Geeky Mom

Education is not the piling on of learning, information, data, facts, skills, or abilities – that’s training or instruction – but is rather making visible what is hidden as a seed.

Thomas Moore

A former boss once said to me that I planted seeds.  The implication, I think, was mostly positive, indicating that I have a lot of great ideas.  But it was also a little bit about my lack of seeing those seeds to their full growth.  If anyone has seen my yard and/or indoor plants, you might understand that this is a bad metaphor for me.  Most of my plants are sad looking things, barely surviving their poor caretaking.

But it’s true that most of what I do is give out ideas, get people started and then leave them to finish things up, to grow in whatever way they want.  With my students, I’m providing a lot more support.  I continue to give them information, push them, encourage them, etc.  But still, there’s no way of knowing if what I’ve said or done will effect them five years from now.  Having contacts at my former job, I know some of the things I floated as ideas as early as 10 years ago are now coming to fruition.  Some things I started are still flourishing, which is heartening to see.  I can only hope that some of my current students have learned something in my class that helps them or guides them ten years from now.

At my current job, people often credit me for giving them the idea to do something, which is also flattering.  Many of my ideas come from Twitter or blogs I read. Because I’m in a small school, I know what my colleagues are doing and what they might need.  I just happen to be at the right place at the right time (online). For my own teaching, though, I’m a bit on my own.  Not that many CS teachers tweet or blog. Which I think is weird. I’m grateful for those that do.  I love sharing ideas with them and stealing the good ones I see (:)).  I think, though, of my CS teaching as planting seeds, primarily because there’s so much to Computer Science, I’m constantly aware of how much I’m *not* teaching.  There’s just no way to cover it all in high school.

I am lucky, however, in that I get to have students over the course of several years and often, I get to have them in multiple contexts, class, clubs, in other social situations.  I really get to know them as people.  That allows me to cultivate the seeds I’ve planted more thoroughly, and better.  And that’s what I think about most often.  I want to plant more seeds earlier.  I want to nurture them more.  And my challenge right now is, how.

Today I worked on something kind of hard.  And it’s something I’m asking one of my students to do.  I had to connect three different things together: HTML, a database, and Python.  I was using a tool, PythonAnywhere, that I had introduced to my students earlier.  I, myself, have used PHP, HTML, and MySQL (database), so conceptually, I knew how to make this work, but practically, I wasn’t sure.  My students don’t even have the concept part down, which makes it even harder for them, so I wanted to have step by step instructions to get them started.

So, I took it one step at a time, myself.  I did the easy part first, creating the HTML form to take input.  Then, I went to my Python file and wrote psuedocode for each function I needed: one to add data, one to delete, one to update, one to show/sort.  Then I made my database directly in the shell.  I wrote a single function, connected it to web form, and then tried it out.  This is actually the opposite order in which I told my student to work–sort of.  I had her my the database first.  Then, I had her make a form, then the Python.

The hardest part of all of this was explaining conceptually how all of it works.  I knew.  I could envision from the beginning how the pieces were going to fit together. For me, it was just a matter of trying out the code in this unfamiliar environment.  I was integrating new knowledge into old.  Lots of, “Oh, that’s how they do that!”  My student, who was having a hard time grasping the idea of taking data from a form and storing it somewhere where you could access it in different ways, had no vision, no model for what that looks like.  It was all new to her.  Yes, some of the Python code is familiar, but the context is very foreign.

I’ve been doing some reading about this problem.  What do you do when you have a student who can’t create a model of something in their head?  What if there is no previous knowledge to build on (or very little)? How do you help them learn? Sometimes we use metaphors.  In this case, I could have used a bucket metaphor maybe.  I tried to use a spreadsheet as a model, which sort of worked.

I was excited to have figured out how to make everything work, but struggled to figure out what to do to make it more straightforward for my students.  One thing I think I will do is teach web programming more directly.  We dabbled this year because we had some time, but I think this is the kind of thing my students might encounter and might be interested in.  And I can teach a lot of other concepts through this.  Investing more time on it seems like a good direction.  I need to do some more thinking about what to do when the concept goes straight over their heads.

