Jan 3, 2017
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Episode 10: Confronting racism in CS through community, criticality, and citizenship with Aman Yadav
The goal of this blog and podcast series is to bring CS education research into the K-8 classroom. In this episode, I take a deep dive into the paper, Breaking the Code: Confronting Racism in Computer Science through Community, Criticality, and Citizenship with Aman Yadav. He is a Professor in the College of Education and the College of Natural Science at Michigan State University. Aman’s teaching and research focuses on computational thinking, computer science education, and problem-based learning.
In this episode, I take a deep dive into the paper, Breaking the Code: Confronting Racism in Computer Science through Community, Criticality
Big ideas from the paper:
Examine the role CS education has in the oppression and harm of marginalized communities.
Move away from a top-down approach to curriculum design to a community-oriented approach that is connected to students' lived experiences.
Move from focusing solely on developing technical skills toward an understanding of the role CS plays in maintaining and perpetuating systemic injustices.
Empower students to solve authentic and community-based problems.
Takeaways for researchers:
School of education leaders and faculty need to be public advocates and be vocal within their own states and nationwide for the importance of teachers in schools and public education in general.
In addition to research, we need to think about the systemic issues related to CS education.
CS education researchers in schools of education need to design professional learning that supports teachers to make those calls to action that bring community, criticality and citizenship into their CS curriculum.
Research is needed on how teachers' own lived experiences also play a role in them implementing anti-racist and justice-oriented CS education.
Takeaways for K-8 teachers and administrators:
Administrators and national organizations need to go beyond just access to CS as the metric to measure success. They need to make sure that teachers have the supports, knowledge, and resources they need to provide high quality CS instruction. It's not just about having bodies in the CS classroom, it's about what kind of learning experiences students are getting.
Find ways to use CS as a tool for civic engagement.
Consider how to dismantle existing ways of teaching CS that prioritizes technical competencies and work toward educating students to think about ethical and moral perspectives and their role as future computer scientists and technology creators.
Resources:
Aman Yadav
Toward Justice in Computer Science through Community, Criticality, and Citizenship
Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code
Design Justice
Dr. Timnit Gebru
Culturally Responsive-Sustaining CS Education: A Framework
Episode 9: Using art to explore emotion, problem solving and identity in CS with Maggie Dahn
The goal of this blog and podcast series is to bring CS education research into the K-8 classroom. In this episode, I take a deep dive into the paper, Dynamics of emotion, problem solving, and identity: Portraits of three girl coders with Maggie Dahn. She is an Associate Project Scientist at the University of California, Irvine working with the Connected Learning Lab and Creativity Labs. Maggie has a background in visual arts and engages in design research to study how people learn in different contexts and the affordances of art making for the development of voice and identity and issues of access and equity.
In this episode, I take a deep dive into the paper, Dynamics of emotion, problem solving, and identity: Portraits of three girl coders with
Research paper takeaways: Kids are feeling things and art making can be a tool for reflection on emotion and helps put young people in positions of power.
Context: An after school program for middle and high school students focused on creating a debugging culture through art and code.
Results: Creative reflection spaces like journaling, art making, and storytelling can open possibilities for learners to understand and examine the integration between problem solving, emotion and identity.
Takeaways for researchers:
Opening up the way you see how art can contribute to CS. See art as providing a way of thinking, seeing the world, and approaching problems. Art supports creating cultural and social connections and art making can create a sense of shared empathy.
Takeaways for K-8 teachers and educators:
Look for opportunities to incorporate art, try it out and experiment. Think about how art can be multifaceted and used as a reflective tool to support development in CS. Think about how to support uncertainty and surprise. You don't always need to know the answer of the art making (or technology creating) activity before you start it. Consider how you can facilitate creating a calming environment for your students.
Resources:
Maggie Dahn
Art as a Point of Departure for Understanding Student Experience in Learning to Code (paper)
Debugging Failure: Youth Resilience in Computer Science (video)
Dear Data Project
Last week we had an Hour of Code at Flourish Learning Club [[MORE]] I had two groups... The younger cuties =) aged 7 & 8 and we did the "Animate your name with Scratch" The older group - aged 11 and 12 - got an advanced introduction to Scratch and game development + an extra hour of open discussions on coding and game development And they finally got to play a little with a MakeyMakey ;)
Episode 7: Formative Assessment in K-8 CS with Shuchi Grover
The goal of this blog and podcast series is to bring CS education research into the K-8 classroom. In this episode, I take a deep dive into two papers: Designing an Assessment for Introductory Programming Concepts in Middle School Computer Science (2020) and Assessing Algorithmic & Computational Thinking in K-12: Lessons from a Middle School Classroom (2017) with Shuchi Grover. She is a learning scientist and computer science and STEM education researcher. Shuchi's research is primarily centered on computational thinking, CS education, and STEM learning in the PK-14 years with a focus on the design of curriculum, assessments, tools, and environments.
