An Analysis of Supports and Barriers to Offering Computer Science in Georgia Public High Schools: Miranda Parker’s Defense

Miranda Parker defends her dissertation this Thursday.  It’s a really fascinating story, trying to answer the question: Why does a high school in Georgia decide (or not) to offer computer science?  She did a big regression analysis, and then four detailed case studies.  Readers of this blog will know Miranda from her guest blog post on the Google-Gallup polls, her SCS1 replication of the multi-lingual and validated measure of CS1 knowledge, her study of teacher-student differences in using ebooks, and her work exploring the role of spatial reasoning to relate SES and CS performance (work that was part of her dissertation study). I’m looking forward to flying down to Atlanta and being there to cheer her on to the finish.

Title: An Analysis of Supports and Barriers to Offering Computer Science in Georgia Public High Schools

Miranda Parker
Human-Centered Computing Ph.D. Candidate
School of Interactive Computing
College of Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology

Date: Thursday, October 10, 2019

Time: 10AM to 12PM EST

Location: 85 5th Street NE, Technology Square Research Building (TSRB), 2nd floor, Room 223

Committee:

Dr. Mark Guzdial (Advisor), School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology
Dr. Betsy DiSalvo, School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology
Dr. Rebecca E. Grinter, School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology
Dr. Willie Pearson, Jr., School of History and Sociology, Georgia Institute of Technology
Dr. Leigh Ann DeLyser, CSforAll Consortium

Abstract:

There is a growing international movement to provide every child access to high-quality computing education. Despite the widespread effort, most children in the US do not take any computing classes in primary or secondary schools. There are many factors that principals and districts must consider when determining whether to offer CS courses. The process through which school officials make these decisions, and the supports and barriers they face in the process, is not well understood. Once we understand these supports and barriers, we can better design and implement policy to provide CS for all.

In my thesis, I study public high schools in the state of Georgia and the supports and barriers that affect offerings of CS courses. I quantitatively model school- and county-level factors and the impact these factors have on CS enrollment and offerings. The best regression models include prior CS enrollment or offerings, implying that CS is likely sustainable once a class is offered. However, large unexplained variances persist in the regression models.

To help explain this variance, I selected four high schools and interviewed principals, counselors, and teachers about what helps, or hurts, their decisions to offer a CS course. I build case studies around each school to explore the structural and people-oriented themes the participants discussed. Difficulty in hiring and retaining qualified teachers in CS was one major theme. I frame the case studies using diffusion of innovations providing additional insights into what attributes support a school deciding to offer a CS course.

The qualitative themes gathered from the case studies and the quantitative factors used in the regression models inform a theory of supports and barriers to CS course offerings in high schools in Georgia. This understanding can influence future educational policy decisions around CS education and provide a foundation for future work on schools and CS access.

An Ebook for Java AP CS Review: Guest Blog Post from Barbara Ericson

My research partner, co-author, and wife, Barbara Ericson, has been building an ebook (like the ones we’ve been making for AP CSP, as mentioned here and here) for students studying Advanced Placement (AP) CS Level A. We wanted to write a blog post about it, to help more AP CS A students and teachers find it. She kindly wrote this blog post on the ebooks

I started creating a free interactive ebook for the Advanced Placement (AP) Computer Science (CS) A course in 2014.  See http://tinyurl.com/JavaReview-new. The AP CSA course is intended to be equivalent to a first course for computer science majors at the college level.  It covers programming fundamentals (variables, strings, conditionals, loops), one and two dimensional arrays, lists, recursion, searching, sorting, and object-oriented programming in Java.

The AP CSA ebook was originally intended to be used as a review for the AP CSA exam.  I had created a web-site that thousands of students were using to take practice multiple-choice exams, but that web-site couldn’t handle the load and kept crashing.  Our team at Georgia Tech was creating a free interactive ebook for Advanced Placement Computer Science Principles (CSP) course on the Runestone platform. The Runestone platform was easily handling thousands of learners per day, so I moved the multiple choice questions into a new interactive ebook for AP CSA.  I also added a short description of each topic on the AP CSA exam and several practice exams.

Over the years, my team of undergraduate and high school students and I have added more content to the Java Review ebook and thousands of learners have used it.  It includes text, pictures, videos, executable and modifiable Java code, multiple-choice questions, fill-in-the-blank problems, mixed-up code problems (Parsons problems), clickable area problems, short answer questions, drag and drop questions, timed exams, and links to other practice sites such as CodingBat (https://codingbat.com/java) and the Java Tutor (http://pythontutor.com/java.html#mode=edit). It also includes free response (write code) questions from past exams.

