Computing Education Research with Mark Guzdial

In this interview with Mark Guzdial, we discuss the similarities and differences between constructionism and constructivism, think through when to situate and apply learning, discuss contextualized learning, creating multiple pathways for exploring computer science, problematizing subservient relationships with integrated curricula or courses, task-specific and domain-specific languages, using multiple learning theories through a multiperspectivalist approach, changes to public policy that Mark would make to help out CS educators and the field, and much more.

• Auto-generated transcript (click to expand)

  Welcome back to another episode of the

  CSK8 podcast my name is jared o'leary

  each week of the podcast alternates

  between an unpacking scholarship episode

  where i talk about latest scholarship or

  some seminal papers in relation to cs

  education

  and episodes where i interview a guest

  or multiple guests

  in this week's particular episode i'm

  interviewing mark gosdale

  and we discuss the similarities and

  differences between constructionism and

  constructivism we think through when to

  situate and apply learning

  we discuss contextualized learning we

  also discuss creating multiple pathways

  for exploring computer science

  and problematize subservient

  relationships with integrated curricula

  or courses

  we talk about marx task specific and

  domain specific languages

  and i discussed how i use multiple

  learning theories through what i

  described as a multi-perspective list

  approach

  we chat through changes to public policy

  that mark would make to help out cs

  educators in the field

  and so much more in the show notes i

  list a bunch

  of links to people and papers and

  resources that we mention

  in this particular interview so make

  sure you check them out by going to the

  app that you're listening to this on and

  clicking on the link or simply going to

  jared o'leary.com

  and clicking on the podcast tab now you

  notice there's a bunch more resources

  that are

  relevant to cs educators in the

  different tabs on the website

  including a link to boot up pd.org which

  is where i create a

  junior and scratch

  that elementary even middle school and

  even some high school students are using

  literally around the world which is

  pretty awesome it's all free to use so

  make sure you check it out if you

  haven't done so yet

  also if these topics interest you make

  sure to reach out to mark at the end

  mark shares his contact information

  or you can reach out to me if you'd also

  like to collaborate on a future research

  project

  or even to be a guest on this particular

  podcast

  but with all that being said we will now

  begin with an introduction by mark i'm a

  professor in computer science and

  engineering at the university of

  michigan

  and i have a courtesy appointment as a

  professor of information

  in the university of michigan school of

  information i think professor of

  information is such a cool title

  for 25 years i was a professor at the

  college of computing at georgia tech and

  that's probably where

  i did most of the work that people know

  me from i came here in 2018.

