I spent some time looking at the Rhode Island Computer Museum web page today. A lot of interesting stuff. Some great information under the Education and Activities page. If you teach the history of computers this is a great resource with text and pictures.
The Collections gallery has a huge collection of images and descriptions of items they have as well. Check it out at Home (ricomputermuseum.org)
That doesn't mean people don't try. Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence have a lot of people predicting what jobs are an are not likely to be replaced by computers. Technology is challenging the ideas about what jobs can and cannot be replaced by technology. Doug Peterson, who shares a lot of interesting articles, recently share this one predicting that leaders will not be replace. It's an optimistic article. 5 Reasons Leaders Shouldn't Worry That Generative A.I. Will Take Their Jobs | Inc.com
A lot of jobs we once thought were completely safe are being seen in a new way lately. AIs are creating what looks to many like art for example. This is forcing us to take a hard look at how we define art. Some recent visits to museums had me already asking “what is art?”
Today we joke about AI attempts to write short stories, poetry, and other narratives. A lot of our stories in movies an even books are formulaic. How long before AIs can write Hallmark Christmas movies I wonder? What used to be a joke may be a prediction of the future.
A lot of people are speculating on the future end of the programmer profession. People have been predicting that would decades but we are closer to that than ever before. Software developers today think they are safe though because they (we) know that end users are terrible about describing what they want a program to do. Will the future bring courses and training on how to talk to AIs? Possibly. I can sure see the need for it.
People who are not teachers are suggesting that AIs will take over for human teachers. As someone who spent 15 years teaching I am not so sure about that. I think the human touch will remain important for the future. Teaching is a lot about reading people and establishing relationships. Wil AI be able to do that? I am not sure anyone knows.
One area I think people have an advantage over AI is that we are bad with risk analysis. What may seem like a flaw leads people with some luck, some imagination, and some hard work to beat the odds. We see potential needs when a pure look at the data would not see anything. And we are often willing to defy the odds for things we believe in. I am not sure AI will get there.
Thinking about the possibilities of AI and what it means for the future of work is a critical topic. It’s something we need everyone, but especially students, to be thinking about.
Traditionally I write a year end look back on thee previous yest in CS education. (Last year at Looking Back on Computer Science Education in 2021) Honestly, that post would largely work for 2022 as well. I attended SIGCSE, CSTA, and the New England Regional CSTA conference. They were all great. There was good learning at all of them. But new stuff? Not a whole lot. A few new tools. Some new robots. Some new AI and cyber security curriculum. But really not a whole lot.
I think we’re in for some disruption in 2023 though. Tools like ChatGPT and GitHub CoPilot are probably only the first of tools that are going to shake things up in teaching programming. Are we even going to still teach programming in computer science? If not, what will computer science courses look like? If we are still teaching programming how will we do it? What will it be all about?
We’re still going to see a need for teaching about cybersecurity for sure. Artificial Intelligence is also going to be more important. We’re seriously going to have to think about how we teach about it. We have to include not just how it works but how it should be used. Ethics in computer science has never been more important.
The discussion about ChatGPT and what it means for education in general and CS education in particular is going to be ongoing. We have to reink how and what we teach. It’s going to be an interesting year. Have you been thinking about it? What are your thoughts so far?
Note: I highly recommend Mike Zamansky's blog post at Kicking off 2023
Donald E. Knuth famously said "Premature optimization is the root of all evil." The important word there is “premature.” Optimization is not a bad thing. It isn’t always required though. The joke is that a programmer will spend hours coding a solution to a problem that can be solved in minutes manually. Is that a bad thing? It really depends on the circumstances. If one is getting paid by the hour one could easily argue that it is wrong. On the other hand if time is not really the issue and writing the code is fun – why not?
There have been times in my career when optimization has been very important. I helped spec a computer for high speed/bandwidth data collection. It was critical that the computer be able to take the data and place it in memory without losing data. We actually analyzed the speed of various machine language instructions for optimization purposes. That’s pretty exceptional of course.
I also remember writing a program of my own that took what seemed like a long time to process some data. I thought about trying to optimize it but as often as the program was to run it would not have been a good use of my time. Before I ran it again I got a new computer which made a bigger difference in execution time than I would probably have been able to get though “fixing” the code.
Old habits from the days of slower computers stick with me though and I tend to think a lot about code execution. Recently I had ChatGPT write some code for me (Coding with ChatGPT–Armstrong Numbers) I looked at the code very closely since I was trying to come to some conclusions about how good the code was. I noticed that the C# version it gave me was highly dependent on modulus and division which are somewhat time consuming compared to addition and multiplication. The program I write didn’t use any modulus or division but a lot of multiplication and addition. Both used the same number of raising to a power of 3 so it doesn’t play an important role in performance differences.