Fill-in-the-blank problems ask a user to type in the answer to a question and the answer is checked against a regular expression. See https://tinyurl.com/fillInBlankEx.   Mixed-up code problems (Parsons problems) provide the correct code to solve a problem, but the code is broken into code blocks and mixed up.  The learner must drag the blocks into the correct order. See https://tinyurl.com/ParsonsEx.  I studied Parsons problems for my dissertation and invented two types of adaptation to modify the difficulty of Parsons problems to keep learners challenged, but not frustrated.  Clickable area questions ask learners to click on either lines of code or table elements to answer a question. See https://tinyurl.com/clickableEx.   Short answer questions allow users to type in text in response to a question.  See https://tinyurl.com/shortAnsEx. Drag and drop questions allow the learner to drag a definition to a concept.  See https://tinyurl.com/y68cxmpw.  Timed exams give the learner practice a set amount of time to finish an exam.  It shows the questions in the exam one at a time and doesn’t give the learner feedback about the correctness of the answer until after the exam.  See https://tinyurl.com/timedEx.

I am currently analyzing the log file data from both the AP CSA and CSP ebooks.  Learners typically attempt to answer the practice type questions, but don’t always run the example code or watch the videos.  In an observation study I ran as part of my dissertation work, teachers said that they didn’t run the code if the got the related practice question correct. They also didn’t always watch the videos, especially if the video content was also in the text.  Usage of the ebook tends to drop from the first chapter to the last instructional chapter, but increases again in the practice exam chapters at the end of the ebook. Usage also drops across the instructional material in a chapter and then increases again in the practice item subchapters near the end of each chapter.

Beryl Hoffman, an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Elms College and a member of the Mobile CSP team, has been creating a new AP CSA ebook based on my AP CSA ebook, but revised to match the changes to the AP CSA course for 2019-20202.  See https://tinyurl.com/csawesome.  One of the reasons for creating this new ebook is to help Mobile CSP teaches prepare to teach CSA.  The Mobile CSP team is piloting this book currently with CSP teachers.

Teachers are not the same as students, and the role of tracing: ICER 2017 Preview

The International Computing Education Research conference starts today at the University of Washington in Tacoma. You can find the conference schedule here, and all the proceedings in the ACM Digital Library here. In past years, all the papers have been free for the first couple weeks after the conference, so grab them while they are outside the paywall.

Yesterday was the Doctoral Consortium, which had a significant Georgia Tech presence. My colleague Betsy DiSalvo was one of the discussants. Two of my PhD students were participants:

• Amber Solomon who is exploring the relationship between spatial reasoning and CS learning (see her position paper here). I blogged about Amber's work on our design studio using AR technology.
• Katie Cunningham who is exploring how instructors can use students' sketching and tracing to get greater insight into the students' mental models of the notional machine (see her position paper here). I blogged about Katie and her work when she won an NSF fellowship earlier this year.

We have two research papers being presented at ICER this year. Miranda Parker and Kantwon Rogers will be presenting Students and Teachers Use An Online AP CS Principles EBook Differently: Teacher Behavior Consistent with Expert Learners (see paper here) which is from Miranda C. Parker, Kantwon Rogers, Barbara J. Ericson, and me. Miranda and Kantwon studied the ebooks that we've been creating for AP CSP teachers and students (see links here). They're asking a big question: "Can we develop one set of material for both high school teachers and students, or do they need different kinds of materials?" First, they showed that there was statistically significantly different behaviors between teachers and students (e.g. different number of interactions with different types of activities). Then, they tried to explain why there were differences.

We develop a model of teachers as expert learners (e.g., they know more knowledge so they can create more linkages, they know how to learn, they know better how to monitor their learning) and high school students as more novice learners. They dig into the log file data to find evidence consistent with that explanation. For example, students repeatedly try to solve Parsons problems long after they are likely to get it right and learn from it, while teachers move along when they get stuck. Students are more likely to run code and then run it again (with no edits in between) than teachers. At the end of the paper, they offer design suggestions based on this model for how we might develop learning materials designed explicitly for teachers vs. students.

Katie Cunningham will be presenting Using Tracing and Sketching to Solve Programming Problems: Replicating and Extending an Analysis of What Students Draw (see paper here) which is from Kathryn Cunningham, Sarah Blanchard, Barbara Ericson, and me. The big question here is: "Of what use is paper-and-pen based sketching/tracing for CS students?" Several years ago, the Leeds' Working Group (at ITiCSE 2004) did a multi-national study of how students solved complicated problems with iteration, and they collected the students' scrap paper. (You can find a copy of the paper here.) They found (not surprisingly) that students who traced code were far more likely to get the problems right. Barb was doing an experiment for her study of Parsons Problems, and gave scrap paper to students, which Katie and Sarah analyzed.