The goal of this blog and podcast series is to bring CS education research into the K-8 classroom. In this episode, I take a deep dive into
Research paper takeaways:
Designing an assessment:
“Without sufficient attention to thoughtful assessment, CT can have little hope of scaling in K-12.”
Context: Pre-post measure of intro programming CS course with 74 middle school students across three classrooms.
Results:
CS curriculum, teacher CS experience and expertise, and students’ background and academic preparation all impact student performance on an assessment.
Open-response items on an assessment help provide better evidence of student understanding than multiple-choice items alone.
A holistic measure of student learning and engagement comes about from using several forms of assessment and not just one assessment at the end of a course.
Assessing computational thinking:
“Desired outcomes for current CS initiatives include students’ conceptual growth and also affective measures such as identity development, motivation, and engagement"
Context: 28 students from 7th and 8th grade enrolled in a semester-long CS-related elective class.
Results:
The exam-based summative assessment included mostly multiple choice questions with a few open-ended questions. Benefits from this approach include scalability, objectivity, and ease of grading.
The challenges with this summative assessment method were issues with reliability of the question items when they included multiple CS concepts or did not take into account English language learner needs.
Even those students who did poorly on the exam-based assessment had high engagement with the final project and a basic understanding of the CS concepts.
Takeaways for Researchers:
What can we learn about learning from other fields that can be applied to CS education?
How can we use assessment to help determine what and how the CS standards should be laid out?
Pay more attention to formative assessment in CS. What sort of assessments work? Which sort of assessments surface misconceptions? Which assessments are good for formative, but not for summative and vice versa?
There's a lot we still have to learn about measuring computational thinking and programming skills as well as giving student feedback through automation.
Takeaways for K-8 Teachers/Administrators:
Formative assessment is important because it helps identify student misconceptions and provides a mechanism for giving feedback to students on their learning.
The goal of teaching and learning CS is not just to develop computing skills, but also interest and motivation.
When your goals are interest and motivation, identity development, and conceptual learning - you can't measure that with one instrument. You have to have a buffet of measures and probes.
You can use assessment as a form of curriculum design.
While more challenging to grade, open-ended projects help students make connections with their homes, their lives, their communities, and their cultures.
Assessment is a signal to the learner about what is important.
Resources:
Shuchi Grover
Measuring Student Learning in Introductory Block-Based Programming: Examining Misconceptions of Loops, Variables, and Boolean Logic (2017)
What We Can Learn About Student Learning From Open-Ended Programming Projects in Middle School Computer Science (2018)
Toward A Framework for Formative Assessment of Conceptual Learning in K-12 Computer Science Classrooms (2021)
Computer Science in K-12: An A to Z handbook on teaching programming (2020)
A brief introduction to evidence-centered design (ets.org)
K-12 CS Framework
CSTA 2020 Formative Assessment Session
Education for Life and Work: Developing Transferable Knowledge and Skills in the 21st Century (National Research Council, 2012)
#CSForAll Commitment from the Charlottesville CS Community
The Charlottesville CS Community through a collaboration with the University of Virginia and Charlottesville City Schools makes a commitment to provide professional learning experiences and ongoing support for at least 42 K-8 teachers to help them infuse CS into their curriculum, serving 1000 students by Summer 2023.
In the summer of 2020, we launched the Creating Equitable CS Experiences Workshop with a cohort of 14 K-8 educators from Charlottesville City Schools. The workshop ran again in 2021 with a second cohort of 14 K-8 educators. We plan to run it again during the summer of 2022 with a third cohort of 14 K-8 educators from Charlottesville City Schools.
We infuse culturally responsive and equitable CS teaching practices throughout the workshop.
Many of the sample lessons we provide have been field-tested through our non-profit partners, Tech-Girls and C4K.
Each cohort of educators commits to remixing and/or creating two CS-infused lessons/units that they then incorporate into their curriculum in the coming year.
We track participant growth in self-efficacy toward computer science and equitable teaching strategies with pre and post-workshop surveys. We published preliminary results of our findings at SIGCSE2021 (Changes in K-8 Teacher Self-Efficacy with CS and Culturally Responsive Teaching through an RPP Workshop).
We also track implementation of the lesson plans/units and follow up with a survey and/or interview to determine what went well, what could be improved, and plans for continuing the lesson in the coming year.
The CS-infused lessons the teachers used are shared on the GoOpenVA repository as openly-licensed digital resources available to educators throughout Virginia and beyond.
The workshop is funded in part by an Advancing Computer Science Education (ACSE) grant from the Virginia Department of Education.
The PD is also available online for free through the CS Institute.
Learn more about CSForAll commitments here.
Design Thinking Strategies for K-8
What is design thinking?
