Archive for November, 2014
The dark at the end of the funnel: The pipeline in computing education leads to a sewage plant
Recommended blog post from Neil Brown, in response to comments from Mark Zuckerberg that the problem with getting more women into computing is solved by getting computing education earlier. It’s not. It used to be that we’d say, “Women aren’t going into computing because they don’t know what it is.” Now we’d say, “Women aren’t going into computing because they know exactly what it’s like. Smart women.”
However, this is not solely an issue with the education system though that would be a familiar narrative — work force not as we would like it? Must be the fault of schools and universities. The pipeline or funnel doesn’t just need filling by shoving lots of 5 year old girls in one end and waiting for the hordes of female developers to swim out of the other end into an idyllic tech industry pool. Zuckerberg mentions that the lack of women in the industry forms a vicious cycle. This is not a problem at the education end of the funnel.
As this Fortune article describes, the industry is not welcoming to women. The Anita Borg Institute found that women’s quit rates were double those of men. Not to mention issues like maternity leave. The pool at the end of the pipeline is leaking, and for good reason. So the vicious cycle is not simply an accident of history; the women that are in the industry tend to leave. There are several reasons for this, some of which are identity and culture in the industry.
Time spent is about expertise developed: Programmer productivity is an education problem
Joel Spolsky argues that the time spent on an assignment by students is not correlated with the results. This is part of his argument that there is a 5x to 10x productivity gap between the best and average programmers.
There’s just nothing to see here, and that’s the point. The quality of the work and the amount of time spent are simply uncorrelated. I asked Professor Eisenstat about this, and he pointed out one more thing: because assignments are due at a fixed time usually midnight and the penalties for being late are significant, a lot of students stop before the project is done. In other words, the maximum time spent on these assignments is as low as it is partially because there just aren’t enough hours between the time the assignment is handed out and the time it is due. If students had unlimited time to work on the projects which would correspond a little better to the working world, the spread could only be higher.
I did my Blog@CACM post in November on this argument (see the post here). Joel is measuring the wrong thing in his experiment. Time spent doesn’t correlate with quality. Time on task correlates with learning. More knowledge correlates with greater quality, but you don’t know much about how much is already known by the students in the class that he’s studying. Therefore, you can’t possibly make an argument about productivity when the critical variable is unknown.
There may be a productivity gap between the best and average programmers. There’s a productivity gap between the best and average practitioners in any field. The issue is whether we can generate the performance at the top end. Can we make someone highly productive? It’s a design problem. It’s an education problem.
2014 CSEdWeek, Hour of Code, and (new!) Georgia Day of Code
CSEdWeek is December 8-14 this year, and Code.org is repeating their Hour of Code activity. The idea of Hour of Code is to get millions of students to try out coding. See more on CSEdWeek here, and on Hour of Code here. This year, Andy Stefik’s accessible programming language Quorum is included in an Hour of Code activity: http://quorumlanguage.com/documents/hourofcode/part1.php
Here in Georgia, the Technology Association of Georgia (TAG) in cooperation with other groups in Georgia are promoting a “Day of Code” on December 10. See here for more on that, including information on prizes available for classes and schools.
#Gamergate as a response to re-engineering: BPC as a conspiracy to change computing
If you don’t know what #Gamergate is, count yourself fortunate. It gets discussed a lot in the circles I hang out in, especially in computational media. I’ve learned words like doxxing and how it can lead to people leaving their home because of death threats, and how conceal-and-carry laws in Utah can cause a feminism theorist to cancel a talk because of threats of a “massacre.”
The article below (and the comments in response) gave me new insight into the supporters of Gamergate. The violent and immature behavior makes it hard to see what (I think) is a kind of free speech argument. Gamergate supporters want their culture just the way it is, thank you very much. Even if that culture lacks positive female role models and may overflow with misogyny, it’s their culture. They see feminists, academics, and journalists as a “conspiracy” to engineer social change (see the quote below). Even the original motivation of Gamergate stance (“It’s about ethics in games journalism”) boils down to resisting forces for change — there wouldn’t be any complaints about the journalism if they agreed with what the journalists were saying. One commenter to the article I’m citing below says, “Many members of this organization, including Ms. Consalvo and Ms. Shaw are on the record discussing how to dismantle what they see as a problematic male dominated gaming culture that is beholden to industrial motives (ergo: economics) rather than artistic aspirations.” In other words, “Our games make money. Leave us alone.” They don’t want their world to be re-made or re-engineered.