First, they replicate the Leeds' Working Group study. Those who trace do better on problems where they have to predict the behavior of the code. Already, it's a good result. But then, Katie and Sarah go further. For example, they find it's not always true. If a problem is pretty easy, those who trace are actually more likely to get it wrong, so the correlation goes the other way. And those who start to trace but then give up are even more likely to get it wrong than those who never traced at all.

They also start to ask a tantalizing question: Where did these tracing methods come from? A method is only useful if it gets used — what leads to use? Katie interviewed the two teachers of the class (each taught about half of the 100+ students in the study). Both teachers did tracing in class. Teacher A's method gets used by some students. Teacher B's method gets used by no students! Instead, some students use the method taught by the head Teaching Assistant. Why do some students pick up a tracing method, and why do they adopt the one that they do? Because it's easier to remember? Because it's more likely to lead to a right answer? Because they trust the person who taught it? More to explore on that one.

Leslie Lamport tells Computer Scientists to go create ebooks (and other new media)

Yes! Exactly!  That’s why we’re trying to figure out new media for expressing, learning, and talking about computing.

“If you succeed in attaining a position that allows you to do something great, if you do something that really is great, and if you realize that it’s great, there’s still one more hurdle: You have to convince others that it’s great,” he told the graduates. “This will require writing.”

He exhorted graduates in biological physics; chemistry; computational linguistics; computer science; language and linguistics; mathematics and physics to find new modes of communication.

“There must be wonderful ways in which a writer can interact with the reader that no one has thought of yet, ways that will convey ideas better and will make reading fun,” Lamport said. “I want you to go out and invent them.”

Source: Computer scientist Leslie Lamport to grads: If you can’t write, it won’t compute | BrandeisNOW

SIGCSE 2017 Preview: Ebooks, GP, EarSketch, CS for All, and more from Georgia Tech

I have written individual blog posts for each paper or other contributions at conferences like ICER or SIGCSE. Then sometimes, like this year, that’s just overwhelming. So please excuse me for talking about a bunch (I may not even get all of it) of Georgia Tech related CS Education work at SIGCSE 2017 this year. (Conference website is here, and program is here. The on-line program is really nice, which is here.)

Workshop 101: GP: A General Purpose Blocks-Based Language

Wednesday 7-10 pm: Room 618-619

I’m helping to organize a workshop with John Maloney, Yoshiki Ohshima, and Jens Mönig on GP. I blogged about GP here, and about the use of GP for Media Computation in a minimal manuals structure here. The workshop will be the first SIGCSE activity with GP. The plan is to move it into a public form next summer, and the team is looking for people who want to start using it for their classes.

Panel: The Role of CS Departments in The US President’s “CS for All” Initiative

Thursday 10:45-12: Room 6E

I was part of an effort at last year’s CRA Conference at Snowbird to get CS departments to participate in President Obama’s “CS for All” initiative (see blog post here). This year, Barbara Ericson, Rick Adrion, and Megean Garvin will tell us about how their CS departments are working to promote CS for All. I’m the moderator.

EarSketch: A STEAM-based Approach for Underrepresented Populations in High School Computer Science Education

Thursday 1:45-3:00: Room 615

Brian Magerko and Jason Freeman will present on EarSketch, which I just blogged about here. They are also presenting on Creativity in Authentic STEAM Education with EarSketch on Friday 1:45-3 in Room 612. And then again Saturday 10-10:45 as a demo, EarSketch, a web-application to teach Computer Science through Music

CS Principle Ebooks for Teachers and Students building on Educational Psychology Principles

Thursday 3-4:30 pm: NSF Showcase in Exhibition Space

Barb, Miranda Parker, and I will present our ebooks. I blogged about our ICER 2016 paper on ebooks here and our WiPSCE 2015 paper here).

BOF: Researching the K–12 Computer Science Framework

Thursday 5:30-6:20 pm: Room 613-614

I’m part of a BOF led by Pat Yongpradit of Code.org with Leigh Ann DeLyser of CSNYC and Kathi Fisler at Brown. The BOF session will allow researchers to discuss opportunities in K-12 CS ed research within five areas related to the implementation and future of the framework:

• Equity and access
• Learning progressions
• Pedagogical content knowledge (Knowledge teachers need to teach CS)
• Facilitating learning in other disciplines
• Policy and implementation within K–12 education systems

Workshop 310: Using and Customizing Open-Source Runestone Ebooks for Computer Science Classes

Friday 7-10 pm: Room 612

Barb, Brad Miller, and Paul Resnick will present on the Runestone platform that we build our ebooks on. Brad built Runestone, and Paul uses and extends it frequently for his Informatics course at U. Michigan. This is the first time that they’re teaching others how to use the platform, which is a great sign of the maturation of Runestone — from researcher and early-adopters into something that all CS educators can use.

