"I Can't Read, But I Can Code": Using Puppets to Teach C++ to Pre-readers: A Quasi-experimental Critical Phenomenological Mixed Methods Case Study [April Fools]

[This episode was a friendly April Fools prank about a fake paper I created] In this bonus episode I unpack Rollerstein’s (2021) publication titled “‘I can't read, but I can code’: Using puppets to teach C++ to pre-readers: A quasi-experimental critical phenomenological mixed methods case study” which investigated the use of puppets to teach C++ to pre-readers in pre-K CS classes.

Welcome back to another episode of the
CSK8 podcast my name is jared o'leary
now this episode is releasing on a
thursday so this is actually a bonus
episode and this is the second bonus
episode i've ever done
interestingly enough i happen to share
the other bonus episode on the exact
same date one year ago
so the reason why i'm sharing this
particular bonus episode is because i
was reading this paper and i was like i
need to share this as soon as possible
so this particular bonus unpacking
scholarship episode is on the paper
titled
quote i can't read but i can code colon
using puppets to teach c
plus to pre-readers colon a
quasi-experimental critical
phenomenological mixed methods case
study
and this paper was written by ricardo
rollerstein and it was written in the
applied programming readers
international ledger volume
is available for free
and you can find that in the show notes
by clicking on the title for the paper
or by clicking on the author's name and
you can find some more
papers that this particular author wrote
so make sure you click on the link
in the particular app that you're
listening to this on or by going to
jaredlery.com clicking on the cska
podcast and then
clicking to sort by bonus episodes
all right so here's the abstract for
this paper quote in the united states
there are hundreds of thousands of open
computing jobs that are currently
unfilled
although the k-12 pipeline can prepare
students for future careers in computer
science
the approaches used in elementary
classes in particular are often
decontextualized from industry practices
for example elementary students often
use block-based programming languages
while industry professionals tend to use
text-based languages given that the fair
labor standards act
sets the minimum age for employment in
non-agricultural jobs at 14 years of age
this presents an opportunity for
students ages 14 and older
to fill current cs positions if they are
adequately prepared in cs to better
prepare students for a jump start to
such opportunities
this quasi-experimental critical
phenomenological mixed methods case
study investigated the use of puppets to
teach c
plus to pre-readers in pre-kinder
classes over the course of a semester
statistically significant results p of
lesson 0.01
from the study indicate that pre-k
students who listened to a lecture
pantomime by a puppet
were able to outperform their peers who
listened to the same lecture by a
university professor the results from
the study demonstrate a promising
approach for accelerating the cs
industry pipeline in k-12 context
end quote all right so if i were to
summarize this particular paper into a
single sentence i would say that this
paper investigated the use of puppets to
teach c
plus to pre-readers in pre-k cs classes
all right so this paper begins with an
introduction and the author describes
how do the ever increasing demands for
more cs professionals k12 schools need
to better prepare students for work in
the field of cs
so rather than taking an approach of
decontextualized coding practices from
industry practice
the author argues that students should
learn to create with languages and
platforms commonly used in industry
settings so in this particular study the
author
wanted to investigate the use of c plus
with visual studio for windows now the
rationale for this particular language
and platform was that if we begin
teaching such languages and platforms to
pre-k and kindergarten students
they are better able to develop their
abilities over 13 to 14 years of
schooling so think of the 10
refining practices within one language
and one platform would allow students to
potentially skip college
and possibly even begin working as a cs
professional
part-time at 14 years of age so this
differs from other approaches that try
and scaffold programming languages
in stages that align with various
developmental theories so for example
using icon-based blocks in scratch
junior
with early and pre-readers then moving
to block-based languages like scratch
and then eventually moving to text-based
languages now the author cites decades
of evidence to support the idea that
puppets can be used to teach concepts to
children
we're often in the pre or early reader
stages so for example kids learn letters
numbers and values
through tv shows that use puppetry like
sesame street or the muppets or even
some advanced concepts such as how the
united states handles
geopolitical relationships around the
world through forms of puppetry like the
super marionation techniques used in the
team america right so a quick summary of
the intro basically the author is saying
that hey
instead of waiting until students
graduate from university
we could potentially find some ways to
get it so that we can fill these unmet
jobs
at ages of 14 rather than waiting until
like ages of 22. and their hypothesis is
that
students will be able to learn advanced
languages and platforms
if we taunt using puppetry techniques as
evidenced in some of the
tv shows and movies or documentaries
that the author cites all right so the
next section in the paper is the methods
section so in this particular study the
author describes how there were two
classes of pre-k
students who were classified as
pre-readers one class
spent a semester watching three hour
long recorded lectures from the authors
university
so this was the control group now the
treatment group used the exact same
audio and screen recordings as a control
group
however instead of displaying the
university instructor in the corner of
the screen
a puppet pantomimed the lecture in the
bottom corner of the screen
so the exact same lecture exact same
screen recording the only difference is
they replace the university instructor
with a puppet who would basically open
the mouth as if they were talking
and demonstrating stuff in a visual
studio so the pre-k students would watch
three-hour lectures each week over the
course of a semester and the control and
treatment groups were compared
with an undergraduate class taking the
same course at the university
okay so both the control and treatment
groups completed all assignments and
quizzes
for the cs 101 course because both the
control and treatment groups consisted
of pre-readers the author used pre
and post surveys that included a mixture
of emoji-based demographic questions
also included like art scales where they
circled emojis to indicate like level of
understanding comfort frustration etc
and even open-ended response section
where students were asked to share what
they learned by drawing pictures so the
author used chromebox alpha to
test for internal consistency of the
likert scale responses among both the
treatment and control groups
and found an alpha of 0.93 indicating
high internal consistency or reliability
among responses
the author and multiple graduate
students coded the open-ended responses
and found a high enter raider
reliability with a fleece cap a rating
of 0.85
indicating strong alignment now the
authors also collected the assignments
and quizzes for the cs101 course at
their university to compare those
results with the treatment and control
groups in the pre-k
pre-reader groups all assignments and
quizzes from the control
treatment and cs101 groups were then
assigned participant id numbers before
being anonymously graded by tas for the
cs101 course
so this made it so that a ta was unable
to determine if an assignment or quiz
was completed by a college student
or a pre-reader from the treatment or
control groups
now this method section is very detailed
so i highly recommend going and looking
at the show notes to take a look at
