Creating Games is More than Programming

Posted on April 26, 2010 by CSTA Blog

By Duncan Buell
For me at least the academic year is about to end; my final exam is ten days away.
And then I have to gear up full time for a June gaming institute for students and faculty from the humanities. This has been a somewhat different experience for me, and it has led me to think about how broad the whole computing industry is. We tend to focus on the obvious deeply geeky aspects of computer science, perhaps because that’s what we know better and what we have seen. But the digital humanities is a growing, and in many ways a very different, side of the world. And the concept of gaming in the humanities is a different concept from first-person-shooter games or even the more naive pedagogical games.
Some of the gaming in the humanities involves using the digital world to learn more about who we are as human beings and about how to appreciate literature and the arts. The usual nature of a game is of something that is unguided, as is unguided learning in artificial intelligence. This is different from literature, that has been through an editing and a vetting process. When we read, we are following in a narrative a path that has been specified for us. Relatively few books (The French Lieutenant’s Woman is a rare counterexample) offer a choice of endings, although the world of visual and performance arts has provided more examples of works of art for which the “ending” is not automatically specified. Digital gaming, however, permits the “reader” or readers to find multiple, alternate, paths to the same learning process, and it could (perhaps?) be more absorbing to participate in the process of the story than simply to have at the end the book club questions that are supposed to help us understand what we have read.
This kind of “game” presents any number of problems for developing the computer game itself. The content of the story and its various paths must be programmed in and accounted for. The usual first-person-shooter game is episodic as a story. Each encounter leads to winning or losing, and losing usually means game over. If the goal is for the digital game to lead to an understanding of oneself or of a message conveyed through “literature,” then that context must be programmed in.
This may seem far afield from hacking code in Java or VB or C++. But if there is to be a game, someone will have to program it. There must be rules, choices, and paths. In the end, though, it’s another of the uses to which this “computer” device can be put, provided we have those with the talents and background to create the games.
Duncan Buell
CSTA Board of Directors

Preparing Future Elementary Teachers to Teach Computing

Posted on April 23, 2010 by CSTA Blog

By Joanna Goode
This term, I am teaching an Education course to University of Oregon undergraduates entitled, Teachers as Cyborgs. Most of my students are juniors who intend to eventually pursue teacher certificates and Masters’ degrees in education. All but a handful of the 80 students are interested in teaching elementary school. Since they are not yet in a teacher licensure program, this is not a formal methodology course.
The course covers a variety of issues and topics, including the social considerations of children growing up online, the racial and gender stereotypes found in media, copyright law, privacy, security, gaming and learning, and how the Internet has changed our view of knowledge construction. But, I have also designed the course to develop students’ understanding of computing as an academic subject area. To this end, I have come up with three strategies for introducing computer science to future elementary teachers:
* They will read Jeanette Wing’s Computational Thinking article, and work towards a definition of computational thinking that applies to the K-5 setting.
* Students will experience several Computer Science Unplugged activities and be introduced to the fantastic CS Unplugged website of K-5 lesson ideas.
* Students will learn Scratch, and design a project which incorporates a well-known story or fairy-tale, but incorporates a new ending with a social justice message.
As a former high school computer science teacher, this elementary realm is new territory for me, and so I am looking for any feedback or ideas from the K-5 computer science community on how to introduce future elementary teachers to computing.
Am I on the right track?
Do any of you have thoughts on other activities/readings that might strengthen this course?
Joanna Goode
CSTA Board of Directors

Dealing with Competence Issues

Posted on April 21, 2010 by CSTA Blog

By Pat Phillips
Engaging every student in computer science is a goal we all share. We label it diversity and know it is critical to a balanced industry and a competitive country. We’ve all struggled with encouraging students to try our courses through elaborate promotions, active recruitment, and stealth strategies of one kind or another.
A recurring theme of student reluctance for “signing up” is that many students don’t think they would be good at CS; they lack self-confidence to try something new and out of their realm of experience in spite of the fact that they are exceedingly good with many types of technology. This has been particularly noted coming from girls and other underrepresented groups, exactly the ones we are trying most desperately to attract.
I ran across an interesting entry in the Geek Feminist Blog on just this topic. The premise of the blog entry is that it takes an over abundance of self-confidence to succeed in STEM fields. The rationale is that the road to success is paved with many mislabeled experiences which students call “failures;” in reality these “failures” are the necessary steps of testing solutions and successfully solving problems. Such experiences are transformed in our brains from “necessary steps toward success that show we are competent” to “proof that we are incompetent.” I think many students are highly susceptible to this thought conversion, especially those who have faced real failures, discouragement, and other de-valuing intellectual experiences. And not surprisingly, these are the very student groups we work to recruit.
So what is the solution? I think that all students should know a bit about self-confidence itself to better moderate their self-talk, to more clearly recognize their strengths, and most importantly, to foster their own sense of self-worth. I propose that knowing about the way our mind works and having skills to set the stage for our own success are critical in overcoming the reluctance of many would-be great computer scientists.
* Recognize the imposter syndrome as a common feeling. Many people feel like they’re not qualified to do what they are doing; they feel like imposters and fear they will be found out.
* Be aware of the Dunning-Kruger effect. People who are vaguely incompetent will over-rate their skills and those who are highly competent will under-rate their expertise.
* Build a classroom of cheerleaders. Surrounding students with individuals who support and encourage their hard work is critical for classroom success and a happy classroom. Finding our own cheerleaders is happy-life skill for everyone.
* Enable and encourage students to celebrate their successes. Tooting their own horn about accomplishments and milestones builds self-confidence and breaks up the negative mind games.
* Give everyone permission to be awesome. Working hard to do awesome stuff displaces low self-esteem; displaced low self-esteem allows awesome accomplishments; awesome accomplishments build self-confidence. And so it goes.
Let me know what you think. How have you encouraged self-confidence in your students and taught them to battle the demons that cause us to minimize our skills and talents? Tell us your stories.
Pat Phillips
Editor, CSTA VOICE

