ISTE 2019 Trip Report

There was a time when I would have written a blog post every night of ISTE. Apparently I’m getting older or something and that is not a priority for me any more. Be that as it may I got some good stuff at ISTE this year. ISTE is not all about computer science the way CSTA (next week) or SIGCSE are but there is more CS than their used to be. You have to hunt for it a bit though.

Robots were big again this year. It seems like everyone is pushing robots as the silver bullet for teaching CS. I’m not so convinced and most of the robot stuff was aimed at younger students. K-6 or K-8 were big. Lots of people promoting their drag and drop Blockly-like programming tools. If you push you hear about Python and other text based languages.  I didn’t spend much time with robots. I don’t want to build my course around them. If others do that is fine. It’s just not me.

On the other hand I am interested in internet of things and integrating that into some of my courses. Plezmo has some interesting products in that space. I missed them in my walk through the exhibit hall but Alark Joshi, Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of San Francisco, sent me an email suggesting I check them out.  I’ve got a core kit ordered. I plan to use it for some experimentation on my own but also as a way to introduce IoT to my students in several courses. Should make for some good demos. Later I may add it to my curriculum. A lot depends on my experimentation.

Doug Bergman gave a presentation on using Artificial Intelligence in projects using some tools from Amazon Web Services (AWS). Doug demonstrated using these services from Thunkable  This may be the piece that really makes my mobile application development course take off. You can learn more about AWS Educate at this link.

Unity also had a surprisingly big booth at ISTE. They have some free online courses which would be usable in the classroom. If I were to have a game development course I would go there first. As it is I plan to take some coursework myself and see how it might fit in to an existing course or perhaps into a new project course I want to propose at my school.

This relates to something else I found interesting at ISTE. Steve Demo presented on Virtual Reality in education. The Oculus Quest (which I got to try out) is pretty awesome and it is programable using Unity and C#. This combination might be awesome in a course after my Programming Honors or our AP CS A course. First I’ll learn some Unity and then I will look at AR/VR/MR devices to see what is practical in the classroom.

I did talk to someone from the Azure (Microsoft’s cloud offering) at the Microsoft booth. I will follow up to learn more about their options as well.  GitHub is something I really want to bring into my Programming Honors course next year and Microsoft owns GitHub now. GitHub for education will be at CSTA and Mike Zamansky is presenting a session on using GitHub so I’ll be in better shape there after CSTA.

So I enjoyed ISTE and I got some good value out of it. But because ISTE is so large a lot of the CS stuff (and people) get lost. CSTA will be a whole other story. Can’t wait to get there.

In Honor of BASIC

I found an interesting article today New Hampshire installs first historical marker to honor computer programming The BASIC programming language was invented at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. Today it gets a bad rap and perhaps the original version deserve it compared to modern programming languages. For its time though it was pretty important.

The early personal computers all came with some version of BASIC.There were books one could buy that has listings of BASIC programs that we used to enter and play with. A lot of people got their start in computer science by teaching themselves BASIC.

The first language  I learned was FORTRAN but the next year my university got a Digital Equipment PDP-11 running the RSTS/E operating system. It cam with a great version of BASIC called Basic-Plus. I taught myself that on my spare time. As an interpreted language on a time sharing system, unlike the compiled FORTRAN on a batch system, this allowed a lot more and more frequent experimentation.  That really opened things up for me.

After university, knowing Basic-Plus got me my first professional software development job.

Later I learned Visual Basic and then Visual Basic .Net. Today’s Visual Basic is a far cry from the original BASIC of course but a lot of the basics are the same. There isn’t much you can do in C-family languages that you can’t also do with Visual Basic. And it is still more friendly for beginners than Java or C++ or C#.

It is still looked down upon by many and yet as the same time it still shows up on lists of most used languages (https://fossbytes.com/most-popular-programming-languages/)

These days I use C# for a lot of my personal programming but I still like to use Visual Basic (as I did for a quick hack today) Over my career versions of BASIC have been very important to me.

Teaching Students to Yearn to Learn

Summer time is time for me to do a lot of thinking about my teaching practice. I've been doing a lot of reading and a couple of quotes have helped me in my thinking. Two of them are about leadership and I see them as having applicability in education. A good teacher is a leader - trying to lead students to learn. The first quote is about using coercion.

“You do not lead by hitting people over the head — that’s assault, not leadership.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower

Grades are, or can be, a bludgeon. Sometimes teachers use grades as a way to force students to do work. I hate doing that. It feels like a metaphoric "hitting over the head." It may get students to do some work or at least to hand in something but it seldom really leads to real learning. That leads to the second quote I have been pondering.

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Leadership is largely about teaching students to yearn to learn. A good teacher leader develops internal motivation in their students so that they want to develop the knowledge and tools one is trying to teach.

One of the things I have observed is that students who have a say in the projects they take on are much more motivated to learn the things they need to know to complete them. Getting students to want to learn is much more effective than trying to force them to learn so that they can get good grades.

Different Kinds of Professional Development for Computer Science Teachers

What to teach and how t teach are different questions. The first is all about content knowledge and the second is about pedagogy. For the most part it feels like professional development for CS educators is focused almost completely on content knowledge. A great many teachers are coming to computer science from teaching other subjects. There is this idea that a good teacher can teach any subject once they have the content knowledge. I’m skeptical. Computer science is not quite like other subjects. It’s more like teaching vocabulary and novel writing at the same time. We’re teaching how to write a novel to people who not only have never read a novel they don’t even know what the words mean.

Do I exaggerate? perhaps a little but the point is that we probably shouldn’t assume that teaching CS is the same as teaching other subjects. There is not a lot of professional development on how to teach CS.  We sure could use more of that.