Having some time on my hands, I added some timing code to see if there was a difference. My program turns on to be much faster. Yea me. Of course both execution times are very small fractions of a second. Does it make sense to optimize this code? Probably not in this case. In fact, I would argue that the most understandable code may be a better goal for this project. That is a very subjective goal. Different people might come to honest but different conclusions.
Another goal might be scalability – the ease of adapting the program for other Narcissistic numbers. The ChatGPT probably wins there.
SO much depends on what we want to optimize:
Getting all three may not always be possible. It’s an interesting question though and one developers do need to ask.
Trying out ChatGPT seems to be all the rage these days in certain geek circles. I may even be late to the game but I tried a few things over the last couple of days.
I started with one of my favorite little projects. Armstrong numbers are a form of narcissistic number which is a number that is the sum of its own digits each raised to the power of the number of digits. I first wrote a program to calculated these as an undergraduate when I wrote programs for it in about a half dozen different languages.
I fed in the following prompt using C#, Visual Basic, and Python as the programming language.
Write a [programming language] program to calculate three digit numbers were the sum of the cube of each digit equals the original number.
The results for C# and VB were the same algorithm written in the specific syntax. The Python code was slightly different. You’ll probably not be surprised that the code ChatGPT showed me is very similar, if not identical, to code examples you can find with Google or Bing.
The C#/VB plan depends highly on integer division and the modulus operator to break down the number into its digits.
for (int I = 100; I < 1000; I++)
{
int sum = 0;
int temp = I;
while (temp > 0)
{
int digit = temp % 10;
sum += digit * digit * digit;
temp /= 10;
}
if (sum == I)
{
Console.WriteLine(I);
}
}
The Python sample changes the integer into a string and used that to address the individual digits.
for num in range(100, 1000):
# Convert the number to a string so we can access each digit
num_str = str(num)
# Initialize a sum to store the sum of the cubes of the digits
sum_of_cubes = 0
# Iterate through each digit in the number
for digit in num_str:
# Convert the digit back to an integer and add the cube of it to the sum
sum_of_cubes += int(digit) ** 3
# If the sum of the cubes is equal to the original number, print it
if sum_of_cubes == num:
print(num)
Note that the Python example nicely includes comments. A dead giveaway that a student didn’t write it. All samples come with simple explanations of how the code works. The explanations tend not to be very deep so oral questioning of a student would probably still show if the student understood the code or not.
It looks like, for some simple, student exercises can be solved by ChatGPT. It is not much different from doing any other online search for the most part. How worried should teachers be about ChatGPT especially? I’m not sure. Cheating goes on all the time and there is a lot of sample code already out there for many common assignments. It’s going to be a bigger problem for educators who have very large numbers of students who can’t be familiar with the code their students write. Or who can’t ask them questions to make sure they understand what they turn in.
I think I would ask ChatGPT to solve some of my assignments before I assign them just so I know what sort of answers I might see.
Side note: Neither of the ways ChatGPT suggested is the way I solve this program. There are more than one ways to skin this cat.
For most of my career I hive been hearing that some day computers will write all the code and human programmers will no longer be needed. Or at least, not as needed as today. Are we getting close to that time – finally? And if we are what does it mean for teaching computer science?
Recently, the CS education world has been discussing GitHub Copilot.
GitHub Copilot uses the OpenAI Codex to suggest code and entire functions in real-time, right from your editor.
While some of the discussion has been about the suit against Copilot (GitHub Copilot litigation) much of the discussion has centered around what it means as a tool for cheating by students. More recently there has been some visibility to the use of ChatGPT to write answers to programming questions.
For example, this year’s Advent of Code seems to have been “invaded” by ChatGPT climbing the leaderboard by answering the problems is seconds. (Adventures With ChatGPT: Advent of Code Edition | Tabs, Not Spaces) Of, perhaps, even more concern to teachers, ChatGPT seems to be somewhat satisfying as a solution to Advanced Placement Computer Science A questions. (ChatGPT passes the 2022 APCSA free response section)
I’d be very surprised if students are not already using these tools. This brings up several questions. One is - how do teachers keep this from happening? We probably can’t. So how do we detect when it does happen? Do we use these tools ourselves to see what sort of code is generated for our assignments? Seems like yet more work for people who don’t have enough time as it is.
Another question, which students are sure to ask, is what is the purpose of students writing code that artificial intelligence can write easier and faster? If you read the article above about putting the APCS A questions through ChatGPT you’ll see that the results are not prefect. So for the time being it looks like good programmers can still write better code than the AI. How long that will last is anyone’s guess. If history is any guide, it will not last long.
I remember when optimizing compilers started generating more efficient than the world’s best assembly language programmers could write. It was painful for some and a real boon for others. It didn’t completely do away with the need for assembly language programmers but it did reduce the need.