Tennessee Moving Forward on CSTA Chapter

Posted on April 19, 2010 by CSTA Blog

By Jill Pala
Tennessee is talking! Well, at least in a very small corner of Tennessee, Chattanooga to be precise, the community of Computer Science Educators is beginning to grow.
After the summer leadership cohort workshop in Chicago, I was excited to start working on the CSTA initiatives in my own state, but also a little overwhelmed. As a teacher at a private school, I was very much in my own bubble and had no idea what sort of CS programs were in place at other private schools or the Tennessee public schools. I decided to start small and make my first goal to identify teachers of Computer Science and other computing disciplines in my city and try to find enough people to start a local CSTA chapter. I figured I could deal with the state level later.
Then of course school started and any hopes of identifying and gathering these like minded individuals faded for a few months. Finally I found time to start calling around, and I was able to make contact with Dr. Joseph Kizza, the head of the Computer Science Department at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. I hit the jackpot! Dr. Kizza was not only very willing to host our meetings and participate in our chapter, he also had contacts with other K-12 teachers in the area! We arranged a first meeting to discuss chapter formation in February, and we had a whopping 4 people show up. Not to be discouraged, we had a great discussion about the purpose of a CSTA Chapter and what it would take to start the chapter, and decided to schedule another meeting in March to try to get more people to join us. Before the next meeting I went to the web sites of a few more local schools and found the people listed as Computer teachers and sent emails inviting them to our meeting, too. Our next meeting had 6 people attend! And only 3 were the same as the first meeting! Whoo hoo! We have enough to start a chapter!
In total we have identified 9 teachers from 7 different institutions interested in beginning our CSTA chapter. We keep trying new days and times to see if we can find the most accommodating meeting time. Our next meeting is April 12, and we plan to elect chapter leadership and finalize the chapter paperwork. Best of all, it is so wonderful to finally get a chance to talk to local people about our struggles and triumphs that we all face in our own schools. We’re really excited to get our Chattanooga CSTA chapter off the ground, and we can’t wait to grow even more. In fact, this year at SIGCSE in Milwaukee, I met another Tennessee teacher, Laine Agee from Memphis, who is chomping at the bit to start advocating for CSTA at the state level. We’re hoping that we can figure out a way to skype her in to our Chattanooga CSTA meetings, or even help her start identifying other teachers in her neck of the woods to start a Memphis CSTA chapter!
What strategies have you used to advocate for computer science education locally or at the state level?
Jill Pala
CSTA Leadership Cohort Member

Elective Status Creates Chaos for Courses and Students

Posted on April 17, 2010 by CSTA Blog

By Ron Martorelli
A recent experience brought to us by a school within our local CSTA chapter drives home some of the unusual difficulties we have in developing Computer Science programs in our high schools.
It seems that seventeen students chose to enroll in a Visual Basic course and twelve students enrolled in a C++ course for the 2010-2011 school year. These are elective courses which, in this school, require a minimum enrollment of twenty five students. The department chairperson was advised that neither course would run because there were too few students.
“But wait”, said the chairperson, “how can we cancel these courses when we have twenty nine students interested in programming?” A meeting was arranged with the principal. The chairperson proposed meeting with the students to determine if they would be interested in a combined course, sort of an introduction to programming? The principal agreed to give it a try.
The chairperson sent an email to the guidance office, asking that counselors not reschedule these students until the meeting. “Too late”, replied the guidance office. We were told yesterday that the classes wouldn’t run and we had to reassign the students.
Two student show up to talk to department chair. One is distraught. He wants to study computer science when he gets to college and his high school counselor has switched him to a sports medicine class. Another student with similar interests complains that she was assigned to a photography course instead of the computer science course she chose. So the department head goes back to the principal and explains what happened. “Ok”, says the principal, “if you can get the students to agree we can change the schedules again and run the course”.
Now comes the paperwork. The scheduling administrator requires that each student have a change of schedule form signed by a parent by the end of the week (two days). Do you know how hard it is to get teenagers to bring a form back home and back in a timely manner?
So far, twenty two forms have been returned. No decision has been made about the course yet.
This is just so frustrating and I am wondering just how common it is that our students get denied an opportunity to take computer sciences courses because of this kind of bureaucracy.
Have things like this happened in your school as well?
Ron Martorelli
CSTA Board of Directors