Although if I am honest, we could use some deeper content knowledge training as well. It seems like most of what we see is pretty basic and designed for beginning teachers. But we all need more research based knowledge about how to teach what we do know.

BTW, Garth Flint had a nicely related post on his blog https://gflint.wordpress.com/2019/06/10/cs-professional-development-in-montana-where-should-it-go/

Join the Online #CSed Conversations

At it’s best, social computing is a conversation that moves in a positive direction. The more people who participate the better the conversation and the more benefit for everyone involved. For computer science teachers, who are often alone in their school. opening and participating in online conversation can be a real benefit. These conversations can cross boundaries of time, space, and even online environments.

A recent example. Garth Flint wrote an end of year post (Last Day of School And Done with Java) that I lead to a post of my own. (How Well Can You Code the Projects You Assign Students?) Mike Zamansky wrote a follow up post of his own. (Do It First ) All of these posts were also discussed in Facebook and Twitter. And of course there are comments left on the various posts. So there are multiple ways to participate in the conversation.

No one has to participate in all the conversations or all online tools/communities to benefit though. Things, especially good ideas, tend to propagate across paths. That’s how networks work after all. There are enough people who act as transmission nodes that the best knowledge and the best ideas tend to move around pretty widely. Everyone benefits from this. People who lurk (read and don’t respond) learn a lot which is an almost invisible benefit. At least it is usually invisible to the people who are writing but it is probably pretty visible to the students whose teachers take what they learn and use it to better their own practice.

Still I wish more people took an active part in the conversation. Be it a comment on a blog or Facebooks post. A tweet with a link and a comments.Tweets in a Twitter chat.  Or an original blog post of their own. (I REALLY wish more CS teachers blogged about what they are doing.) How ever people participate we all benefit.

Computer science educators tend to be a very supportive community. Jump in with both feet.

Change the Programming Language, Change the Course

A recent Facebook post suggested changing the language for Advanced Placement Computer Science A (what some of us annoy others by calling AP Java). This comes up regularly with lots of people suggesting their favorite language. Changing the programming languages means changing a lot more than the language though.

Different programming languages have their own idioms. Their own way of doing things. Programming languages and the concepts one can teach with them are closely related.The change to Java (and to some extent C++ before it) was based on a desire to teach more object oriented programming and design. The language was picked after the concepts to teach were chosen.

I wonder how often we (CS teachers) pick a language first though. DO we pick the concepts to teach based on the languages and the programming idiom we are familiar with or do we  think wider?

My honors programming course is largely a warm up for AP CS A and preparing students with the concepts they’ll need is a goal. I use C# rather than Java though because it seems to me (without the sort of research based evidence I should probably look for) that it has a lower cognitive load than Java. It seems to work for us.

My APCS Principles class is using the curriculum and tools developed by code.org. It uses their block based App Lab with the option to use/view JavaScript. This language and tool does appear to be based on the concepts rather than fitting the concepts in after the fact. So I’m happy with that.

One thing I will be pondering over the summer is what concepts should I teach. Am I teaching the right concepts or should I change them? What about cognitive load? I was re-reading How to choose programming languages for learners: Reviewing JavaScript and Ready by Mark Guzdial and his points about cognitive load really resonate with me.

Block languages do seem, based on evidence, to have lower cognitive load for beginners. I’m less comfortable with them; probably because I’m so old school. Student attitudes towards them are mixed with some really loving the low cognitive load and some having trouble taking them seriously. I have to keep in mind the concepts I want to teach as well.

No matter how I look at it though it is never as easy as “just teach the same things the same way but with a different programming language.”

How Well Can You Code the Projects You Assign Students?

Garth Flint had another good post today (Last Day of School And Done with Java) He lists some interesting projects he assigned and writes about some lessons learned. Any time a teacher learns from student projects I count that as a double win. But one of his comments really resonated with me. Garth writes “I did only two of the six assignments myself.  With the others I saw the solution so did not code them up.  I should have coded them up just so I could answer questions better for the students. “ Highlight mine.

Some years ago I wrote a couple of editions of project books for both C# and Visual Basic. (I may update them this summer if I have time.) People seemed to like them and I received numerous requests for coded solutions. I had them and usually provided them. I really think that teachers should always write their own solutions though. In fact, the less you know about programming the more you should code up your own solutions. As Garth pointed out in his post, when you code your own solutions you can better help students.

And if a project is a good learning experience for students it will also be a good learning experience for a teacher who is working on their own skill and knowledge base.

I’ve got a ton of programming experience and know a lot of tricks techniques that I would never expect beginners to know. So I try to write solutions using the tools and language constructs my students will have at their disposal. This helps me understand what issues students are likely to come across. It saves me time later.

Of course students are clever and think of ways to do things that an experienced coder would never come up with so I learn some new things from them. And the smart kids look up features we don’t cover in class and build “interesting” solutions. That’s all good. Better than good really. I’ve actually come up with several new to me ideas from students.

To be clear, I don’t want every student to write their solution the same way I write mine. I want to see some creativity and imagination. But I also don’t want to have to admit I have no idea how to implement a solution of my own. Well, not often anyway.

Since I teach several level of CS from our freshmen course which only has a few weeks of programming to our APCP P course with Programming Honors in the middle I sometimes code up several solutions. Some things that are possible with limited tools are much easier with more advanced tools. Arrays for example can be a powerful tool. I wrote about this a couple of years ago at Taking Things To Another Level  where I talked about revisiting a popular freshmen project later in Programming Honors.

It’s summer break and I’ll be doing some coding. Trying new projects to see what students will need to know to code them themselves. I’ve been looking forward to having the time to do this for moneys.