What do we tell students who ask “what’s the point of learning to code?” My thought is that we talk about the need for human oversight of AI generated code. We need to verify that it works as we want it to work and that means we need to understand code. We’re also going to need to fine tune generated code for some time to come. Understanding code will also help write good instructions for the AI that generates code. Again, understanding how code works is important for that.
Of course, there is a lot more to computer science than just writing code. Programming languages are the language of that study. Learning assembly language still helps people understand how computers and computing works. So will learning higher level languages.
The AIs will get better. Our conversations with students will get harder. Cheating is always going to be a challenge. We live in interesting times.
Facebook memories remined me that ten years ago I was thinking about writing a program that would ring bells (nautical time) on the hour and half hour. I didn't write it back then. Probably because I was busy with my day job. It got me thinking about writing one now just for the fun of it.
Now I have written a fancy clock program before. It looks something like this.
That was written in Visual Basic and I really wanted to use C#. Besides that, that program is a bit busy for something as simple as I wanted to write. The Timer and DateTime classes in the .NET Framework make writing a simple clock application very easy. I thought I would take a look on the internet to see what code samples I could find. There are plenty of them. I found several interesting looking samples that also drew analog clock faces.
The first one I found (C# Analog Clock Program (thecrazyprogrammer.com)) looked simple enough so I created a project and copied the code into it. It was broken. Looking back at the comments on the original post I found a number of comments saying the codebase broken. None of them had answers.
That seems to be pretty common. No doubt that things worked fine for the original coder but something was lost in the posting. I suspect that most people who come across this sort of thing are beginners which would explain the questions. Having a bit more experience I quickly fixed the errors I had and got the program to work. It didn’t look quite like I wanted but again, having enough knowledge to understand the code without a lot of comments, I made some adjustments and got it looking the way I waned. I suspect that many beginners would either life with it or try a whole lot of things until they stumbled on the right combination. Or maybe broke the program beyond fixing.
That highlights one of the big issues with beginners taking code from the internet. Without some real knowledge even minor issues will keep success away from the student.
I found a second project that was put on the internet some years after the first one I found. Interestingly enough, it appeared to be a refactoring and modest improvement over the first one I found. The code was nearly identical. No credit was given to a previous coder. In fact it was so close that I copied a snippet and pasted into the earlier project. With a tiny edit (a name change) it worked perfictly. This is what I wound up with.
The Code Project web site has a variety of analog clock code samples. I took at look at one - Analog clock control in C# – CodeProject that was pretty good. and worked more or less right off the bat. Except that is was written in a much older version of Visual Studio than I was using. (2003 compared to 2022). An upgrade was required with Visual Studio handled pretty well. That is not always the case if coders used depreciated or removed features or changed names. Yet another issue with taking code from the internet.
Well, now I have a couple of code samples to play with. Most of all I am more convinced that actually getting code from the internet to work can be more complicated than many would think it is.
Now to think about ringing bells. Which reminds me of one last story,
Back when I was in college during the mini-computer era we had a lab full of ASR-33s. They had actual bells that were hit with a little hammer. One student wrote a program that ran in the background of the computer and "grabbed" control of each terminal as it became available. Then it would start ringing all the bells at once. It so happens that when it ran the only one in the lab was the computer department secretary.
The department chair held a meeting with all the TAs and it never happened again.
This year’s CSTA New England regional conference is at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst) school of Education. It’s a great venue. There are around 150 people here. I can remember when CSTA national conferences were smaller than that. It just shows the growth in CSTA and the growing strength of CSTA chapters over the last several years.
I am running into a number of people I know and meeting some new people as well. That is what makes in-person conferences so extra special.
The energy level is high here with teachers from all over New England and New York. The opening keynote was by Dr. Cheryl Swanier who talked about “Changing the Face of Technology for Social Good.” Tech has a woman problem – we don’t have enough of them. As part of her talk, Dr. Swanier showed this video Girls in Tech for Web Summit - Ruthe Farmer – YouTube We’ve been taking about this problem for a while but we really need to take our actions up a notch. The case is pretty clear. Dr. Swanier also talked about explicitly teach problem solving. Much as we’d like to think that teaching programming does that, the truth is that it has to be taught explicitly.
My first regular session was “Teaching with Minecraft: Education Edition.” You’d think I would know all about this but honestly I have trouble grokking it. My grandson has seen it and thinks its cool so I figured I should learn more about it. Minecraft Education requires a license. That may limit what I can do initially. However, it looks like there are a lot of resources for teachers including lesson plans, the ability to share worlds, create NPCs (non player characters), and portfolios. There are Code Builder options for blocks, Python, or JavaScript with MakeCode.There is a demo that can be used with “An Hour of Code” and I will play with that. I was pretty impressed with what I saw today.