  i am a computing education researcher so

  i study how

  people come to understand computing and

  how we can make that process work better

  i'm probably best known for curriculum

  development i

  developed a way of teaching introductory

  computing called media computation where

  students manipulate pixels of a picture

  to create things like photoshop

  effects or snapchat filters manipulate

  frames of a video to implement digital

  video special effects manipulate samples

  of a sound to reverse sounds or

  scale them or echo them or splice them

  together

  i also did work in public policy for

  about 12

  years from 2006 to 2012

  we had a project an nsf broadening

  participation in computing alliance

  called

  georgia computes where we tried to

  improve computing education

  across all levels in the entire state of

  georgia barbara erickson and i

  with renee fall and rick adrian from

  massachusetts the commonwealth alliance

  for i.t education

  formed esap the expanding computing

  education pathways alliance

  where we worked with 16 states and

  puerto rico to improve their computing

  education policy

  and then i came to the realization that

  we're never going to reach cs for all

  via cs classes

  and so the work that i now do at the

  university of michigan

  is about trying to develop new kinds of

  programming tools

  to facilitate integrating computing into

  lots of other subjects

  so how did you get into cs education

  so sort of a fun accident when i was in

  high school in

  the early 1980s i was in one of the few

  high schools

  in the country probably at the time that

  had multiple computer science courses

  i took basic when i was 16 years old and

  i took fortran and cobalt

  those sound really ancient but i guess

  i'm pretty old now and

  i started teaching computing in february

  of 1980 i was 17 years old

  the local adult education program you

  know night school

  where we can pick up fun classes local

  community education reached out to

  one of my computer science teachers in

  my high school and said

  we'd really love for you to teach adults

  about these new personal computers that

  are coming along like apple twos can you

  teach them about it

  and she said no i don't but if you think

  it'd be kind of fun i've got this

  geeky kid in my class so i think he

  could do it so i got signed up

  i taught a class called bits bytes in

  basic

  and we talked about what microprocessors

  were

  and how memory worked and i taught a

  little bit of applesoft basic

  and then i went to wayne state

  university for

  undergrad here in detroit and i taught

  all throughout

  undergrad i continued to teach adult ed

  until i was teaching

  four or five nights a week some

  semesters i taught

  middle grades after school programs i

  even started teaching ged

  classes i had enough hours built up by

  my

  junior and senior year that i could

  qualify as vocational education teacher

  so i was teaching high school ged

  classes community college

  and then when i went off for my master's

  degree i taught

  logo on saturdays in a workshop setting

  to elementary school kids

  in 1982 i had a summer internship at

  bell labs

  which was just fabulous it literally

  changed my life i'd never

  worked with other students from places

  like purdue and

  mit and stanford i was like wow this is

  amazing

  and that's when i discovered i took a

  class

  on unix shell and for some reason they

  started talking about small talk

  and i looked it up and discovered alan

  kaye and dan

  ingles and adele goldberg and i read the

  paper personal dynamic media

  and that's when i decided i want to go

  to graduate school because this idea of

  building computing

  explicitly for the goal of facilitating

  learning

  that just changed things for me my first

  publication

  ever was at logo 84 the international

  logo conference

  i still have my acceptance letter from

  hal abelson at mit

  i had built an object-oriented logo in

  university of michigan bob cosma reached

  out to me and said

  we want to do a joint phd in education

  and computer science but the way it

  works at michigan is you have to send a

  few students through

  doing that as an individualized degree

  program before you can turn into a

  regular program

  and he asked me if i'd be willing to do

  it so

  i came here to michigan started my phd

  and then elliot soloway get

  came here it was amazing coincidence

  luck for me because there's probably not

  a better person for me to have been

  working with

  to do computing education research in

  the 1980s and early 90s

  and then i graduated in 93 and went to

  georgia tech

  so i had been teaching for eight years

  almost every night before i started

  graduate school

  so i had a surprising amount of

  experience for a new phd student

  so i was past the point of i find

  teaching cool

  and to the point where i said there's

  got to be i mean teaching is still cool

  i still love to teach

  but it wasn't just the activity of

  teaching i want to figure out how to do

  it better

  what does it mean to teach computer

  science well that was the research

  question that i got it started with

  so one of the things that i'm really

  interested in is like

  how people's understandings of teaching

  or a subject are kind of like

  shift and evolve over time so i'm

  curious like

  what's something when you first began

  teaching that you believed that you

  no longer believe so as you probably

  know

  i have been blogging for a very long

  time i started

  in 2009 and have just continued doing it

  probably way too much

  you can find both my blog posts where i

  say things that are

  i now know are wrong and the blog posts

  where i correct myself

  this has happened several times like in

  blog posts

  what i learned in the last 10 years what

  are the great accomplishments i've had

  in the 10 years

  i wrote the 10 years worth of things

  that i got wrong so there's a blog post

  of all the things that i got wrong

  during the 2010s one of them probably

  the biggest one

  is that when we started georgia computes

  and even went

  into doing esep the expanding computing

  education pathways alliance

  i was really convinced that access would

  drive participation

  that we would have broadening

  participation in computing

  once there was enough computer science