I don’t approve of the Gamergate message, and I strongly reject how the message is being conveyed. Modern society values being inclusive. There is not one kind of gaming culture and gamer – it’s not all theirs to define. There are enough game developers out there so that they can have their “anti-feminism” (which I didn’t know was a thing before I read the below) while others have their feminism (as Anita Sarkeesian talked about in her interview on the Colbert Report). Threatening violence because you don’t like how things are changing is an unacceptable way of sending a message.
I can understand why Gamergate supporters want to send a message about “Leave our culture alone.” People strongly resist having culture re-engineered around them, sometimes resisting with violence. If you think about other efforts to engineer culture and the pushback in response, you might recall the Arkansas Governor using the National Guard to keep out nine black students in Little Rock (see Wikipedia article here).
I wonder about the implications for diversifying computing. Might an anti-diversity backlash happen in computing — not the threats of violence (I hope), but outrage against change? When looking up papers by Michael Kimmel (whom I wrote about here), I found the National Council for Men, which is decidedly anti-Kimmel (see example here). Read the comments on the Guardian article describing Mattel’s decision to pull their awful “Barbie: I can be a software engineer” book. There is clearly a backlash against feminism right now.
We in the Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC) community are aiming to achieve a similar kind of social engineering that the Gamergate supporters are complaining about. I am part of a vast, international (though maybe not particularly well-organized) conspiracy to change computing culture and to invade computing with many women and members of under-represented groups. We are “actively plotting to influence” computing. The Gamergate supporters argue that the conspiracy is about “artistic aspirations.” In BPC, we say that we’re about social justice, equity, and diversity. From the perspective of the “engineered,” the difference in purpose may not make much difference. One of the pushbacks on the call I shared to eliminate nerd culture (see here) was, “Can’t we just shape/change nerd culture?” Do the nerds want to be changed?
What might a response to BPC look like? Might well-prepared, privileged male and white/asian CS students complain about efforts to give seats in classes to women or under-represented minorities whom they may perceive as less-prepared? Or might we even see efforts arguing “We like Nerd Culture just way it is!”
I’m not predicting Gamergate-style threats against supporters of BPC, but it’s worth considering what kind of pushback we might receive. Today, the challenge to broadening participation in computing is less a pushback and more a lack of priority. There’s a general awareness that there’s a problem, but there’s less conviction that it’s an important problem or that there’s an obvious way forward to fixing it. We see that in the Microsoft CEO gaffe and the male allies panels at Grace Hopper this year (see discussion here) — they knew there was a problem, but they weren’t really thinking about it deeply or taking steps to address it. But if change really started to happen, there would likely be resistance to that change. A good strategist is thinking several steps ahead in the game, and it’s worth watching the Gamergate present to glean lessons for the BPC future.
At DiGRA’s annual conference this August, Shaw and Consalvo participated in a roundtable session on “identity and diversity in game culture.” Notes from the roundtable were discovered online, showing how participants discussed the impact of feminist game studies on the video game industry, and whether academics could influence developers. Some interpreted it as proof that members of DiGRA were actively plotting to influence game development. Sargon of Akkad, a YouTube user who regularly discusses “gaming, anti-feminism, history and fiction” on his channel, has fueled that conspiracy theory. The connections between DiGRA, Shaw, Golding and other journalists, Sargon argues, suggest “DiGRA is the poisoned spring from whence all of this evil flows” — meaning Gamergate and the argument that gamer culture is dying.
via #Gamergate supporters attack Digital Games Research Association @insidehighered.
(Thanks to Shriram Krishnamurthi, Blair MacIntyre, Barbara Ericson, Briana Morrison, and Betsy DiSalvo for helpful edits and advice on drafts of this post.)
Programming with Pseudocode, Keeping Student Interest, the Need for School, and International Curricula: Trip Report on WiPSCE 2014
First week of this month, Barb and I went to Berlin for WiPSCE 2014 conference. See the program here and the proceedings here, and the post on my keynote here. Let me tell you about some of the interesting things I heard there.
