Let’s program in social studies classes: NSF funding for our work in task-specific programming languages

If we want all students to learn computer science (CS for All), we have to go to where the students are. Unfortunately, that’s not computer science class. In most US states, less than 5% of high school students take a course in computer science.

Programming is applicable and useful in many domains today, so one answer is to use programming in science, mathematics, social studies, and other non-CS classes. We take programming to where the students are, and hope to increase their interest and knowledge about CS. I love that idea and have been working towards that goal for the last four years. But it’s a hard sell. I told the story in 2018 (see post here) about how the mathematics teachers rejected our pre-calculus course that integrated computing. How do we help non-CS teachers to see value in computing integrated into their classes?

That’s the question Tammy Shreiner at Grand Valley State and I get three years to explore, thanks to a new grant from the US National Science Foundation in the research strand of the “CS for All” Program. Tammy teaches a course on “Data Literacy for Social Studies Teachers” at GVSU, and she (with her colleague Bradford Dykes) have been building an open educational resource (OER) to support data literacy education in social studies classes. We have been working with her to build usable and useful data visualization tools for her curriculum. Through the grant, we’re going to follow her students for three years: From taking her pre-service class, out into their field experiences, and then into their first classes. At each stage, we’re going to offer mentoring and workshops to encourage teachers to use the things we’ve showed them. In addition, we’ll work on assessments to see if students are really developing skills and positive attitudes about data literacy and programming.

Just a quick glimpse into the possibilities here. AP CS Principles exam-takers are now about 25% female. AP US History is 56% female exam takers. There are fives times as many Black AP US History exam-takers as AP CSP exam-takers. It’s a factor of 14 for Hispanic students. Everyone takes history. Programming activities in a history class reach a far more diverse audience.

I have learned so much in the last couple of years about what prevents teachers from adopting curriculum and technology — it’s way more complicated than just including it in their pre-service classes. Context swamps pre-service teaching. The school the teacher goes to influences what they adopt more than what they learned pre-service. I’ve known Anne Ottenbreit-Leftwich for years for her work in growing CS education in Indiana, but just didn’t realize that she is an expert on technology adoption by teachers — I draw on her papers often now.

Here’s one early thread of this story. Bahare Naimipour, an EER PhD student working with me, is publishing a paper at FIE next month about our early participatory design sessions with pre-service social studies teachers. The two tools that teachers found most interesting were CODAP and Vega-Lite. Vega-Lite is interesting here because it really is programming, but it’s a declarative language with a JSON syntax. The teachers told us that it was powerful, flexible — and “overwhelming.” How could we create a scaffolded path into Vega-Lite?

We’ve been developing a data visualization tool explicitly designed for history inquiry (you may remember seeing it back here). We always show at least two visualizations, because historical problems start from two accounts or two pieces of data that conflict.

As you save graphs in your inquiry to the right, you’re likely going to lose track of what’s what. Click on one of them.

This is a little declarative script, in a Vega-lite-inspired JSON syntax. It’s in a task-specific programming language, but this isn’t a program you write. This is a program the describes the visualization — code as a concise way of describing process.

We now have a second version where you can edit the code, or use the pull-down menus. These are linked representations. Changing the menu changes the code and updates the graph. Changing the code updates the menu and the graph. Now the code is also malleable. Is this enough to draw students and teachers into programming? Does it make Vega-Lite less overwhelming? Does it lead to greater awareness of what programming is, and greater self-efficacy about programming tasks?

We just had our first in-service teacher workshop with these tools in August. One teacher just gushed over them. “These are so great! How did I not know that they existed before?” That’s easy — they didn’t exist six months ago! We’re building things and putting them in front of teachers for feedback as quickly as we can, in a participatory design process. We make lots of mistakes, and we’re trying to document those, too. We’re about applying an HCI process to programming experience design — UX for PX.

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