Design thinking is a method of problem solving that starts with empathy. Projects infused with design thinking tap into students’ intrinsic motivation as they solve relevant, real-world problems. Along the way, students build up their skills of critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and compassion. The role of the teacher during the project is to be a facilitator. Instead of dispensing knowledge, the teacher helps guide students through their own learning and often learn alongside them. Design thinking is a relatively recent phenomenon and there are several flavors to choose from including models from IDEO and the d.school at Stanford. The strategies below follow the DEEPdt process outlined by Mary Cantwell.
Step One: Discover
This is the stage of researching, asking questions, observing, and immersing yourself in your environment. You are looking for something that’s not quite right and finding a problem to work on that catches your eye.
What this looks like:
Observing Kindergarteners trying to find their way to a non-fiction book in the library and documenting the problems they encounter. (Solving library problems with design thinking)
Exploring a site where people with disabilities request custom video game controller mods.
Researching cerebral palsy and the everyday challenges it poses to the young people born with it. (Design thinking and robotics)
Interest mapping to discover where your passion intersects a problem you want to solve. (Are you too young to start something?)
Learning about problems local businesses and organizations want help solving. (SPARK Hackathon: Student-driven learning in the real world)
During this stage, you can also introduce students to the tools they will use for prototyping. One strategy to do this is inspired by Sugata Mitra's Hole in the Wall project. The idea is to get students hands-on with these tools and mostly let them figure out how they work through trial and error. You can provide some scaffolding in the form of challenges or basic setup instructions, but the students should mostly get a feel for what’s possible with the tools by playing around with them.
Step Two: Empathize
The next phase of the process is to empathize - to walk that mile in someone else’s shoes and then define a need they are facing. Exploring empathy means stepping outside your comfort zone and having difficult conversations. Those are hard to plan for and there may be failures of understanding and communication or in how an activity plays out. Here are 10 steps for discussing failure with kids.
What this looks like:
An empathy homework assignment for students, like spend 15 minutes doing a regular activity without the use of your arms. Afterwards, reflect on: 1) What was the most challenging thing to do? 2) How did you feel while you were doing this assignment? 3) What most surprised you about doing this assignment?
Completing an empathy map, in person, if you have the opportunity to interact one-on-one or based on a relevant video, podcast, or blog post.
Writing a need statement - a concise statement that describes a problem the person/population affected is facing along with the desired outcome while ensuring it does not focus on a specific solution.
Step Three: Experiment
The next phase of the process is to brainstorm, experiment, prototype and iterate. This is the stage where you really hand control of the project over to the students and this can often seem a bit chaotic and messy.
What this looks like:
Brainstorming sessions in which students are challenged to come up with a large number of ideas to solve the problem in a very short time period, eg. 20 ideas in 5 minutes. No idea is too crazy at this stage.
Introducing design constraints, eg. time, resources, scope of project and rubrics (if you have them).
Teams picking one solution to take to prototype stage by removing ideas that do not fit within design constraints, grouping the remaining ideas into overarching themes or ideas and ranking them based on how well you think they address the need statement.
Sketching a design and storyboarding idea.
Trying out different materials, testing often, getting feedback and ensuring everyone on the team is on the same page and can explain what they are working on and the process they have been through.
Recognizing frustration is a normal part of the learning process. (Failure, Frustration & Fearlessness)
Reflecting at the end of each work day - what did you accomplish, what are you going to work on next and what, if anything, if blocking your progress.
Step Four: Produce
The final step is to produce something, so that you can get feedback to make it better.
What this looks like:
Students in the hallway at UVA. trying out their ideas and asking for feedback from people they run into. (Bio-Med Tech-Girls)
Peer reviews to share I like… and I wish… feedback to each other.
Sharing prototypes with an authentic audience. (CS in Math Intensive Demo Party and SPARK! Hackathon)
Pitching projects to experts in the field. (Are you too young to start something? and Growing a CS Ecosystem)
Resources
More examples of Design Thinking in K-12
Design Thinking in Action (Baker-Butler Elementary School)
Design Thinking in Schools
Getting Started with Design Thinking (The LAUNCH Cycle)
K12 Network Lab Resource (d.school)
designschoolx.org
Empathy
Teaching Empathy Through Design Thinking
Design Thinking: Getting Started with Empathy
Empathy Mapping: The First Step in Design Thinking
Activities
Design Challenge: The Perfect Chair
Game Controller Design Challenge
As one of the exhibitors of #CSTA2020 , @USReadyAI is Looking forward to e-meeting you at #CSTA2020 virtually today and tomorrow! @csteachersorg @ai4k12 #edtech #CSed #csforall https://t.co/glDzU1SBuF https://www.instagram.com/p/CClaBhelCsj/?igshid=jyqyuwpgmilu