures was writing something that keeps track of my food items and tries to match that with recipes.  It was something I really wanted to work, so I worked harder on it.  And that wasn’t something anyone has ever suggested in any class I’ve taken online or offline.  I teach in a way that I’ve never been taught. 

Solving the time problem is harder, but one thing that CS is good for is breaking down problems into small bits.  Find a project and just write a small piece of it at a time.  For my recipe project, I started with structuring my recipes so that I could separate food items from them.  Just a bit at a time. 

What am I missing?  What else works? How do you work around the time problem?

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Over the break, I ran into a couple of articles about Digital Humanities and coding, both by women.  They both address issues with exhorting women in DH to code.  Miriam’s post (second one linked) discusses the issues of the unfriendliness of both in-person and online communities for learning, and the pressure of representing all women.  The other post is more about not blogging and tweeting more, but it shares an issue with the other, which is about time.

These posts come on the heels of an interview I had with Audrey Watters about coding, and an article in the New York Times about the need for everyone to learn to code and touting all the new online ventures that are supposedly helping people to learn to code.  There are, btw, several women quoted in the article, at least one of whom I actually know in real life.  It’s a small world of people who think about these things.  There should be more of us.

As someone who is simultaneously learning to code and teaching women to code, I think a lot about why more women aren’t interested enough in coding to take the time to do it.  And I can come up with a few key things I’ve been thinking about.

First, to address the issue of whether DH’ers or anyone else should learn to code.  Short answer, yes.  Yes, they should know a little code.  They should spend maybe just a few weeks learning enough to write a couple of simple programs–in Python or PHP or Javascript or whatever, doesn’t matter.  It will at least give them an appreciate of how machines work and interpret instructions, of the limitations of what we can tell computers to do, and the logic of the instructions we give.  It helps people see the gap between how humans process information vs. how computers do, which has to be a huge help to anyone, but especially for those in DH.  This is not to say everyone doing DH should become an expert coder.  Only if they want to.  There are plenty of ways to contribute without knowing how to code.

Second, why don’t more women pursue coding, especially with all these great resources that are available.  The answers differ, depending on where you are.  For my students, there’s the time factor–finding time for a class or an after-school program or just figuring it out on their own.  And when your schedule is already packed, that’s hard.  But there’s also a coolness factor (or lack of coolness factor, I should say), something the first post I linked mentions as an issue for teens.  That’s hard to overcome.

Older women also have the time issue.  And here’s where I get to my break.  I could be coding over break. I’m not. My husband did.  He codes in almost every spare moment of his time.  Sometimes I do, but a lot of times I don’t.  And frankly, I attribute some of that to being a woman.  Even if the actual physical labor of our household is evenly divided, and it’s not quite, the brainpower devoted to it is not.  As soon as my husband walks out the door, he’s not thinking about whether the kids will do their homework and clean their rooms or the fact that we’re out of butter or milk or that I have no underwear and therefore need to do laundry.  Those thoughts crowd my head, plus doctor’s appointments, etc.  That’s not to say I’m distracted when I’m working, but it often means that when I do have spare time, those things become my priority, not coding.  Learning anything is a challenge, and frankly, learning to code is not a cakewalk when you get past a certain level.  It’s higher order problem solving.  It puts my brain cells into probably their highest gear.  Which is great and exhilarating at times, but requires energy.  And if I’ve just put in a long 10 hour day teaching, I have a hard time mustering the energy to code.  And laundry takes less energy and it’s already in my head to do anyway.

The other, more important issue, I think, is about the culture.  Learning to code is about entering another culture.  Miriam mentioned the inside jokes that go along with this culture.  Those jokes, along with many other things, are meant to keep people out.  And that’s the nice way of doing it.  If you’ve been to Slashdot lately, you’ll see the not so nice way.  Programming culture, especially online, is not far off from Mad Men.  Women are made to feel that they don’t belong and we shouldn’t worry our pretty little heads about it.

The culture also creates particular structures for learning about programming which are not friendly to women.  Here’s how most men I know learned to code.  They or their parents bought them a (Tandy, IBM, Apple IIe), and they used the manual to learn to program, often in BASIC.  They did this on their own, in their bedrooms or rec-rooms.  By the time, they got to high school, they joined the computer club, which brought together all the other boys who’d learned to program the same way.  By the time they got to college, they’d written programs to do all kinds of things–from games to graphics to organizing their cassette tapes.  Girls, in contrast, often weren’t given a computer.  I got my first as a sophomore in college. Nowadays that’s less true, but nowadays computers don’t immediately look like they need to be programmed.  Why would anyone learn to program on their MacBook?  It’s got tons of programs.

The mostly solo, figure-it-out-for-yourself mode of learning has now been transferred online.  Every venture out there, from Stanford’s CS courses to Codeacademy, takes this as its model.  They think, well, I learned on my own, so if we just give people the resources, they can do it, too.  No, really, they can’t.  They might be able to get started.  But there’s no sequence of courses.  One doesn’t progress from easy projects to harder ones.  One doesn’t learn the next level of things, because often one doesn’t know the next level.  There aren’t group projects or socialization or a context that’s interesting and fun.  I’ve taken a couple of these courses.  In one from MIT, the first lesson had us calculating the first 1000 prime numbers. Woo hoo.  That’s going to be something I use again.  My first lesson in the class I teach? Draw a square with your robot.  Same principles apply, but it’s a lot more fun, imho.

My point is, these courses attract the same kinds of people to CS that CS has always attracted.  They’re not doing things differently enough to reach folks who’ve looked at coding and thought, nope, not interested.  As Miriam says at the end of her post: “If you want women and people of color in your community, if it is important to you to have a diverse discipline, you need to do something besides exhort us to code.”  Yes, you need to do things differently–way differently.  You have to attract the artist and the musician and the future scientist.  You have to contextualize coding within things that they’re interested in, not within things that you think are important.  It’s why I changed my 8th grade curriculum.  Okay, I said, you don’t like this, then let’s do this.  Similar information is being taught, but hopefully it’s in a way that doesn’t turn people off.  And I think it means you have to accept that most women haven’t been sitting in their basements hacking on their computers (though some certainly have), and that might mean explaining the inside jokes (or not telling them) and not assuming that they have a certain baseline knowledge.  And you can’t berate them for that.  I mean Apple once said, “Think different.” But when it comes to teaching coding, few people are.

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Here are the ones I selected as appropriate options so far: Design & Audio.  I haven’t picked out Video ones yet.  And Daily Create will be entirely up to them.

We’ll see how it goes over when I introduce it on Wednesday.

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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.

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Image via Wikipedia

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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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.

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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.

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