CSTA Membership Survey Raffle Winners

Posted on April 10, 2010 by CSTA Blog

By Dave Burkhart
Two CSTA members who completed the 2009-10 Membership Satisfaction Survey have been selected as the winners of our member survey raffle.
Deboarah Gilliam of Alma J. Brown school in Grambling, LA and Elaine Adams of Hollidaysburg Area Senior High School in Hollidaysburg, PA have each won a Flip video camera. In total more than 1400 CSTA members participated in the survey.
The survey, conducted every two years, is of great importance to CSTA because it not only gives us with a better idea of how well we are currently serving our members, but also provides key data that will be used to refine current projects and launch new member benefits over the next two years.
It will take us a while to crunch through all of the numbers, but the results of the survey will be reported in an upcoming issue of the CSTA Voice.
On behalf of CSTA, I would like to personally thank all of our members who took the time to participate in our survey and so provide us with their insight and suggestions.
Dave Burkhart
CSTA Membership Chair

“Training” Should Be a Four-Letter Word

Posted on April 8, 2010 by CSTA Blog

By Gail Chapman
“We need to train more teachers.”
“Teachers need more training in order to be successful at teaching computer science.”
“More teacher training programs are needed.”
Statements like these are common and reading a recent post on another blog reminded me of just how much I hate the word “training” when it is used in reference to teachers and teaching. (I even had a professional title once that included the word training and I fought against it then.)
Not that I believe that those who use the word intend to be mean-spirited or do harm; it has just become part of the language we use when we talk about the various needs surrounding teacher education.
I’d like to challenge our community to make a conscious effort to remove training from our vocabulary and replace it with words like education, preparation, and professional development.
Is anyone else bothered by this? Will you accept the challenge?
Gail Chapman
Director, Leadership and Professional Development
CSTA

Books Worth Reading

Posted on April 7, 2010 by CSTA Blog

By Robb Cutler
Some books I’ve read recently have a lot of applicability to education in general and computer science education in specific. So I thought I’d share…
The Mathematician’s Lament by Paul Lockhart talks about how to fix the study of math that we’ve made so boring and uninteresting, it’s no wonder kids don’t like it. Read this and think about how we teach computer science.
A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein. Sally Fincher talked about this book in her SIGCSE keynote this year, though I first learned of it about in the fall from my Human Factors professor. Even though it’s about building, the idea of abstracting salient design patterns is brilliant.
The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander. This is a beautifully-written book which I read before reading A Pattern Language (and which probably should be read before reading APL). While APL is the what and how, TWB is the why and provides the motivation for thinking about design in this manner.
Discrete Mathematics for Computer Scientists by Cliford Stein, Robert “Scot” Drysdale, and Kenneth Bogart. Although I’m not quite through it yet, I’m excited about finally finding a discrete math book that:
1) is written in clear and accessible yet precise language (that could be used in an upper-level high school course), and
2) provides application to computer science problems and algorithms.
Drysdale is the former Chair of the APCS Development Committee, and if you’ve read his posts on the APCS listserv, you’ll understand how clearly written this book is. (Disclaimer: Scot was my undergraduate advisor.)
The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman. You should read this book (and read it again if you haven’t read it in a while) if you ever write a computer program with a user interface, even though Norman never discusses computer interfaces. (If you’ve read it recently and want something more practical for interface design, Jennifer Tidwell’s Designing Interfaces: Patterns [there’s that word again] for Effective Interaction Design is quite good.)
The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges’ Library of Babel by William Goldbloom Bloch. If you haven’t read The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges, you should (it’s a short story that’s freely available on the web). Bloch describes the mathematics behind the story in a very accessible and interesting way.
Feel free to add your favorite books (or even just what you’ve been reading recently) in the comments!
As John Steinbeck once said, “I guess there are never enough books.”
Robb Cutler
CSTA Board of Directors

Facebook: What’s appropriate?