Designing and Studying of Maker Oriented Learning to Transform Advanced Computer Science
Saturday 10-11:30, NSF Showcase area in Exhibitions

Zane Cochran, a student of my colleague Betsy DiSalvo, will present some of his work on using maker spaces to improve CS education.

Concepts and Practices: Designing and Developing A Modern K12 CS Framework

Saturday 10:45-12: Room 611

My PhD student, Miranda Parker (who has been working on privilege issues and on the SCS1), and Leigh Ann Delyser (of CSNYC and CS for All fame) will present on the new K-12 CS Framework (see blog post here) and the research support for it.

Workshop 401: Evidence Based Teaching Practices in CS

Saturday 3-6 pm: Room 618-619

Briana Morrison is leading the effort with Cynthia Lee, Leo Porter, Beth Simon, and me to present CS teaching practices for which we have an evidence-base. We’re drawing a lot on our New Faculty Workshops material.

Workshop 404: How to Plan and Run Effective Teacher Professional Development

Saturday 3-6 pm: Room 612

(YES! Dueling workshops!)

Barb is working with Rebecca Dovi and Ria Galanos on how to teach CS teacher professional learning opportunities. Barb is using a lot of the material that she’s developed for “Train the Trainer” sessions as part of ECEP.

An Ebook Integrating Minimal Manuals with Constructionism, Worked Examples, and Inquiry: MOHQ

Our computing education research group at Georgia Tech has been developing and evaluating ebooks for several years (see this post with discussion of some of them). We publish on them frequently, with a new paper just accepted to ICER 2016 in Melbourne. We use the Runestone Interactive platform which allows us to create ebooks with a lot of different kinds of learning activities — not just editing and running code (which I’ve been arguing for awhile is really important to support a range of abilities and motivations), but including editing and running code.

It’s a heavyweight platform. I have been thinking about alternative models of ebooks — maybe closer to e-pamphlets. Since I was working with GP (see previous post) and undergraduate David Tran was interested in working with me on a GP project, we built a prototype of a minimalist medium for learning CS. I call it a MOHQ: Minimal manual Organized around Hypertext Questions: http://home.cc.gatech.edu/gpblocks. (Suggestion: Use Firefox if you can for playing with browser GP. WAY faster for the JavaScript execution than either Chrome or Safari on my Mac.)

Minimal Manuals

John Carroll came up with the idea of minimal manuals back in the 1980’s (see the earliest paper I found on the idea). The goal is to help people to use complicated computing devices with the minimum of overhead. Each page of the manual starts with a task — something that a user would want to do. The goal is to put the instruction for how to achieve that task all on that one page.

The idea of minimalist instruction is described here: http://www.instructionaldesign.org/theories/minimalism.html.

The four principles of minimal instruction design are:

1. Allow learners to start immediately on meaningful tasks.
2. Minimize the amount of reading and other passive forms of training by allowing users to fill in the gaps themselves
3. Include error recognition and recovery activities in the instruction
4. Make all learning activities self-contained and independent of sequence.

There’s good evidence that minimal manuals really do work (see http://doc.utwente.nl/26430/1/Lazonder93minimal.pdf). Learners become more productive more quickly with minimal manuals, with surprisingly high scores on transfer and retention. A nice attribute of minimal manuals is that they’re geared toward success. They likely increase self-efficacy, a significant problem in CS education.

The goal of most minimal instruction is to be able to do something. What about learning conceptual knowledge?

Adding Learning Theory: Inquiry, Worked Examples, and Constructionism

I started exploring minimal manuals as a model for designing CS educational media after a challenge from Alan Kay. Alan asked me to think about how we would teach people to be autodidacts. One of the approaches used to encourage autodidactism is inquiry-based learning. Could we structure a minimal manual around questions that they might have or that we want students to ask themselves?

We structure our Runestone ebooks around an Examples+Practice framework. We provide a worked example (typically executable code, but sometimes a program visualization), and then ask (practice) questions about that example. We provide one or two practice exercises for every example. Based on Lauren Margeliux’s work, the point of the practice is to get students to think about the example, to engage with it, and to explain it to themselves. It’s less important that they do the questions — I want the students to read the questions and think about them, and Lauren’s work suggests that even the feedback may not be all that important.

Finally, one of the aspects that I like about Runestone is that every example in an active code area is a complete Python interpreter. Modify the code anyway you want. Erase all of it and build something new if you want. It’s constructionist. We want students to construct with the examples and go beyond them.