We heard about so many international CS curricula efforts. Tim Bell talked about different levels of programming activity going on in different curricula (all the images in this blog post are from me snapping pictures of presentations).
We heard about Austrian efforts, Flemish efforts, and programs I was aware of in the UK, New Zealand, Germany, Israel, and the United States. I had not previously hear much about Poland in CS Ed, but they’ve been including computing in their curriculum for a long time.
Quintin Cutts (Code or (not Code) – Separating Formal and Natural Language in CS Education) talked about a problem that they’re having in Scotland that we’re also facing in the US with the CS Principles effort. There are several different programming languages in use in schools. Nobody wants to be the bad guy to say “You have to use X (maybe Scratch? Alice? App Inventor? Python?), because that’s what the national test will be in.” So, national test-developers are creating pseudocode languages that aim to be understandable without getting hung up on syntax. Scotland has one that’s made up of bits and pieces of other languages (which they call “Haggis” — seriously!). The problem is that if a piece of code is never expected to run, it can have assumptions within it that would have to be cleared up to build a runtime system. Quintin showed how even simple examples of the pseudocode from their national test have all kinds of logical inconsistencies.
It’s a real problem. Allison Elliott Tew’s dissertation (see here for post) showed that weakest performing students had the worst time transferring their knowledge from whatever language they learned to a pseudo-code. That means that your top students are going to be fine with a pseudo-code test, but your bottom students are not going to do well at all — they won’t know all the concepts, and they’re going to trip over the language. A pseudo-code test is going to be another barrier to underprepared students getting into CS.
Now, once you get them in the door, how do you keep them there? One interesting paper (Scratch vs. Karel – Impact on Learning Outcomes and Motivation) compared student interest in using Scratch or Karol the Robot. Scratch is a blocks-based language, and Karol was programmed in a text-based language. Students liked Scratch and performed better with it, but felt that Karol was more “real-life” and thus was more motivating for doing more in CS later. Betsy DiSalvo found similar results with her Glitch students. When comparing Alice and Python, students liked what they could produce with Alice, but felt that Python was more like what real programmers did and was consequently more motivating for some students. This paper has had me thinking, “Maybe we should bring Logo back?” It’s text-based like Karol, designed for students, and we have LOTS of books and other materials available for Logo across the curriculum.
Leigh Ann DeLyser talked about her work with CS NYC (Software Engineering Students in the City). It’s a remarkable program: 1900 students applied for 120 slots, and the selection among the qualified students was by lottery. They did pre and post surveys around the first year of the program, with questions like “Would you like to study CS or SE after this semester?” or “Want to be a computer scientist or software engineer one day?” Females lost much more interest in a future computing career then males.
Finally, the talk that has most been in my thoughts since the conference was by Debby Fields and Yasmin Kafai on their Scratch study (Programming in the Wild: Patterns of Computational Participation in the Scratch Online Social Networking Forum). They studied 5000 visitors to the Scratch website in the first quarter of 2012. First big finding — most of them don’t do much. 55% visit but don’t do anything. The other 45% engage at a variety of levels, and the levels are pretty much gender-balanced. The most active participants are about evenly split male-female.
Debbie and Yasmin defined four “classes” of programming activity based on the programs that these users uploaded to the Scratch website. Booleans are a big differentiator, as are variables and random numbers. The below figure describes how much of each kind of programming block appears in each class of programs, and what percentage of programs they saw land in each class.
Here’s the disappointing part: The highest level of programming activity was almost all boys. Girls don’t go much beyond the simplest programming.
Now, we don’t know much about ages or where these students are or their ethnic group. As Debby pointed out, age and location are self-reported on the Scratch website, and it’s remarkable how many 100 year old Scratch programmers there are in Antartica. Their data suggest that informal education activities like Scratch (or Kahn Academy or MOOCs) are unlikely to reach a broad range of users. Debby pointed out that what students are building influences what students do. If Scratch programmers can tell stories without booleans, how do you motivate more advanced programming actvities if they’re only story-telling? If we want to reach more diverse students, and we want to encourage more kinds of activities, we need school. We need formal education to reach everyone.