Posted on March 31, 2010 by CSTA Blog

By Fran Trees
As computer science educators, we think of ourselves as computer savvy. We are knowledgeable about social networks and online communities. I’ll wager that a good many of us have accounts on Facebook (even if we do not actively post what we do every waking moment of our existence).
I have a Facebook account. My activity is very limited. I confirm friends when I receive an email requesting me to do so and I have a clue who the person is! I login to my account occasionally to find that my friends are finding Ugly Ducklings on their farms, building horse stables, sharing flowers with me, and doing whatever is happening in Mafia Wars. In a way (a very small way), I’m jealous. How do these people find time to do these things?
I do find joy in keeping up-to-date with activities and events in the lives of my friends: pictures of new grandchildren, accomplishments of dogs in of agility competitions, pictures of vacationing children, new pets, experiences on cool dive sites, and great ski adventures.
I also question some of the information people post. I hesitate to tell the world where I am each day. I doubt that they would care. I don’t think I would tell the world where my children are, either. I know, when I post information to Facebook, it’s not really “to the world.” I do have a bit of control about just who my friends are and who sees what. So, maybe, I’m just a bit old-fashioned.
Lots of people post how they are feeling: it’s a bad day today; it was a great day at the mountain; it’s only Wednesday; I need sleep. I need chocolate.
Just what is appropriate? Is what’s appropriate for one person inappropriate for another?
I was floored when I read the following article about a professor being suspended for comments made on her Facebook page:
http://www.poconorecord.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100226/NEWS/2260344
There are many similar stories:
A student being suspended after threatening remarks on Facebook:
http://www.mndaily.com/2009/12/16/u-student-suspended-after-threatening-remarks-facebook
This makes for a great class discussion (or writing assignment).
What are your thoughts?
Do you have a Facebook account?
How active are you on Facebook?
I can’t wait to see how many friend requests I get as a result of this blog!
Fran Trees
CSTA Chapter Liaison

Computing and the Common Core

Posted on March 26, 2010 by CSTA Blog

By Cameron Wilson
K-12 computer science education might get a boost from a recently released document called the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI). This initiative is historic for the United States. For the first time forty-eight governors have come together to propose a common set of English arts and mathematics standards — which are key drivers of the curriculum students are exposed to — for their states. Until the common core standards initiative, state standards were generally disconnected from each other.

The exciting news is that computer science is listed as a potential fourth course in their model pathway, which is described below. Or, put another way, the Common Core State Standards Initiative is proposing that computer science be part of the students’ core curriculum. States are not bound by these standards or this model, and this doesn’t mean that once the draft is made final computer science will count as a mathematics credit in high schools across the nation. But political momentum for the initiative is building and being a part of it gives computer science a much needed boost.

To better understand how computer science fits into the Common Core State Standards Initiative we need to dive deeper into policy landscape and context.

Most education policy discussions revolve around standards and a student’s "core" curriculum requirements. Every state has standards for education, and many assess student progress toward meeting these standards. But each state sets is own standards. For example, a Virginia 11th grade mathematics standard might be in a different grade in North Carolina or might not exist in another state. The Secretary of Education Arne Duncan believes the main cause of the problem is that we’ve given states too much flexibility on setting standards and too little in implementing them through rigid testing requirements. The initiative is part of an attempt to change this dynamic.

The second piece of the policy framework revolves around core curriculum — i.e. what "counts" toward a student’s requirements for high school graduation. Of the states that have credit requirements, many are moving toward a "four by four" plan. For example, students will have to take four courses of mathematics and four courses of science to graduate. Typically other disciplines such as English arts, social studies, etc. are in the "core."

When it comes to computer science education in K-12 we have two major policy issues: 1) most states do not have specific computer science standards, and 2) if computer science courses are in schools, they don’t count toward a student’s core credits. Some states like Texas, Georgia and Virginia have moved to count computer science courses in high school as either a math or science; however, in most states computer science is an elective. This leaves computer science courses starved for attention, resources and student interest.

The mathematics standards in the draft document are split by grade level from K-8; certain concepts would be taught in certain grades. In high school, the framework splits the remaining standards into threads to be taught in some sequence. To help guide course development in high school, the initiative developed a model four-course pathway for mathematics, which is part of the Appendix to the standards. The standards only reflect three years of courses, but the model reflects what they would consider appropriate courses for additional study. Computer science is one of those additional courses in the mathematics pathway.

ACM and the Computer Science Teachers Association have met with the leaders of the initiative and advocated that it computer science should be part of a student’s core subject. The draft of the common core standards initiative gives us a foothold in meeting this goal.

Now the community can support this breakthrough by sending letters for support for the inclusion of computer science in the final document. The initiative is taking comments on the draft until April 2. There are two ways to comment. The first is by taking the survey, which as an additional comment area where you can express support for computer science. (Follow this link and click on the "submit feedback" to get to the survey.) The second is by sending letters to [email protected].

Cameron Wilson
Director of Public Policy
Association for Computing Machinery

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