Related articles

• Scaffolding
• The New Coder: A Path to Software Engineering

Audrey Watters has a fabulous write-up about the trend of the learning to code movement that’s happened over the last year. Well, I have an interesting perspective on this whole thing. Over the last couple of years, I’ve learned to code. Also, I’m learning to teach code.

Some time ago, maybe 3 or 4 years ago, I confessed and lamented that I didn’t know how to program, which is both true and false. I have had a computer science class. I learned BASIC, which I had learned 9 years earlier in 7th grade. I knew what a computer program was. I’d written some simple ones. More recently, I had valiantly tried to learn PHP and JavaScript. I never really learned those, though I hacked other people’s code all the time. I just never started anything from scratch. I also knew HTML and CSS, things I’d learned on my own for the pure fun of it. So, up until two years ago, I would have called myself a dabbler, a hobbyist. If anyone asked me if I could code, I would have said, no.

But here I am with quite a bit of coding under my belt. I still would not call myself a programmer, but I am fairly proficient. I wrote a voting program for my school to do mock elections. I needed a little help but mostly I managed on my own. So how did I learn? What tools did I use? Do I think any of the available resources are useful?

I honestly think it would be best if I could plop myself into a few CS classes, face to face, with some concentrated time to do projects and assignments. Mostly, after you learn the basics, both of computational thinking in general and then the language you’re working in, it’s a matter of using those skills to create things and solve problems. Bt I don’t have the time or money for that. I do have the benefit of a husband who teaches CS, which gave me the face to face component I needed. I was able to ask questions and get help with debugging in a way that most people don’t outside of a class. But I did learn something from the resources I used.

I started with books. I dove into Head First programming. I worked my way through the who,e book. Then I did the same with another book. Then I came up with my own pet project and used those two books as resources. Then I worked through the book I teach from, and in addition to the exercises in the book, I created my own. The creating my own thing was important. It let me figure out what problems I could solve and were messy enough that I had to learn and do things outside of my comfort zone to accomplish them. Most exercises in book and online are clean. There’s kind of a right or wrong answer for them. Real programming is messier.

I did turn to some online courses. I took a Python course through Code Lesson. I took a Udacity course on program and algorithm design. The code lesson course was much more effective than the Udacity course (which I never finished). I knew most of the material already, but I learned some new things. My work was graded by a real person, and I communicated with real people, just a few, via the forum. It cost money, though it was really a bargain. But I liked the Udacity course because it had no specific start or end dates. I could hop in and out at will. I barely scratched the surface of that course. I learned one or two things, and I would probably benefit from going back to it, but I have a time issue. I felt compelled to work on the Code Lesson course because I’d paid for it.

Where I learned the most, though, was in teaching. To teach something, you have to know it pretty well. I did all my students’ assignments and projects. If they asked me a question I didn’t know the answer to, I’d spend time figuring it out. I enjoyed the puzzles they gave me, and I learned a lot from solving them. It was like doing 7 assignments all at once. Talk about practice!

Is this the year of learning to code? Has it been successful? Personally, I think it has. I can definitively say I learned to code. But, I have a lot more to learn. I’d never apply for a job as a programmer even if no CS degree was required. I just don’t have enough experience under my belt. Has learning to code caught with others? In my own school, I have a nice cohort of students moving through computer science. But I’m not turning people away. The need to take certain courses, the schedule, and the geek factor all work to keep girls out of my classes. Some have, in fact turned to these online courses, but they find them difficult. I have a student going through intro via Udacity and I had to give a lecture on functions because the lectures and quizzes she’d already had didn’t sink in for her.

It’s great that attention has been brought to this issue, but I don’t think there’s going to be a sudden surge in people who have learned to code. For one, Alan Levine points out the small numbers of people who finish these courses. And what do they know, really? The knowledge feels abstract and ephemeral to me. Real learning doesn’t seem to happen in front of a box (or in one). That doesn’t mean that a handful of people might not learn something from all these Learning to code initiatives (some of which are face to face and probably more successful). But I think those are the people who might have learned to code anyway–through books, the web, or just hacking. What I’d be interested in knowing is if Mayor Bloomberg (or someone with little knowledge and less time) learned to code. Then we might be headed in the right direction.