There were 10 or 12 exhibits at the event. One that really interested me was the Kibo robot from Robot Kits For Kids | KIBO | Kinder Lab Robotics.
These robots are programmed with blocks. Not virtual blocks! Physical blocks that cane be connected together. Once the program blocks are together the bar codes on the blocks are scanned into the robot which will execute the program This looks pretty interesting.
After lunch, we had a panel of CS/STEM leaders from the New England departments of Education reporting on what progress the states have made in the last few years. The tl;dr of it is that there are been a lot of progress. But the efforts could really use more money. States have created certification programs, made progress in getting states to require schools to offer CS courses. We’ve still got a long way to go. We could use more money for teacher PD. We could require CS courses for graduation. Although in several states CS courses can count for graduation credits in various ways.
Next up for me, Kathy Kleiman, Founder of the ENIAC Programmers Project, who told the story of the women behind the ENIAC. A story I have heard before but Dr. Kleinman tells it really well. I loved that she talked about the history of these women after the war. A lot of information at ENIAC PROGRAMMERS PROJECT
Next up for me, Gencyber Teacher Academy @ the Univ of New Haven: Incorporating Cybersecurity Concepts into 9th-12th High School STEM Curriculum.
This program includes a week long summer "camp" and follow up virtual sessions. Last year the program just included 25 teachers from Connecticut but applicants from other states are welcome to apply for next summer. Anyway, it comes with a stipend and some good free stuff. And a lot of good learning,
Last regular session of the day for me, Bring Computation to Life with the micro:bit. I love the Micro:Bit and always like to learn about how teachers are using them in their classrooms. I linked to the presentation above and on slide 7 you can find the mini project that opened the session with links to the code used. It uses the ability of the Micro:Bit to send and receive messages. You will find a lot of useful links on that slide deck including in the speaker notes.
The closing plenary involved a lot of recognition of CS teacher award winners. and door prizes!
Next year the conference will be on October 20, 2023 at the University of Connecticut Storrs. Should be a good one.
Mike Zamansky is stirring up trouble again. OK not really his intent I’m sure but people can get defensive. I have to say that I agree in principle with most of his post at Why PD doesn't work for CS
Mike lists four different types of PDs.
It’s as good a break down as any though the fourth kind can really include any of the first three. So I will zero in on those for now. Full disclosure: I have given all three of those types of PD in my time. This includes working for a content provider, Microsoft in this case, that was more or less selling something even though the stuff I was presenting to teachers was free.
I think that these types of PD can be great things for improving a teacher’s knowledge and skills. None of them are really good for starting from scratch.
Teachers sharing practices is a wonderful thing. At least if the audience has a solid base to start. We see a lot of it in social media. Not as much on blogs as I would like but still some valuable stuff is shared on Facebook and even Twitter. I have learned a lot from teachers sharing practices. I hope I have helped some teachers as well. Short bursts of knowledge is not a foundation to start a CS teaching career on though.
Conferences are wonderful. The sessions are short, typically 45 minutes to an hour and a half. They are great for sharing and for helping teachers to build on existing knowledge or to lead them in new directions for further exploration. But one should not expect a new to CS teacher to attend a conference (or two) and expect them to be a trained teacher.
PD run by content providers are typically longer form. Usually a week, sometimes two. These can be awesome especially if they are given to educators who have prior experience For example, a teacher who has taught simple web page building attending a session of a more advanced toolset for a more advanced course. Or a teacher who is learning a new programming language who can relate it to previous knowledge. These sorts of PD can be a mixed bad of course. Some focus totally on the tool and not much of pedagogy. Others are concept focused as much a tool focused. Regardless, these can be very valuable especially when the content provider is a non-profit with goals beyond selling product.
We’re getting to an interesting point in the development of CS for All. We’re rapidly outgrowing the availability of strong technical CS educators. Qualified CS teachers are hard to find. We’re not doing students any favor by putting untrained or antiquatedly trained teachers in the classroom. Colleges and universities have been complaining about having to reteach students who were poorly taught in high school for years. Do we really want to see more of that? I think not.
We really need more long term training for CS teachers. We’re starting to see some programs and more universities are developing CS education research programs and working with schools of education. That really needs to ramp up. States have to start requiring more training for CS teachers AND put some money into making it happen.
The Micro:Bit is a pretty cool piece of hardware being used in a lot of schools. It’s mostly used in middle school and above but that may be changing. New from Microsoft is Microcode beta. Programming is via a MicroCode web editor at aka.ms/m9. Microcode documentation is at Microsoft MicroCode for micro:bit (beta)
Take a look at the intro video below.People who have used Kodu Game Lab will see some simularity in MicroCode. Although the graphics are very different, the programming modularity is similar. With both, programming is drag and drop using cute little kid friendly icons.Besides the Micro:Bit itself, Micro:Code supports Jacdac devices which opens a lot of new prossibilities. I wrote about JacDac back in July - Jacdac and Micro:Bit 2.0–First Look.