some of the stuff that i left out in
this but hopefully i gave you enough
details to
share what the basic method was and how
reliable or valid the results were
so results from the study indicate that
the control group failed
all assignments and quizzes so this is
the group that did not have the puppets
they just watched the three-hour
lectures each week
now this finding makes sense given that
these students were pre-readers in a
pre-k class
taking an intro to cs course using c
plus in visual studio however the
treatment groups
scored along a bell curve that matched
the grades of the undergraduate students
in cs 101
with absolutely no statistically
significant deviations from the bell
curve so in other words
the group that had the puppet treatment
or intervention scored along the same
bell curve
as the undergraduate class that took the
cs101 course
which that's a pretty remarkable finding
right now interestingly even though the
treatment group could not read
they were able to complete coding
assignments with the same level of
quality of undergraduate students who
are at least a decade older than the
students in the treatment group
now one of the things i really
appreciated is the author includes some
excerpts of the assignments in quizzes
so we could see
and compare the three different groups
the control group the treatment group
and the
undergrad cs101 group and i have to say
the treatment and the 101 i could not
tell a difference between the
level of code that students were
submitting but there was a very clear
difference with the control group i
include direct links in the show notes
to those particular
excerpts if you want to take a look at
it now speaking of the show notes i also
include
direct links to the open-ended responses
that the author provided
so remember the open-ended responses
were drawings that
the pre-readers were able to draw to
kind of demonstrate their understandings
of what they learned
when they took the survey so as an
example one student used a red crayon to
draw what appears to be a fire truck
which was coded by the author and the
tas as a clear example of nested
conditionals
which totally makes sense okay so
another respondent actually
drew a stick figure person and the
letters j
o and a backwards letter e which was a
misspelling of the child's name
but the authors note that it clearly
demonstrated understanding of the
difference between variables and
constants
while also challenging the hegemonic
norms imposed by the social construction
of alphabets
so in addition to the surveys and the
open-ended responses
and collecting of assignments the author
did some follow-up interviews with
students in the treatment group asking
them to explain their assignment
submissions and these video recordings
of these explanations
are actually linked to in the paper
itself so it's a playlist with some
youtube videos and i'll include a link
to this in the show note
because i highly recommend going to the
show notes watching the videos
in the provided playlist as they made me
realize that i could have done
so much more with the k8 kids that i was
working with if i had tried this
approach outline in this particular
article
all right so here's a quick summary of
the results itself so the author found
that the control
group failed completely whereas the
treatment group the group that used the
recorded lectures but had a puppet
pantomime in things
they were able to score on par with the
cs101 undergraduate course which is a
remarkable finding
all right so the author in the
discussion section notes that the
findings from this study provide a path
for streamlining the k-12 to cs industry
pipeline
by demonstrating how children as young
as pre-k can begin learning
undergraduate intro to cs concepts
if you use this approach and so the
author closes with the following quote
on page four
quote given to the success of using
puppets to teach c-plus plus to
pre-readers and pre-k students
follow-up studies should not only
investigate the effectiveness of puppets
in other k-12 and higher education cs
classes
but in other subject areas as well end
quote so i think this is very important
for other cs researchers to investigate
so i wish i was still in the elementary
classroom to see if i could teach
students advanced concepts in other
subject areas using the techniques
outlined in this article but maybe
we could go back and like re-record all
the videos that i've done with boot up
and instead of having me in the corner
explaining how to do stuff in scratch we
could have a puppet do it so that might
be the next project that i'll start
working on
all right so as always in these
unpacking scholarship episodes including
this bonus one
i like to talk about some of my
lingering questions or thoughts
so one of my questions is how might the
results have differed if the puppets
were singing the lines of code in a
musical
rather than speaking the lines of code
so the reason why i ask this is because
often
in these like puppet shows and movies
and whatnot they're
not just talking but they're also
engaging in musicals that teach a
very specific concept for example on
team america there is a very specific
discussion on loneliness
and some of the problems that come with
that now if they do this they might need
to consider singing in falsetto range
because children
are able to hear the notes and can sing
along
without having to transpose octaves in
other words the voice that i'm speaking
right now is like my normal chest voice
my speaking voice but falsetto would be
if i talk like this
so it's using more of like a head voice
and it's the the voice that i had to use
when i was teaching elementary kids when
i was a general music and band
specialist
it was difficult for them to transpose
from my natural singing voice
up to their range just because they
don't have as long of vocal chords
so if you are interested in implementing
this technique of using puppets to teach
concepts
perhaps you should try doing a musical
and then let me know how it goes
alright so my final question for this
particular paper is what's a similar
approach we
might be able to use with older students
so in particular i doubt older students
would want to learn from puppets they
might think it's too childish
so i'm wondering if we should do
follow-up studies that take snippets
of the pre-recorded lecture and sequence
them together in tik-tok
to teach the same concepts using a
platform that older students are already
engaging with so think about it we could
basically be
engaging in edutainment by simply taking
out like 20 second excerpts of
the pre-recorded lecture and then simply
putting it in a sequence in tik-tok
and then as people swipe through it
they're going to be learning advanced cs
concepts
and practices i imagine this would be
really helpful for
filling the unmet jobs right now and
getting more kids interested in computer
science
alright so with that that concludes this
week's episode of the csk8 podcast i
hope this bonus episode was super
helpful for you maybe you will consider
using some of these techniques in here
but i highly recommend going to the show
notes and make sure you click on
any of the links in there whether it be
the author's last name to see more of
their publications
the actual title of the publication to
go directly to it or any of the
related links in there such as the
youtube playlist or the example excerpts
of
students code or even the pictures of
the drawings
that students submitted in the
open-ended responses
they are all extremely interesting and
so i highly recommend going there
remember you can find this by going to
jaredaler.com or by clicking on the
link in the app that you're listening to
this on which should take you directly
to that
if you enjoyed this particular episode
please consider sharing it with somebody
else
especially on the day that it releases
otherwise it might not make sense
and if you don't understand why check
out the show notes stay tuned for
another unpacking scholarship episode
that will release on this upcoming
monday and the following link which will
have another interview
hope you're all staying safe and are
having a wonderful week