MOHQ: Minimal Manual Organized around Hypertext Questions

The prototype MOHQ that David Tran and I built (http://home.cc.gatech.edu/gpblocks) is an implementation of this integration of minimal manuals with constructionism, inquiry, and worked examples. Each page in the MOHQ:

• Starts with a question that a student might be wondering about.
• Offers a worked example in a video.
• Offer the opportunity to construct with the example project.
• Asks one or two practice questions, to prompt thinking about the project.

Using the minimal design principles to structure the explanation:

1. Allow learners to start immediately on meaningful tasks.

The top page offers several questions that I hope are interesting to a student. Every page offers a project that aims to answer that question. GP is a good choice here because it’s blocks-based (low cognitive load) and I can do MediaComp in it (which is what I wanted to teach in this prototype).

#1: Minimize the amount of reading and other passive forms of training by allowing users to fill in the gaps themselves.

Each page has a video of David or me solving the problem in GP. Immediately afterward is a link to jump directly into the GP project exactly where the video ended. Undo something, redo something, start over and build something else. The point is to watch a video (where we try to explain what we’re doing, but we’re certainly not filling in all the gaps), then figure out how it works on your own.

Then we offer a couple of practice questions to challenge the learner: Did you really understand what was going on here?

#2: Include error recognition and recovery activities in the instruction.

Error recovery is easy when everything is in the browser — just hit the back button. You can’t save. You can’t damage anything. (We tell people this explicitly on every page.)

#3: Make all learning activities self-contained and independent of sequence.

This is the tough one. I want people to actually learn something in a MOHQ, that pixels have red, green, and blue components, and chromakey is about replacing one color with a background image, and that removing every other sample increases the frequency of a sound — and more general ideas, e.g., that elements in a collection can be referenced by index number.

So, all the driving questions from the home page start with, “Okay, you can just dive in here, but you might want to first go check out these other pages.” You don’t have to, but if you want to understand better what’s going on here, you might want to start with simpler questions.

We also want students to go on — to ask themselves new questions, to go try other projects. After each project, we offer some new questions that we hope that students might ask themselves. The links are explicitly prompts. “You might be thinking about these questions. Even if you weren’t, you might want to. Let’s see where we can explore next.”

Current Prototype and What Comes Next

Here’s the map of pages that we have out there right now. We built it in a Wiki which facilitated creating the network of pages that we want. This isn’t a linear book.

There’s maybe a dozen pages out there, but even with that relatively small size, it took most of a semester to pull these together. Producing the videos and building these pages by hand (even in a Wiki) was a lot of work. The tough part was every time we changed our minds about something — and had to go back through all of the previously built pages and update them. Since this is a prototype (i.e., we didn’t know what we wanted when we started), that happened quite often. If we were going to add more to the GP MOHQ, I’d want to use a tool for generating pages from a database as we did with STABLE, the Smalltalk Apprenticeship-Based Learning Environment.

I would appreciate your thoughts about MOHQ. Call this an expert review of the idea.

• Thumbs-up or down? Worth developing further, or a bad direction?
• What do you think is promising about this idea?
• What would we need to change to make it more effective for student learning?

Preview for WiPSCE 2015: Usability and usage of interactive features in an online ebook for CS teachers

Next week in London, at WiPSCE 2015, the 10th Workshop in Primary and Secondary Computing Education, Barbara Ericson is going to present the pilot study of our teacher CSP ebook that Steven Moore (undergrad researcher here at Georgia Tech) ran last year.  This is the pilot that came before our Spring trial (see post here) and which led to our student and teacher ebooks that we recently released (see post here).  The authors of the paper are Barbara, Steven, Brianna Morrison, and me.

Steven’s study had two parts to it.  The first was a usability survey comparing three different ebook platforms: Runestone Interactive, Zyante, and CS Circles.  You may recall the post here where I invited you to participate in that survey.  Runestone did well in the survey, just beating out Zyante, and both were far ahead of CS Circles.

The meat of the paper is the study of 10 teachers who qualified for our study (got less than 40% on a pretest) and read the 8 chapters we had ready for them.  Every two chapters, there was a post-test on those two chapters.  Some of the findings:

• 50% of the study participants finished all 8 chapters.  That’s pretty good, but isn’t directly comparable to MOOC studies because we did offer them a $50 gift card for completing.
• As we expected and designed for, teachers read the books in chunks of time when they could fit it in.
• Those who used the book (e.g., did the Parson’s problems, ran the code, etc.), gained confidence in teaching CS and performed well on the post-tests. This is a big deal!  The teachers are not just writing code.  They are using a variety of different kinds of learning activities (see our ICER ebook paper) — and successfully learning and gaining confidence.  Writing code is not the only way to learn CS.  This has been one of the more controversial hypotheses. Many CS teachers believe that apprenticeship is the only way to learn CS, but we believe that we can successfully use a range of pedagogical practices.