I haven’t tried this with my 8 year old grandson yet but I hope to soon. I think he’ll like it.
Last night I had a dream during which someone suggested that COBOL would make a good first programming language. They tried to promote the data division and English language syntax as plusses. When I shared this on social media it got a lot of laughs. Few would take this as a serious idea and with good reason.
We used to joke that the hardest part of programming in COBOL was learning how to spell environment. (You had to be there) But really that data division was a bear to get right. The cognitive load was a lot for beginners. Today they are some who think that static variable declarations are enough cognitive load to hold students back and COBOL was a lot of effort.
COBOL is still around and I understand that it has changed somewhat. I thought that “Structured Programming in COBOL” (there was such a book) was a stretch but object oriented COBOL just boggles my mind.
Most of the people in my age group in the industry have some experience with COBOL. For more than a few it was the first or second or, as in my case, third programming language. Learning multiple programming languages was a big thing early in my career. FORTRAN, COBOL, BASIC, and C (before C++) were all a part of many people’s tool box. I worked on one project that had code in all four of those languages plus PASCAL.
Today we have a lot of new languages. C++. C#, Java, JavaScript, Rust, and I could go on and on. Today’s languages have more and more powerful decision structures, looping structures and libraries that do things for us that we used to have to program ourselves. We have improved error handling, the ability to use classes and objects, and many other cool features. That doesn’t even touch on powerful IDEs and the ability to compile and get results in seconds rather than hours and days.
With power often comes complexity. Complexity means cognitive load and potential for confusion and errors. We walk a fine line determining what to teach and how to prevent students from getting overloaded. It’s an exciting time to be teaching for sure.
I was reading through The Big Book of Computing Pedagogy, as one does, the other night. Specifically, the section on student misconceptions. Misconceptions are one of my favorite topics in teaching computer science. The articles in this book are very helpful in understanding what student misbelieve and why they do so.
I’ve seen students with all of the common misconceptions and, of course, I try my best to help them overcome them before they get students into trouble.I tried to remember if I experienced any of them myself but memory of 50 years ago is very selective. What I do remember is that I had some experiences of getting very close to the hardware early on. While my first course was learning FORTRAN the computer we used required some extra (compared to today) to run. Specifically, it requires that one toggle in some instruction in binary using toggle switches to get it to read in a couple of punch cards that did the next phase of the boot up.
Not long after I learned the first two of what would be 7 or 8 assembly languages over my career. There is something about toggling a memory address so that one could read (in binary lights) or enter information in binary with those same switches to program a computer that give one a good understanding of what memory actually is.t
Those days are long gone of course and while assembly language still gets one close to the computer and gives an understanding of how things like memory work it can also be a gate or barrier to students. It’s actually not the ideal way to understand concepts that one might think. It’s not the sort of visual experience that today’s students are used to learning from.
What we really need is some better visualization tools for introducing concepts. My first thought was using debugging tools such as those built into tools like Visual Studio. One can single step though instructions and view the contents of memory (variable) locations. It works but it is slow and tedious. That may be fine for debugging but for learning it has a high cognitive load that gets in the way of what we’re trying to do in teaching.
So I have been thinking about how to create visualizations that are simple to use and that might help clear up misconceptions. Two things my thinking is focusing on are how variables and memory work and how loops and loop control variables work. Eventually I have to narrow it down to one of them to start. I should probably look at what might already be available first. I thought I would start by asking you, my readers, for suggestions. So, any ideas? How do you help students visualize these concepts? Any suggestions on tools for creating visualizations?
Every couple of weeks I bake a couple of loaves of bread. The bread mostly gets used for breakfast sandwiches. Now my bread does not look as perfect as what I could get in a bakery. And the bagels? Once in a while I try my hand at bagels, don’t look anything close to what I get at my favorite bagel place. But they all taste good and I find it very satisfying to make it myself.
Coding can be a bit the same. Not everyone writes professional looking (or performing) code but sometimes there is some satisfaction in having a program that works just they way you want it to and does just what you need. Maybe it is not “release to the public” neat and tidy. It may be what we used to call a “programmers program.” In other words, a program that only the programmer who write it could (or would) use. My Wordle solver helper program is one such. It works great – for me. It doesn’t have the error checking a released program should have. And maybe it should start at one and not zero. But it works great for me.
Programming is basically stating a process or method using computer code. My Wordle solver represents my thinking of how I think Wordle could be solved. It was fun to write and is fun to use. It’s not ready for prime time though. Does that make it a bad program? No more than my imperfect bread or bagels are bad. They both meet my needs and that, for me, for these, is all that matters.
