Fashion counts: Cell phones vs. Calculators

My advisor, Elliot Soloway, appeared in the Atlanta Journal Constitution this week, which made me proud. Education columnist Maureen Downey wrote a piece on “Cellphone as Teacher” in which she talked about Elliot and his quest to make cell phones into useful and powerful educational tools. The idea is to “capitalize on children’s natural affinity for technology and the omnipresence of cellphones.”  The article talks about how the cell phones might be used: “Students measured the area of a school hallway, recorded the geologic stages of the rock cycle and found mean, median, mode and range from a group of numbers. They sketched and even animated on the phones.”

My kids started school this week (Georgia starts waaay early), so I’ve been spending lots of time in Target and Office Depot picking up school supplies — including calculators.  Have you looked at calculators lately?  They are amazingly powerful!  A $30 calculator provides a list interface to input sets of numbers, and then does regression analysis and solves simultaneous equations.  The $100 calculator that’s required for the high school does graphing, animation, and includes a digital periodic table.  These calculators can easily be used for everything Maureen describes.  A $100 calculator is way cheaper than a cell phone plus minutes. There’s a huge amount of curricular materials for calculators, and the teachers now do welcome calculators into the classroom, unlike cell phones. Maureen quotes Elliot saying, “Now, we truly, finally have personal computers that are going to fit in our pockets.” Calculators have been there for years.

So why not push calculators, rather than cell phones?  They are cheaper, more powerful, the curricula already exist, and teachers already accept them.  I’m pretty sure that I know how Elliot would answer: you start from where the kids are.  Calculators are not cool, are not interesting.  They are out of fashion.  As Maureen’s piece says:

“Laptops are very ’90s,” says University of Michigan researcher Elliot Soloway. “They are your daddy’s computers.”

He might as well have said, “Calculators are very ’80’s.  They’re your grandfather’s computers.”

I think about that with respect to computing education (and the next blog post I’m planning).  I’ve argued that no student gets engaged anymore by seeing the word “Hello World!” appear on the screen.  In MediaComp, the equivalent of “Hello World!” is to open a picture and play a sound.  That’s a minimally interesting unit of computation.  But what will it be next year? In five years? In ten years?

In contrast, I look at my kids’ math books, and social science texts, and even science books.  I recognize the pedagogical methods, even some of the figures and diagrams.  There is change there, but there is also a sense for what makes education work.

Will we ever get there with computing education and educational technology?  Our field is so influenced by fashion, by the latest and greatest thing.  What’s cool engages. What’s out of fashion is rejected by students.  Why does fashion seem to influence other disciplines less?  Maybe it does influence engagement there, too, and not changing is a downfall.  On the other hand, there are lots of kids taking Calculus AP, and few taking CS AP.  Math Ed seems not to be a slave to fashion.  How do we get to the point where we can talk about computing education that works, period, and that we can keep using for decades?  Or does the continual upheaval in the field force us to always be on a treadmill of creating the next trendy educational technology or computing education initiative, none of which will last long?