Earn your Human-Centered Computing PhD at Georgia Tech: Applications due Dec 15
Georgia Tech founded the very first HCC degree program in 2004, focusing on the intersection of computing and people – where computing includes not just computers but also different kinds of computational artifacts from games to mobile applications, from robots to bionics and mobile applications; and people includes not only individuals but also teams, organizations, societies and cultures.
Join our 29 faculty in working across the HCC spectrum: learning sciences & technologies, computing education, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, collaboration, design, human-computer interaction, health & wellness, informatics, information visualization & visual analytics, international development, learning sciences & technology, social computing, and ubiquitous & wearable computing.
Join our 39 students, all doing research in one of three broad areas: Cognition, Learning & Creativity, Human-Computer Interaction, and Social Computing. We value diversity in all its dimensions; our students have a broad range of backgrounds, coming from across the world and with a variety of different and undergraduate degrees.
Join a vibrant community of faculty and graduate students that encompasses not just the HCC PhD but also the PhDs in Digital Media, Computer Science with specialization in HCI, Psychology with specializations in Engineering Psychology and Cognitive Aging, Music Technology, and Industrial Design, and the interdisciplinary GVU Center with its multitude of research labs.
Join, upon graduation, our alumni who have academic or research careers at Adobe Research, CMU, Drexel, Georgetown, Georgia Tech, Google, Kaiser Permanente, Kaltura, U. Maryland, U. Michigan, Michigan State, U. Minnesota, Oak Ridge National Labs, Northeastern, Penn State, Rose Hulman, Samsung, Sassafras, U. Washington, US Military Academy and Virginia Tech.
Our curriculum is flexible, allowing considerable customizing based on individual interests: three core courses, three specialization courses and three minor courses. You get involved with research during your first semester, and never stop!
Students receive tuition and a competitive stipend during their studies; outstanding US students are eligible for the President’s Fellowship.
Applications are due December 15; see http://www.ic.gatech.edu/future/phdhcc for additional program and application information.
Seeking study participants: What should BS in CS graduates know about software development?
Katrin was in our ICER DC this last August. She is trying to measure the expectations that software companies and universities have on BS in CS graduates. She has a survey on software development and the software development process. She asked me to share this message:
Tech’s Meritocracy Problem: Perception doesn’t match reality
The blog post linked below was inspired by Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella’s gaffe at Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, but connects to an important theme in the story of the lack of diversity in computing. Many in computing think that the tech industry is a meritocracy, where the most capable get the most credit and best pay. It underlies the entrepreneur’s belief that the successful entrepreneur gets there because of his or her hard work alone. But it’s clearly not true — a lesson that I first learned from Caroline Simard.
Meritocracy is a myth. And our belief in it is holding back the tech industry from getting better.The intent to be meritocratic is not a myth, but we know what road is paved with good intentions. In practice, merit and impact in software engineering are impossible to measure objectively. And so we fall back on subjective evaluation of merit. And when we are measuring subjectively, we are prone to cognitive error stemming from stereotypes and other unconscious beliefs. We have unimpeachable research that when you ask any of us, male or female, to evaluate the work of women mathematicians, engineers, and scientists, we evaluate identical work to be less meritorious than a man’s.
A new explanation for tech’s pathetic gender diversity: The personal computer
Barbara Ericson gets quoted in this interesting piece in Salon.com. I think that there were multiple things that happened at once. The PC also led to a boom in enrollment, which (Eric Robert argues) led to a raising of standards to reduce load on teachers, which had an inhibitory effect on gender and ethnic/racial diversity in computing.
NPR’s Planet Money just had a piece (quoting Jane Margolis) where they explore this angle, that having a PC became a necessity to succeed in CS classes, and the PC was a “boy’s toy.” See here for the NPR piece.
The PC, and a decade later, the Internet, changed all that. Silicon Valley became a destination not just for the engineering-minded, but also for the profit-seeking. People motivated by money are different than people motivated by science. It’s always dangerous to venture too far into the minefields of gender-based determination, but it seems at least possible that the arrival of a generation of testosterone-fueled, super aggressive men who saw computers primarily as a way to get rich ended up creating a less welcoming atmosphere for women. Silicon Valley became more sexist because it became more about money and power, and less about actually doing something interesting and useful.
via A new explanation for tech’s pathetic gender diversity: The personal computer – Salon.com.
