Visit to researchers at ExcITEd Center at NTNU

In January, Barbara Ericson and I were invited to visit the new ExcITED Center at NTNU in Trondheim, Norway. ExcITED is the Centre for Excellent IT Education. It was a whirlwind trip, fitting it in after the start of our semester at Georgia Tech, but really wonderful. We got there just as NTNU was celebrating their new Department of Computer Science with an “IDIovation” celebration which included some great research talks and (a highlight for me) a live coding computer music performance. The whole event was recorded and is available here.

Our host for the visit was Michail Giannakos, who is a learning scientist interested in a variety of educational technologies. We got a chance to meet with several of the faculty and many of the students working in ExcITED. Like I said, it was a whirlwind trip, so please excuse me if I only mention a few of the projects we saw — the ones that particularly stuck with me, despite the jet-lag.

One team at ExcITED is logging student interactions with the IDE that they use in their classes at the University, like the BlueJ Blackbox effort. What makes what they’re doing remarkable is that they’re immediately turning the data around, to present a process mirror to the students. They show students a visualization of what they have been doing. The goal is to encourage reflection, to get students to realize when they’re spending too much time on one phase of their work, or maybe not enough (e.g., in testing). The challenge is mapping from the low-level user interactions to higher-level visualizations that might inform students.

There are several projects that are working with children who are programming in Scratch (which can be localized to Norwegian). The one that most captured my attention was where students were programming these beautiful robotic sculptures, created by professional artists. The team is exploring how this influences student motivation. How does motivation change when the robots under the students’ control are neither student-generated nor stereotypically “robotic”?

The Tiles project by Simone Mora, Francesco Gianni, and Monica Divitini aims to engage designers in ubiquitous computing. They have these cool cards that they use in an activity with designers to get them thinking about the kinds of everyday items in which computation might be embedded. They want designers to think about how sensors and actuators might be used to support user activity.

They’re now working to extend these cards with ties to JavaScript code that would actually allow designers to build the things that they designed. It’s an innovative activity to engage designers with embedded computing and then to carry the designs to prototype.

On the weekend after our visit, the chair of the department, Letizia Jaccheri, took Barb and I off to ski in Sweden in Åre. We arrived on a Thursday, spoke at IDIovation that night, met with ExcITED researchers on Friday, traveled to Sweden to ski on Saturday, back on Sunday, and flew home on Monday. An absolutely amazing trip for which we were both grateful to have had the opportunity!

When test scores seem too good to believe – USATODAY.com

I’m glad that it’s not just Atlanta, but it’s still depressing.  I guess that this is an example of two quotes that Richard Hake recently included in a post:

Dukenfield’s Law <http://bit.ly/bsRokM>: “If a thing is worth winning, it’s worth cheating for.”

Campbell’s Law <http://bit.ly/hMsyUr>: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes  it is intended to monitor.”

Such anomalies surfaced in Washington, D.C., and each of the states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Michigan and Ohio — where USA TODAY analyzed test scores. For each state, the newspaper obtained three to seven years’ worth of scores. There were another 317 examples of equally large, year-to-year declines in an entire grade’s scores.

USA TODAY used a methodology widely recognized by mathematicians, psychometricians and testing companies. It compared year-to-year changes in test scores and singled out grades within schools for which gains were 3 standard deviations or more from the average statewide gain on that test. In layman’s language, that means the students in that grade showed greater improvement than 99.9% of their classmates statewide.

via When test scores seem too good to believe – USATODAY.com.