Barbara did an extensive log file analysis of the participants, and we learned a lot from that. We learned where our books were not usable, e.g., when participants skipped over interactive features, or when they used the features wrong (e.g., clicking “Check Me” on a Parson’s problem, without ever moving pieces around). We used these findings in designing the current ebooks.

This paper is exciting for us — it’s the first where we test our design claims.

 

Seeking teacher input on Dashboard for ebooks

Matt Moldavan is an MS HCI student here at Georgia Tech who is developing a new Instructor Dashboard for the Runestone Interactive and our group’s CSP eBooks (see announcement here). The goal for the dashboard is to offer useful reports, graphs, and analytics accessible by instructors. He aims to provide instructors with useful insights into their students’ activity and progress through their online course(s).

He’s conducting a survey to find out what teachers want to know when overseeing student activity in online learning. We would like to know your previous experiences with similar student progress tracking tools (such as Cengage, Moodle, Desire2Learn, and others). Additionally, we are seeking feedback on several early design prototypes of the dashboard.

Matt has a short survey at https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/YQJ5MVC. If you have taught an online course or have used any other student progress tracking tools, your input would be greatly appreciated.

For more information, contact Matt at mmoldavan@gatech.edu.

 

Student and Teacher CSP Ebooks are now Available

We now have TWO ebooks supporting CS Principles (see website here) now available — one for teachers and one for students.

Our teacher ebook summer study is now ended. (Announcement about launching the study is here.) We’re crunching the data now. We’ve already learned a lot about what teachers want in an ebook. We learned where our user interface wasn’t obvious, and where we needed to explain more. We learned that teachers expect end-of-chapter exercises. We have used what we have learned so far to produce the two new ebooks.

STUDENT CSP EBOOK: About a year ago, we received additional NSF funding (from the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) program) to develop a student version of our CSP ebook. We have been running participatory design studies and gathering usability surveys from students to get input on what a student ebook should look like. We have now released the first version of the student ebook.

The student CSP ebook is available at http://interactivepython.org/runestone/static/StudentCSP/index.html  It doesn’t require a login, but we recommend that teachers have their students login. Without a login, we store saved answers on the local computer, but if the student logs in, we save the answers by the student’s username.  The course name is StudentCSP.

We recommend that teachers create a custom version of the student ebook for your students.  This allows teachers to customize the ebook, assign homework, and view student’s progress, and even create additional assessments for students.

New Version TEACHER CSP EBOOK: We iterated on our teacher ebook at the same time that we were developing the student ebook. We hypothesize that the student CSP ebook may actually encourage teachers to complete the teacher ebook. We can imagine that teachers who use the student ebook might want to stay one step ahead of the students, e.g., “My students are starting Chapter 3 on Monday, so I better finish Chapter 3 this weekend.”

We have now created a second version of our teacher CSP ebook. This one is in lockstep with the student CSP ebook, includes all the end-of-chapter exercise answers and teacher notes (e.g., on how to teach particular concepts, common student difficulties, etc.). We are not making the second teacher ebook available openly (because it includes answers to the student problems).

Teachers, please contact us at cslearn4u@gmail.com with the name and location of your school, and we’ll send you the URL.

We recommend that teachers create their own course for their students.  See http://interactivepython.org/runestone/static/overview/instructor.html for why a teacher might want to build a custom course and how to do it.

• You must register on Runestone first at http://interactivepython.org/runestone/default/user/register. Enter StudentCSP as the course name. Be sure to record your username. We find that users often forget what they entered and assume it was their e-mail address — and it may not have been. You can also choose to sign in with your account on Google Plus, Facebook, Twitter, or several others.
• Then go to http://interactivepython.org/runestone/admin/index and select “Create your own Course”.
• Create a unique name for your course (use your school name and StudentCSP and year maybe), add a description, and your institution, and then select “CS Principles: Big Ideas in Programming by Mark Guzdial, Barbara Ericson, and Briana Morrison“.
• Leave the rest as defaults and click the “Submit” button.  This will build a custom version of the student ebook for your students and it will have a unique URL and course name.  You will be listed as the instructor and can look at the log files and view other information on the instructor page (you can get to this by clicking on the icon that looks like a head and shoulders and the top right of your screen when you are in the ebook).