Why nerd culture must die: Not everyone can teach themselves, and we have to welcome diversity
An interesting argument, with implications for computing education.
- Many people in nerd culture are self-taught — there were few courses in the early days, and people just figured it out. If we want computing to grow, broaden, and diversify, we have to start teaching this stuff, and not only value those who are self-taught.
- We have to stop insulting our students’ learning. I told the story in my CS Education Zoo interview of a teacher (at Georgia Tech, I’m sorry to say) who asked everyone who took Python as their first language to raise their hand. He then told them, “Python is a terrible language. You need to forget everything you learned if you’re going to learn Java.” That’s classic nerd culture — dissing the languages and tools of others, of those not in your “in” group.All kinds of CS learning leads to developing expertise. That kind of insult says to women and under-represented minority students, who may already be wondering if they belong (see imposter syndrome), “And you know even less than you thought.”
If we went to get beyond “nerd culture,” then we have to take seriously the welcoming and education of new-comers to our field.
And that’s where the problem lies. We’re still behaving like the rebel alliance, but now we’re the Empire. We got where we are by ignoring outsiders and believing in ourselves even when nobody else would. The decades have proved that our way was largely right and the critics were wrong, so our habit of not listening has become deeply entrenched. It even became a bit of a bonding ritual to attack critics of the culture because they usually didn’t understand what we were doing beyond a surface level. It didn’t used to matter because nobody except a handful of forum readers would see the rants. The same reflex becomes a massive problem now that nerds wield real power. GamerGate made me ashamed to be a gamer, but the scary thing is that the underlying behavior of attacking critics felt like something I’d always seen in our culture, and tolerated. It only shocked me when it was scaled up so massively into rape and death threats, and I saw mainstream corporations like Intel folding in the face of the pressure we can bring to bear.
Come visit the CS Education Zoo from Steve Wolfman and Will Byrd
Post to SIGCSE-members, re-posted here with Steve’s permission.
TL;DR version: Watch Will&Steve interview interesting CS Ed folks on the CS Ed Zoo at http://webyrd.net/zoo.html. Most recent episode with Mark Guzdial at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1oTtPECHZI
Full version:
It’s a common lament that CS education is an isolated practice. You teach in your own classroom, a colleague drops by once a year for performance review, and otherwise only your students know what you do.
We know what you’re thinking:
I wish there were a place where CS educators were kept on 24-hour public display (locked securely behind iron bars, of course).
Well, now there is!
Announcing the CS Education Zoo http://webyrd.net/zoo.html, a bi-weekly-very-ish interview series where CS educators (and people with animal-themed last names) Will Byrd and Steve Wolfman interview interesting people involved in CS education (even if they lack animal-themed last names).
So far, we’ve posted six episodes:
+ Mark Guzdial extols the power and potential of live coding (and MUCH more): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1oTtPECHZI
+ David Nolen ponders the impact of a programmer’s first language on their learning (and MUCH more): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxR-AjRZUrQ
+ Becky Bates shares how to craft a large, heterogeneous project course (and MUCH more): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QSOHDo4pVA
+ Jeff Forbes explains why “rapid feedback is better than good feedback” (and MUCH more): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJVoPE7IeaI
+ Rob Simmons discusses the subtleties of teaching formal reasoning about programming in intro courses (and MUCH more): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2xd5Bc_-Os
+ Kim Voll tells us what to tell our students interested in gaming careers (and MUCH more): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JcNHHSPMzE
And in the works: a chat with some of the people behind Hacker School.
P.S. Drop us a line (wolf@cs.ubc.ca or tweet like the cool kids apparently do to @steve_wolfman and @webyrd) if there’s some person, group, or other amorphous-but-audible entity you think we should invite!
Open Access as IP Communism
Great piece by Moshe Vardi on the ills of open access (something I’ve written about). I agree with him — the open access movement is not sustainable in its current form. There are advantages to forms of capitalism.