Article

Rollerstein, R. (2021). "I can't read, but I can code": Using puppets to teach C++ to pre-readers: A quasi-experimental critical phenomenological mixed methods case study. Applied Programming Reader's International Ledger, 1(21), 1-4.

Abstract

“In the United States there are hundreds of thousands of open computing jobs that are currently unfilled. Although the K-12 pipeline can prepare students for future careers in computer science, the approaches used in elementary classes in particular are often decontextualized from industry practices; for example, elementary students often use block-based programming languages, while industry professionals tend to use text-based languages. Given that the Fair Labor Standards Act sets the minimum age for employment in non-agricultural jobs at 14 years of age, this presents an opportunity for students ages 14 and older to fill current CS positions if they are adequately prepared in CS. To better prepare students for a jump start to such opportunities, this quasi-experimental critical phenomenological mixed methods case study investigated the use of puppets to teach C++ to pre-readers in pre-Kinder classes over the course of a semester. Statistically significant results (p < 0.01) from this study indicate that pre-K students who listened to a lecture pantomimed by a puppet were able to out perform their peers who listened to the same lecture by a university professor. The results from this study demonstrate a promising approach for accelerating the CS industry pipeline in K-12 contexts.”

Author Keywords

C++, industry pipeline, pre-reader, April Fools

My One Sentence Summary

This paper investigated the use of puppets to teach C++ to pre-readers in pre-K CS classes.

Some Of My Lingering Questions/Thoughts

How might the results have differed if the puppets were singing the lines of code in a musical rather than speaking the lines of code?
What's a similar approach we might be able to use with older students?