In some ways, that is the message we may want to pass on to students. Many, perhaps most, of our students will not become professional software developers. They may still write code for their own tasks or interests though. We need to help them enjoy that experience. One way to do this is to assign projects that are interesting to the student. Open ended projects are good for this but even better is letting students select their own projects.
For semester ending projects, I used to allow students to select from a list of suggested projects and also to have the option to design their own projects (after discussion with the teacher) that solved a problem that they were interested in solving. Helping students find the fun and satisfaction in solving an assignment promotes their learning. And, I hope, helps them think of computer science as worth doing for themselves.
"A rose by any other name would smell as sweet" William Shakespeare.
There are cultures where people have a sort of public name and a secret or true name that is rarely shared because knowing ones true name gives people power over them. In fact, knowing a name is powerful in all cultures. Consider the difference between calling “hey you” versus calling a child by their actual name. Which way draws them up sharp?
Naming is important in computer programming as well. It’s not always as easy or as simple as beginners assume it is. Mike Zamansky’s post Subtle Errors gives a good example. Having more than one item with the same name causes the sort of ambiguity that computers do not handle well. Some names (identifiers as we often call them in programming) have special meanings. Getting names slightly wrong can cause other problems.
A name can provide a great deal of information to a programmer. To the compiler names are pointers to more information. A variable name identifies a location to the computer. Other information about the data stored in that location is specified in other ways. The computer doesn’t care what characters make up the name. That it is unique is important but not the characters involved. In many programming languages the case of the letters makes two names completely different. People tend to see them as identical.
Beginners often think that “the computer” pays attention to everything in a program the same way people do. That’s not the case though. I’ve had students write comments in their code believing that the computer will read the comment and perform the action. They may also assume that naming conventions, starting all integer valuable names with “int” for example, will influence the computer. Again, not usually the case.
[Note: back in the day, any variable starting with one of the letters “I” through “n” was automatically an integer.]
Names/identifiers can communicate a lot of information to programmers. They are pretty important for sure.It is easy to gloss over them and minimize their importance. Getting them right though is something worth spending time on.
I was thinking about data science lately. The problem is that I don’t know much about data science. I learned about data bases in school and worked with them some in industry but that was mostly about how they work internally. I used to give talks on how B* Trees worked and I could (back then) give serious talks on how databases do journaling. But I never did much of anything with real work data applications. Not professionally at lease. But I do like playing around with data and Excel is my friend.
So my first thought was to look at Bootstrap’s data Science curriculum. I did find their definition:
data science the science of collecting, organizing, and drawing general conclusions from data, with the help of computers.
Sounds good to me. I guess I have been doing some data science after all.
Looking though the curriculum had me thinking about Mark Guzdial's work with teaspoon languages. It feels like there are some things Bootstrap and Teaspoon languages have in common. The idea of teaspoon languages is to add some computer science to other subjects to broaden participation in CS. Bootstrap is using data sets from other subjects in their curriculum. So both are using CS and programming to help students learn about a lot more than just computer science or the subject they are taking. Note that Bootstrap also has Bootstrap Physics! and Bootstrap Algebra.
While I was doing all this thinking Mike Zamansky posted this post - Teaching CS - How early and how often? Mike askes a lot of practical questions about fitting CS into grades k through 8. It’s easy for us zealots to say that CS should be in every grade and expect K8 teachers to make magic but that is not really fair to anyone. Maybe the answer is to have some teaspoons of CS in existing subjects. It doesn’t make a lot of sense unless adding this CS makes learning the subject it is imbedded into better though.
We’ve seen for years in higher education that computer science and [some other area of study] can be a big win. Can we move some of that down to lower grades? Probably though it is going to take some time and some innovation. It’s worth doing, in my not so humble opinion. We use math in other subjects. We use reading and writing in every subject. Might not CS help teach/lean a lot more subjects than just programming? I think so.
It;s seems like artificial intelligence has been “10 years away” for the last 40 years. Back in the mini computer days every computer was custom and configurations were designed by people. I worked for a company that believed that configuring computers was beyond the ability of computer software. From there I went to a different company that was developing rules based artificial intelligence. Using a special language called OPS5 they wrote software that configured computers faster and more accurately than people. Rules based AI was dependent on people to know the rules and properly prognathism. Limitations became apparent.
Today we have machine learning which basically means the computer is developing the rules. Rules is probably not the best definition though. We’re starting to see AI grow into many more areas than ever before. Think self driving cars for example. It’s becoming clear that understanding the world today means understanding something about artificial intelligence. What does that mean for K-12 computer science education?