It is regrettable, I believe, that the open access OA movement found itself in the IP communist camp. OA advocates unrestricted online access to peer-reviewed scholarly research. On the face of it, this idea is seductively attractive. Who can object to unrestricted access to research? Furthermore, after seeing the price of scholarly publications escalate in the 1990s, open access seemed like a perfect solution; no more escalating subscription fees. But just like any other intellectual property, online publishing has fixed costs, which must be covered. OA advocates often ignore or minimize this issue, but this reality cannot be ignored forever and the dominant business model that has emerged to support OA publishing is “author pays,” whereby authors pay article-processing fees to cover publishing costs. This model is not new, but in recent years it has gained a strong foothold in science publishing, both with for-profit commercial publishers and non-profit societies like ACM, which now offers such an option for any and all articles in its Digital Library DL.
via Openism, IPism, Fundamentalism, and Pragmatism | August 2014 | Communications of the ACM.
Educational Technology as Imperialism: Finding a middle ground between Papert and Freire
Audrey Watters is an insightful writer who tackles hard issues in educational technology. I’ve cited her work before in this blog. The post linked below made me realize that I need to read more by Paulo Freire and Paulo Blikstein, and how important it is to avoid, “The latest in a long line of educational salvations that the Global North has imposed on the Global South.”
I deeply appreciate Freire’s emphasis on “school,” which Audrey emphasizes. The need for school can also be seen in the research findings of Yasmin Kafai and Deborah Fields (who found that kids who discover tools like Scratch tend to be even more privileged than those in undergrad CS classes) and Betsy DiSalvo (who found that immigrant families don’t even know what words to search for in order to find learning resources). Open education efforts alone are unlikely to reach the underprivileged students who most need the resources. We need school in order to reach everyone.
It isn’t simply that an XPRIZE would likely offer an imperialist curriculum — that it’s in English is only part of the problem here. What does it mean to teach “O is for Octopus” in Sub-Saharan Africa, for example? It’s that all of this will be delivered on an Android tablet, and with that comes a host of other technological imperialist overtures — telecommunications companies offering hardware and software and banking and schooling; Google’s special brand of data-mining; and more broadly the tech sector’s penchant for surveillance, for starters.What is the goal of the Global Learning XPRIZE when it comes to learning? Is it for children in the developing world to join the global economy, for example? If so how? On whose terms? To what end? In what role? Why? How? Under whose Terms of Service?
Computing Teachers are Different from Software Developers: WIPSCE 2014 Keynote
A computer science degree is neither necessary nor sufficient for success in teaching computing. The slides below miss the live demo of Media Computation. My TEDxGeorgiaTech talk (video on YouTube) has much of the same components, but is lacking the ukulele playing that I did today. There was no recording made of my talk.
Off to WIPSCE 2014: 9th Workshop in Primary and Secondary Computing Education in Berlin
Barbara and I are attending the WIPSCE 2014 conference, the 9th Workshop in Primary and Secondary Computing Education in Berlin. See the program here and the proceedings here. I was impressed as a reviewer this year — the quality of papers at WIPSCE is exceptionally high. There is worldwide interest in improving K-12 computing education, and reports are flowing into WIPSCE on research findings and lessons-learned from all over the world.
Barbara is presenting a short paper on Friday (with co-authors Tom McKlin and me) on “Preparing Secondary Computer Science Teachers Through an Iterative Development Process.” She’s going to tell how her professional development effort at Georgia Tech developed, using feedback from Tom’s evaluation efforts. She’ll offer some of her lessons learned, such as using teachers themselves as providers where ever possible, to establish leaders in the community of teachers and to make the PD more sustainable.
I am honored to be the keynote speaker on Thursday morning. My talk is on “Preparing Teachers is Different than Preparing Software Developers.” I’m going to talk about what teachers need to know and do that’s different from software developers, with a particular emphasis on pedagogical-content knowledge, on reading code more than writing code, and about writing code to learn rather than to produce software. I’m still working on my talk. The audience is going to be primary and secondary school CS teachers AND researchers and providers of teacher professional learning opportunities. So, how much do I tell teachers things that they might find useful in the classroom, and how much do I tell results from research or give suggestions on how to facilitate teacher learning? I’ll let you know how it goes.
Computing Ed Research - Guzdial's Take 
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