ICER 2015 Preview: First CSLearning4U Ebook Paper

ICER 2015 (see website here) is August 9-13 in Omaha, Nebraska. The event starts for me and Barbara Ericson, Miranda Parker, and Briana Morrison on Saturday August 8. They’re all in the Doctoral Consortium, and I’m one of the co-chairs this year. (No, I’m not a discussant for any of my students.) The DC kickoff dinner is on Saturday, and the DC is on Sunday. My thanks to my co-chair Anthony Robins and to our discussants Tiffany Barnes, Steve Cooper, Beth Simon, Ben Shapiro, and Aman Yadav. A huge thanks to the SIGCSE Board who fund the DC each year.

We’ve got two papers in ICER this year, and I’ll preview each of them in separate blog posts. The papers are already available in the ACM digital library (see listing here), and I’ll put them on my Guzdial Papers page as soon as the Authorizer updates with them.

I’m very excited that the first CSLearning4U project paper is being presented by Barbara on Tuesday. (See our website here, the initial blog post when I announced the project here, and the announcement that the ebook is now available). Her paper, “Analysis of Interactive Features Designed to Enhance Learning in an Ebook,” presents the educational psychology principles on memory and learning that we’re building on, describes features of the ebooks that we’re building, and presents the first empirical description of how the Runestone ebooks that we’re studying (some that we built, some that others have built) are being used.

My favorite figure in the paper is this one:

This lists all the interactive practice elements of one chapter of a Runestone ebook along the horizontal axis (in the order in which they appear in the book left-to-right), and the number of users who used that element vertically. The drop-off from left-to-right is the classic non-completion rate that we see in MOOCs and other online education. Notice the light blue bars labelled “AC-E”? That’s editing code (in executable Active Code elements). Notice all the taller bars around those light blue bars? That’s everything else. What we see here is that fewer and fewer learners edit code, while we still see learners doing other kinds of learning practice, like Parsons Problems and multiple choice problems. Variety works to keep more users engaged for longer.

A big chunk of the paper is a detailed analysis of learners using Parsons Problems. Barbara did observational studies and log file analyses to gauge how difficult the Parsons problems were.  The teachers solved them in one or two tries, but they had more programming experience.  The undergraduate and high schools students had more difficulty — some took over 100 tries to solve a problem. Her analysis supports her argument that we need adaptive Parsons Problems, which is a challenge that she’s planning on tackling next.

SIGCSE 2015 Week! ECEP BOF and Ebooks and IRB and other CS Ed terms

This week is the SIGCSE 2015 Technical Symposium, the largest computing education conference in the US, perhaps in the world.  About 1300 people will be heading to Kansas City for four days of discussion, workshops, and talks.  See the conference page here and the program here.

Barbara Ericson and I will be presenting at several events:

• I’m speaking on a panel Thursday afternoon at 3:45 on human-subjects review of experiment protocols (by Institutional Review Boards (IRB)) and the challenges we’ve had in working in high schools and working on cross-institutional projects.
• Barb and I will be hosting with Rick Adrion a Birds of a Feather (BOF) session on state-level change at 6:30 Thursday.  This is part of our ECEP work.
• On Friday morning at 10 am, we’ll be showing our electronic book (ebook) for high school teachers interested in learning CS Principles.  The first public showing was at the NSF BPC Community meeting in January, but that was to a small audience.  We’ll be presenting at the NSF Showcase at 10 am on the exhibition floor.
• Barb is speaking on Friday afternoon in a panel at 3:30 on activities for K-12 CS outreach.
• On Friday night, Barb is running her famous “How to run a computing summer camp workshop.”

As usual, Georgia Tech is sending several of us (not just Barb and me).  One of my PhD students, Briana Morrison, is on a panel on Flipped Classrooms Thursday 1:45-3 pm in 3501G.  Another of my PhD students, Miranda Parker, is part of a BOF Preparing Undergraduates to Make the Most of Attending CS Conferences 6:30-7:20 on Thursday evening.  Our colleague, Betsy DiSalvo, is speaking Friday morning 10:45-12 on a panel Research, Resources and Communities: Informal Ed as a Partner in Computer Science Education in 2505A.

This is one of my shorter stays at a SIGCSE conference.  I’ll be coming in late Wednesday and leaving Friday afternoon.  I’ve been traveling way too much lately (NSF BPC Community meeting in January, talk at Penn in early February, Tapia conference in Boston two weeks ago, AP CS Principles review meeting in Chicago this last week).  I am fortunate to be teaching Media Computation this semester, and I hate to miss so many lectures.  More, it’s hard on our family when we’re both gone.  Barb will be at SIGCSE all week, from Tuesday night to Sunday morning, so be sure to stop by and say hello to her.

Help us figure out how to design ebooks to be usable

Like the post I made last week, we’ve been working on a bunch of experiment setups during the summer, and are now looking for participants.  This one is open to most readers of this blog. 

