Task Specific Programming will only matter if it solves a user’s problem (Precalculus TSP Part 4 of 5)

This is the fourth in a five part series about Precalculus Task-Specific Programming. I presented two prototypes in Parts 1 and 2, and discussed what I’m exploring about programming in Part 3.

I’ve shown my prototypes to several teachers — some computer science (e.g., I presented the first prototype at the Work In Progress Workshop at ICER in Toronto) and a half-dozen math teachers. The computer science teachers have been pretty excited, and I have had several requests for the system to try out with various student groups.

Why am I looking at precalculus?  Because it’s what leads to success in college calculus. I’m influenced by Sadler and Sonnert’s work showing that high school calculus isn’t the critical thing to support success in undergraduate calculus (see article here). It’s precalculus. Undergraduate calculus is a gatekeeper. Students don’t get STEM undergraduate degrees because they can’t get through calculus. So if we want more students to succeed in STEM undergraduate, we want high school precalculus to get better, in terms of more inclusive success.

Precalculus is a pretty abstract set of topics (see an example list here).  For the most part, it’s foreword looking: “You’ll need this when you get to Calculus.”  My idea is to teach precalculus with concrete contexts made possible by computing, like image filters. I want more students to find precalculus more engaging and more personally meaningful, leading to more learning.

So, might my prototypes help students learn precalculus?

Math teachers have generally been, “Meh.”

I’ve had four teachers tell me that it’s “interesting*.” One math teacher was blunt and honest — neither of these tools solve a problem that students have. Basic matrix notation and element-by-element matrix operations are the easiest parts of matrices. Precalculus students can already (typically) figure out how to plot a given wave equation.

What’s hard? Students struggle with forms of matrix multiplication and determinants. They struggle with what each of the terms in the wave function do, and what influences periodicity. Seeing the graphed points is good, but having the values display in symbolic form like (3*pi)/2 would be more powerful for making a connection to a unit circle. I’m learning these in a participatory design context, so I actually pushed more on what would be useful and what I need to do better — I have a much longer list of things to do better than just these points.

The math teachers have generally liked that I am paying attention to disciplinary literacy. I’m using their notations to communicate in the ways that things are represented in their math textbooks. I am trying to communicate in the way that they want to communicate.

Here’s the big insight that I learned from the mathematics teachers with whom I’ve spoken: Teachers aren’t going to devote class time or their prep time to something that doesn’t solve their problems. Some teachers are willing to put time into additional, enrichment activities — if the teacher needs more of those. As one teacher told me, “Most math classes are less about more exploration, and more about less failure.” The point of precalculus is to prepare students to pass calculus.  If you want more diverse students to get into STEM careers, more diverse students have to get through calculus. Precalculus is important for that. The goal is less failure, more success, and more student understanding of mathematics.

This insight helps me understand why some computational tools just don’t get a foothold in schools. At the risk of critiquing a sacred cow, this helps to explain why Logo didn’t scale. Seymour Papert and crew developed turtle geometry, which Andrea diSessa and Hal Abelson showed was really deep. But did Logo actually solve a problem that students and teachers had? Turtle graphics is beautiful, and being body syntonic is great, but that’s not the students’ problem with math. Most of their real problems with mathematics had to do with the cartesian coordinate system, not with being able to play being a turtle. Every kid can walk a square and a triangle. Did students learn general problem-solving skills? Not really. So, why should teachers devote time to something that didn’t reduce student failure in mathematics?

It would be hard to be disciplinary literate when Logo and turtle geometry was invented. Logo was originally developed on teletype machines. (See Cynthia Solomon’s great keynote about this story.) The turtle was originally a robot. Even when they moved Logo to the Apple II, they could not match the representations in the kid’s textbooks, the representations that the teachers were most comfortable with. So instead, we asked student to think in terms of fd 200 rt 90 instead of (x,y). Basic usability principles tell us to use what the user is familiar with. Logo didn’t. It demanded more of the students and teachers, and maybe it was worthwhile in long run — but that tradeoff wasn’t obvious to the teachers.

I have a new goal:

I want to provide a programming experience that can be used in five minutes which can be integrated into a precalculus class to improve on student learning.

I want to use programming to solve a learning problem in another domain. Programming won’t enter the classroom if it doesn’t solve a teacher’s problem, which is what they perceive as the student’s problem. Improving student learning is my users’ (teachers’) goals. Good UI design is about helping the user achieve their goals.

I’ve started on designs for two more precalc prototypes based on the participatory design sessions I’ve had, and I’m working on improving the wave texture generator to better address real learning problems. The work I’m doing with social science educators is completely driven by teachers and student learning challenges. That’s one of the reasons why I don’t have working prototypes there yet — it’s harder to address real problems.  My precalc prototypes were based on my read of literature on precalculus. That’s never going to be as informed as the teacher-in-the-classroom.

Now, there’s another way in which we might argue that these prototypes help with education — maybe they help with learning something about computer science? Here’s a slide from my SIGCSE 2019 keynote, referencing the learning trajectories work by Katie Rich, Carla Strickland, T. Andrew Binkowski, Cheryl Moran, and Diana Franklin (see this blog post).

You’re not going to learn anything about #1 from my prototypes — you can’t write imprecise or incomplete code in these task-specific programming environments. You can learn about #2 — different sets of transformation can produce the same outcomes. You definitely learn about #3 — programs are made by assembling instructions from a (very) limited set. If I were to go on and look at the Rich et al. debugging learning trajectories (see paper here), there’s a lot of that in my prototypes, e.g., “Outcome can be used to decide whether or not there are errors.”

So here’s the big research question: Could students learn something about the nature of programming and programs from using task-specific programming? I predict yes. Will it be transferable? To text or blocks language? Maybe…

Here’s the bigger research question that these prototypes have me thinking about. For the moment, imagine that we had tools like these which could be used reasonably in less than five minutes of tool-specific learning, and could be dropped into classes as part of a one hour activity. Imagine we could have one or two per class (e.g., algebra, geometry, trigonometry, biology, chemistry, and physics), throughout middle and high school. Now: Does it transfer? If you saw a dozen little languages before your first traditional, general-purpose programming language, would you have a deeper sense of what programs did (e.g., would you know that there is no Pea-esque “super-bug” homunculus)? Would you have a new sense for what the activity of programming is about, including debugging?

I don’t know, but I think it’s worth exploring task-specific programming more to see if it works.

Request to the reader: I plan to continue working on precalculus task-specific programming (as well as in social studies).  If you know a precalculus teacher or mathematics education researcher who would be interested in collaborating with me (e.g., to be a design informant, to try out any of these tools, to collaborate on design or assessment or evaluation), please let me know. It’s been hard to find math ed people who are willing to work with me on something this weird. Thanks!

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* In the South, if you hear “Bless your heart!” you should know that you’re likely being insulted.  It sort of means, “You are so incompetent that you’re pitiful.”  I’ve learned the equivalent from teachers now.  It’s “That would make a nice enhancement activity” or “We might use that after testing.”  In other words, “I’d never use this. It doesn’t solve any of my problems.”