For now, most of the education is about AI. What it is. How it worse conceptually. What is it being used for. And, perhaps most importantly, what does AI mean for society and the future. The math and science of creating AI platforms s a bit too much for most high school students let alone younger students. That can wait. Although there are tools that exist that students can use for their own projects which is pretty cool.
I am very concerned about bias in artificial intelligence (Bias in Artificial Intelligence. Inequality, racism and discrimination is just one article you will find from an internet search for “Bias in artificial intelligence) Systems that do not recognize that people of color are actually people is only one example Bias against women or various other groups of people can be baked into AI systems if developers are not VERY careful.
Also, how is AI being used? Facial recognition and privacy have become areas of concern in many areas and applications.
These are more than just ethical issues, though ethics has got to be a core part of what we teach, as many other problems are unconscious bias or the result of innocent but false assumptions made by people who mean well but lack understanding of their own environment. Its a reason we need a lot more diversity is AI and CS as a whole. We have to teach students to think about these issues and to think beyond their own identities and beyond “the way we have always done it.”
Companies in industry are taking new looks at AI as well. One useful resource is Microsoft's framework for building AI systems responsibly - Microsoft On the Issues. The blog post talks about some issues Microsoft has faced and how they are addressing them. Companies are asking the “should me” question as well as the “can we” question. We need students to think about those questions from the start. The document itself is at Microsoft-Responsible-AI-Standard-v2-General-Requirements-3.pdf and makes interesting reading. It could start some class discussions as well.
Way back in time, cybersecurity was all about controlling access to the computer in the locked room with the raised floor. Well, you had to trust the people you did let in of course. I will not say much about the students I went t university with who competed to create the best, most realistic login emulator to steal passwords because, you know, that was all in fun. Later in life I actually had supporting the real login software as part of my job responsibility.
We were more aware of security by then. It was the real world. We spent a lot of design time on our various OS subsystems to make sure that access was verified and that people could only access what they were authorized to access. Dial in lines and then networks made things a bit more risky. I remember one system that required a second password of 16 random characters that changed every 5 or ten minutes (I forget which). Someone broke in anyway. Social engineering not technical engineering. People were and are still the weak link in computer security.
In the early days few people had access to a computer. Fewer still had technical knowledge enough to crack into systems And most of them were (it seems) fairly trust worthy. As more people got access to both computers and knowledge breaking into systems became more common.
Today there is a lot of talk about cybersecurity and the need for more people to be trained in the field. What does that mean for high schools? For one thing, it means a lot of people are saying that high schools should teach it. What teaching cybersecurity means is a question with still developing answers.
Should schools offer a whole course in it or can they cover enough in an existing course? If a full course, a semester? A year? Some part of a year? You’ll get a lot of answers but little in the way of a consensus. A lot of discussion about this on Facebook group for Cybersecurity Educators. Resources at CYBER.ORG are helpful as well.
For now, individual schools are making their own decisions. These decisions are based on things like teacher knowledge to teach such information, room in the schedule, and resources available. Some school IT departments are not willing to let students experiment on networks in a school. Or even, in some cases, to have students learn about network vulnerabilities! I suspect that career technical schools are going to be the main source of high school courses in cybersecurity. There is less focus on AP exams and more focus on preparing students for the work force sooner rather than later. Oh yeah, colleges and universities but they are not my focus.
Comprehensive high schools are more likely to add some cyber security information into existing courses. AP CS Principles for example. A few will have longer courses but I suspect most of those will be independent high schools and charters as they have fewer restrictions and their politics is different. (Different does not always mean better or worse to be clear.)
Maybe when (if?) we get to a place where the learning of coding is done well enough and deep enough in middle school we can move away from HS courses that “just” teaching programming and start using that programming to learn about other things in computer science. Like cybersecurity. Like data science (although we are seeing some of that in middle school already (Bootstrap:Data Science ) which is pretty exciting. And like more artificial intelligence.
Programming is cool (to me) and important (to everyone!) but there is more to computer science than programming. Security is an important part of that and high school CS educators have to have it on their radar and give serious thought to bringing it into their curriculum.
Learning about Jacdac devices was my incentive to buy a Micro:Bit 2.0 The Micro:Bit 2.0 has a number of upgrades and new features from the original. These include a microphone and a speaker among others. That is probably justification enough to get an upgrade but being curious about the Jacdac devices, which requires the newer model, was the deciding factor. I am really enjoying spending time with external devices and the Jacdac devices are really easy to use.
I purchased the Micro:Bit from AdaFruit (micro:bit v2 Go Bundle - Batteries and USB Cable Included) Actually I bought two because, well, why not? I bought the Kittenbot Jacdac Kit for micro:bit V2 from KittenBot My hope is that more manufacturers and suppliers will be offering Jacdac over time.