We have found that there is a lot of literature on how to design text to be readable on the screen.  But for interactive ebooks with embedded elements like coding areas, visualizations, and Parson’s problems, we know less about usability.  Steven Moore is an undergraduate researcher working with us, and he’s put together a collection of three different ebooks and a survey on preferences for each.  We’d love to get participants to try out his ebook samples and survey, please.

Hello,

We are a research group at Georgia Tech developing new approaches to teaching computer science at a distance.  In collaboration with researchers at Luther College, we have created a new kind of electronic book for learning Python. The book is entirely web-based and cross-platform, with special features, including programming within the book, program visualizations, videos, multiple-choice questions, and Parson’s problems (a special kind of programming problem).

We are currently seeking individuals with 6 months or more experience with programming in a textual language.  If you are willing to volunteer, you will need to complete a survey regarding the design and usability of three different interactive computer science e-books and specific components within those e-books.  Links to the e-books will be provided within the survey and the whole study can be completed via most web browsers.  The survey should take roughly forty-five minutes to complete.  We would like you to complete it by September 30^th, 2014.

The risks involved are no greater than those involved in daily activities.  You will receive a $15.00 gift card for completing the survey.  Study records will be kept confidential and your participation in this study is greatly valued.

If you are interested in participating, please contact Steven Moore at smoore46@gatech.edu.  If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me, Mark Guzdial at guzdial@cc.gatech.edu.

Try an Hour of Code in an Ebook for #CSEdWeek

It’s CSEd Week this week. Code.org and Computing in the Core have effectively merged now, and that’s the organization that owns and promotes CSEd Week. The big focus this year is the Hour of Code — getting all students to do some kind of coding activity for one hour. There are a lot of tutorials now available at the CSEdWeek site.

As readers of this blog now, one of my research activities is to create an electronic book to support high school teachers learning computer science. (Here’s our project webpage.) We’ve been exploring ideas like how best to create videos about computer science (hint: use subgoal labels!) and how to reduce cognitive load (hint: Parson’s problems). We’re also working on multi-modal explanations (evidence suggests that audio narration for code is more effective than text descriptions) and worked examples.

Barb Ericson put together an Hour of Code activity using some of our ideas for learning Python with turtles here, as an Hour of Code activity: http://interactivepython.org/runestone/static/IntroPythonTurtles/index.html. Please do try it and let us know what you think!

If you have an Hour of Code activity that isn’t making it to the main CSedWeek.org site, please feel free to link to it here in the comments!

No Dynabook Yet: An Interview with Computing Pioneer Alan Kay

Nice interview with Alan Kay, with nice links to Engelbart and Knowledge Navigator videos.  Here’s the segment where Alan describes why the iPad is not a Dynabook.

The interesting thing about this question is that it is quite clear from the several early papers that it was an ancillary point for the Dynabook to be able to simulate all existing media in an editable/authorable form in a highly portable networked (including wireless) form. The main point was for it to be able to qualitatively extend the notions of “reading, writing, sharing, publishing, etc. of ideas” literacy to include the “computer reading, writing, sharing, publishing of ideas” that is the computer’s special province.

For all media, the original intent was “symmetric authoring and consuming”.

Isn’t it crystal clear that this last and most important service is quite lacking in today’s computing for the general public? Apple with the iPad and iPhone goes even further and does not allow children to download an Etoy made by another child somewhere in the world. This could not be farther from the original intentions of the entire ARPA-IPTO/PARC community in the ’60s and ’70s.

via An Interview with Computing Pioneer Alan Kay | TIME.com.

Meet Wikipedia, the Encyclopedia Anyone Can Code

It sounds like you can only use Lua for encyclopedia-like functions (e.g., handling citations), but what a wonderful step toward having a tool for building simulations and data processing & visualizations into the encyclopedia.  It’s a nice new motivation for “Computing for Everyone.”

It began as the encyclopedia anyone can edit. And now it’s also the encyclopedia anyone can program.

As of this weekend, anyone on Earth can use Lua — a 20-year-old programming language already championed by the likes of Angry Birds and World of Warcraft — to build material on Wikipedia and its many sister sites, such as Wikiquote and Wiktionary. Wikipedia has long offered simple tools that let tens of thousands of volunteer editors reuse little bits of text across its encyclopedia pages, but this is something different.

“We wanted to provide editors with a real programming language,” says Rob Lanphier, the director of platform engineering at the Wikimedia Foundation, the not-for-profit that oversees the online encyclopedia. “This will make things easier for editors, but it will also be significantly faster.”

via Meet Wikipedia, the Encyclopedia Anyone Can Code | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com.