Visiting NTNU in Trondheim Norway June 3-23

Barbara and I are just back from a three week trip to NTNU in Trondheim, Norway. Katie Cunningham came with us (here’s a blog post about some of her work). Three weeks is enough time to come up with a dozen ideas for blog posts, but I don’t have the cycles for that. So let me just give you the high-level view, with pictures and links to learn more.

We went at the beginning of June because Barb and I (and the University of Michigan) are part of the IPIT network (International Partnerships for Excellent Education and Research in Information Technology) that had its kick-off meeting June 3-5. The partnership is about software engineering and computing education research, with a focus student and faculty exchange and meetings at each others’ institutions: NTNU, U. Michigan, Tsinghua University, and Nanjing University. I learned a lot about software engineering that I didn’t know before, especially about DevOps.

If you ever get the chance to go to a meeting organized by Letizia Jaccheri of NTNU, GO! She was the organizer for IPIT, co-chair of IDC 2018, and our overall host for our three weeks there. She has a wonderful sense for blending productivity with fun. During the IDC 2018 poster session, she brought in high school students dressed as storybook characters, just to wander around and “bring in a bit of whimsy.” For a bigger example, she wanted IPIT to connect with the NTNU campus at Ålesund, which just happens to be near the Geiranger fjord, one of the most beautiful in Norway. So, she flew the whole meeting to Ålesund from Trondheim! We took a large cruise-ship like boat with meeting rooms down the fjord. We got in some 5-6 hours of meetings, while also seeing amazing waterfalls and other views, and then visited the Ålesund campus the next day before flying home. We got work done and WOW!

For the next week and a half, we got to know the computing education research folks at NTNU. We were joined at the end of the first week by Elisa Rubegni from the University of Lincoln, and Roberto Martinez-Maldonado came by a couple days later. Barb, Elisa, and I held a workshop on the first Monday after IPIT. A couple days later, we had a half-day meeting with Michalis Giannakos’s group and Roberto, then Elisa led us all in a half-day design exercise (pictured below — Elisa, Sofia, Javi, and Katie). In between, we had individual meetings. I think I met with every one of the PhD students there working in computing education research. (And, in our non-meeting time, Barb and I were writing NSF proposals!)

Michalis’s group is doing some fascinating work. Let me tell you about some of the projects that most intrigued me.

• Sofia (with Kshitij and Ilias) is lead on a project where they track what kids using Scratch are looking at, both on and off screen. It’s part of this cool project where kids program these beautiful artist-created robots with Scratch. It’s a pretty crazy looking experimental setup, with fiducial markers on notebooks and robots and screens.
• Kshitij is trying to measure EEG and gaze in order to determine cognitive load in a user interface. Almost all cognitive load measures are based on self-report (including ours). They’re trying to measure cognitive load physiologically, and correlate it with self-report.
• Katerina and Kshitij is using eye-tracking to measure how undergrads use tools like Eclipse. What I found most interesting was what they did not observe. I noticed in their data that they had no data on using the debugger. They explained that in 40 students, only five people even looked at the debugger. Nobody used data or control flow visualizations at all. I’m fascinated by this — what does it take to get students to actually look at the debuggers and visualizers that were designed to help them learn?
• Roberto is doing this amazing work with learning analytics in physical spaces, where nurses are working on robot patients. Totally serious — they can gather all kinds of data about where people are standing, how they interact, and when they interact. For tasks like nursing, this is super important to understand what students are learning.

Then came FabLearn with an amazing keynote by Leah Buechley on art, craft, and computation. I have a long list of things to look up after her talk, including Desmos, computer controlled cutting machines (which I had never heard of before) which are way cheaper than 3-D printers but still allow you to do computational craft, and http://blog.recursiveprocess.com/ which is all about learning coding and mathematics. She made an argument that I find fascinating — that art is what helps diverse students reflect their identity and culture in their school, and that’s why students who get art classes (controlling for SES) are more likely to succeed in school and go onto post-secondary schooling. Can computing make it easier to bring art back into school? Can computing then play a role in engaging children with school again?

The next reason we were at NTNU was to attend the EXCITED Centre advisory board meeting. Barb and I were there for the launch of EXCITED in January 2017. It’s a very ambitious project, starting from students making informed decisions to go into CS/IT, helping students develop identities in CS, learning through construction, increasing diversity in CS, and moving into careers. We got to hang out with Arnold Pears, Mats Daniels, and Aletta Nylén of UpCERG (Upssala Computing Education Research Group), the world’s largest CER group.

Finally, for the last four days, we attended the Interaction, Design and Children Conference, IDC 2018. I wrote my Blog@CACM post for this month about my experiences there. I saw a lot there that’s relevant to people who read this blog. My favorite paper there tested the theory of concreteness fading on elementary school students learning computing concepts. Here’s a picture of a slide (not in the paper) that summarizes the groups in the experiment.

I’ll end with my favorite moment in IDC 2018, not in the Blog@CACM post. We met Letizia’s post-doc, Javier “Javi” Gomez at the end of our first week in Trondheim. Summer weather in Trondheim is pretty darn close to winter in Atlanta. One day, we woke up to 44F and rain. But we lucked out — the weekends were beautiful. On our first Saturday, Letizia invited us all to a festival near her home, and we met Javi and Elisa. That evening (but still bright sunlight), Javi, Elisa, Barb, and I took a wonderful kayaking trip down the Nidelva river. So it was a special treat to be at IDC 2018 to see Javi get TWO

awards for his contributions, one for his demo and an honorable mention for his note. The note was co-authored by Letizia, and was her first paper award (as she talks about in the lovely linked blog post). It was wonderful to be able to celebrate the success of our new friends.

On the way back, Barb and I stopped in London to spend a couple days with Alan Kay and his wife, Bonnie MacBird. If I could come up with a dozen blog post ideas from 3 weeks, it’s probably like two dozen per day with Alan and Bonnie, and we had two days with them. Visiting a science museum with an exhibit on early computers (including an Alto!) is absolutely amazing when you’re with Alan. But those blog posts will have to wait until after my blog hiatus.