Each part is labeled and has a QR code that will take you to documentation for that device. I took full advantage of that. One thing I learned the hard way but would have learned if I read the documentation is that the adapter has a switch that determines if the Micro:Bit powers the Jacdac devices or if the Jacdac (and some external power supply TBD) powers the Micro:Bit. Things worked much better with the switch in the right direction.
Once I got everything out and read some documentation I had to try something out. I started with the RGB Ring and the Rotary Button. I started with individual example programs and then created my own. I had the rotor determine which LEDs were lit. Going backwards (negative numbers) had some issues of course. I might leave solving that to students if I were doing this in class.
I recommend starting at MakeCode Integration before you get to far on your own. It will step you though adding the Jacdac extensions to MakeCode, connecting to your Micro:Bit, and other helpful information.
BTW, from MakeCode you can program using blocks (very easy) as well as either JavaScript or Python. You can move back and forth between languages as well. A lot of potential for learners there.
Next up I will be trying to think of some larger projects as well as experimenting with other sensors and gadgets. I may even cut some boxes with my laser engraver for some projects. Making boxes with 3D printers is also an obvious thing to do.
Mike Zamansky had another interesting post (CS - it isn't all that) that got me thinking. The last three paragraphs started me going. For example
As CS becomes more part of the system I expect teachers to have less freedom in what they teach and how they teach. As a community we might be able to steer the ship towards keeping the good stuff but then again, we might not.
In talking to a lot of teachers at CSTA 2022, I realized that most CS teachers have a lot of freedom in what they teach as CS and how they teach it. Other than the Advanced Placement courses there are not many real limits on what and how we teach CS. One teacher said “as long as the students are happy I’m left alone.” That is both exciting and scary.
It’s exciting if a teacher with good content knowledge and skills in CS pedagogy says it, Scary if that is not the case. And the later is probably more common than the former. Of course there is a positive move in standards development and teacher certifiably rules that is trying to fix the problem of “anyone can teach CS.”
That has its risks as well. While most standards programs I am aware of are deeply involving experienced CS educators in their development, once standards start getting implemented by bureaucrats all bets are off. Standards can be inspiration or shackles. They can include people who are good at passing tests and exclude qualified people who don’t fit in the usual boxes.
Many, dare I say most, education administrators don’t really understand computers let a lone what it means to teach computer science. That is the source of some of our freedom but can also be a source of constriction if effective advocates for specific curriculum and teaching resources convince them to push things top down on classroom educators. I see it all too often “My administration wants me to use [some well sold curriculum]. Is it any good?” Seems to me that excluding subject matter experts in the school should be making those decisions not people inexperienced with teaching the subject.
How we teach today is going to be influential If we teach everyone well we are more likely to keep some freedom in how we do things in the future. People tend to teach the same way they were taught. Given how much we still have to learn about how to teach CS we need to avoid that trap AND to promote a growth mindset that is open to new ways of teaching and learning.
It will be hard to keep computer science from being constrained in someone’s idea of neat little boxes. That is what bureaucrats like to see. As CS continues to grow we have to be flexible and we have to promote the need to be flexable to all the publics we deal with.
CSTA 2022 was energizing! After three years of not seeing people in person it was awesome to reconnect with people. And to meet new people. The energy level was high through the whole event. Masks and proof of vaccination were required which I thought was great. It seemed to work out well at SIGCSE. Quite frankly, after lots of stories' of people getting COVID at ISTE which did not have those requirements I really apricated the carefulness of CSTA.
Masks did make it harder to recognize people. I’m glad I wore my trademark hat which one person told me was more famous than I am.
Sessions were very good as one expects. The exhibit hall had about 75 exhibitors and everyone was staffed by engaged, knowable, and upbeat people. The hallway track was really fun. I learned a lot from friends old and new in discussions. As I understand it there were about 1,700 people in attendance for everyone to talk to.
The venue, McCormick Place was huge. It needed to be to all all of the concurrent sessions. We only took up a small part of the place though. If you explored to far you could easily get lost. And I did. There was food available for purchase in the back of the exhibit hall. It wasn't bad. It was nice not to have to go far and wide to search for food. There were many good places to eat nearby however. I liked that I could get from the conference hotel to the conference without going outside. Especially the day it rained all day.
A good number of people approached me to say that they read and value this blog and/or my Twitter feed. I can't tell you how much that means to me. Thank you to all of you. You made CSTA extra special.
It looks like next year’s CSTA will be virtual. Sigh. I know that it will make it possible for a lot of people who can’t travel to an in-person conference to get valuable knowledge from sessions. A virtual exhibit hall doesn’t excite me though. And I will miss the hallway conversations. On the other hand, maybe we can have even more sessions and have them available to more people.
My previous posts on CSTA 2022