  classes

  that it was easy for diverse range of

  students to get

  access to computing education and i

  think we've now shown that's just

  completely wrong

  that in several states we're up to 40 to

  offer some computer science and in no

  state in the union

  are there more than 10 percent of the

  kids taking computer science

  high school age kids and it's much lower

  in texas

  it's less than three percent same as in

  california my former student dr miranda

  parker did a phd

  on what influences high schools in

  georgia to offer computer science or not

  so she knows pretty exactly that it's

  like 43 percent of georgia high schools

  offer computer science

  and only two and a half percent of the

  high school students take computer

  science

  and i've always thought you know since i

  was a young kid computing is so

  cool and i'm increasingly realizing

  that computing isn't so cool for lots of

  people

  for a lot of kids it's a negative thing

  one of things that i've observed is that

  if you offer an undergraduate degree in

  computing and don't call it computer

  science it will be much more diverse

  than the ones named computer science

  undergraduate programs in informatics

  and computational media and even

  computational forensics

  computational medical informatics turns

  out to be a really big one

  they're much more diverse than computer

  science

  i think that we have created some pretty

  negative stereotypes

  about computer science and teachers have

  some pretty

  low self-efficacy about computing

  so let's see another thing i am a fallen

  constructionist

  i used to believe in constructionism

  with the big n the way that seymour

  papper talked about it that

  learning happens best when you're making

  things

  and then i realize that may be true but

  you can't

  make things for all the things that we

  want kids to know

  we want kids to learn a lot of different

  things having them engage in

  construction

  on every single one of them they're not

  that interested

  we don't need that deep of an engagement

  and it's expensive to try to get

  that level of engagement in all subjects

  with all kids

  so i've been doing duolingo spanish

  for i think i'm nearly at 1500 days

  nice for a long time and don't ask me to

  write

  a letter or a poem or an essay in

  spanish i can't do it yet

  i can pick out words i can solve spanish

  puzzles i can start to read some things

  but i really can't i'm just not that

  engaged i don't get to speak spanish on

  a regular basis

  so that is too high of a bar i will

  likely disengage

  at that level yeah that resonates a lot

  i'm learning in japanese just like

  on my own using dlingo other platforms

  and whatnot it's very difficult and

  i'm curious with the constructionism and

  you had mentioned constructivism

  on your blog like what do you see as

  some of like the similarities and

  differences between

  those two different approaches because

  constructivism was

  like came before paper came up with

  constructionism it was built off of that

  so there's three different things and

  only two different words which makes it

  really confusing

  so the original constructivism is

  john piaget's theory about how we

  learned

  that all of learning is a conscious

  process

  of trying to make sense of the world

  now there's a lot of people disagree

  with piaget now i know that ken kadenger

  at cmu has been talking about how

  important the unconscious

  aspects of learning are and there's this

  whole

  movement around implicit learning for

  the way that we learn

  second language as well but i think

  constructivism

  is a fair theory that still explains how

  most

  learning in classrooms occurs that

  there's these processes called

  assimilation and accommodation

  and it's about trying to make sense of

  your world constructivism

  as a pedagogical approach says well

  if constructivism is how people learn

  and it's all about individuals making

  sense of their world

  we should give individuals the ability

  to construct their own curriculum

  and learn in what way makes sense for

  them and that's taking

  piaget a little bit too far piaget's

  theory explains how you learn from

  reading a book

  it explains how you learn from listening

  to a lecture those things do

  occur it's not the case that the only

  way learning happens

  is by individuals constructing their own

  opportunities to learn or constructing

  their own curriculum

  constructionism with the n is this

  argument that seymour papert made

  that learning happens and he uses this

  fabulous phrase especially felicitously

  he doesn't use a word like best it's not

  clear what especially felicitously

  means but that students learn especially

  felicitously

  when they are constructing a public

  artifact whether a sand castle on the

  beach or a theory of the universe

  so it's a particular approach that says

  you know when you're engaged in

  designing and constructing and it's

  something that other people are going to

  look at

  that's a terrific place to do learning

  and i think that's absolutely true

  but i don't think we can do that for all

  kids so then how do you

  situate or apply understandings within

  an educational setting because i agree

  with you

  like it wouldn't make sense to have

  everybody like let's say build a rocket

  like an actual rocket to go to the moon

  but you could engage in simulations and

  what not to actually construct something

  like that but then

  something more abstract you might only

  be able to engage in dialogue about

  like more heavy topics like genocide

  like you clearly wouldn't want people to

  apply something related to that but you

  want to engage in a discussion and learn

  from it

  sure of course not yeah i think that you

  get to ideas like

  backwards design and thinking about what

  is it that you're trying to

  achieve a lot of years ago cindy himelo

  silver

  which is a professor of learning

  sciences at indiana university

  when cindy was a postdoc at georgia tech

  she and i wrote a paper

  about glass box and black box

  scaffolding that

  sometimes you have scaffolding that

  you're providing to students especially

  when they're using

  a computer-based system where you want

  that scaffolding to fade

  and you want them to understand how the

  scaffolding works we call that glass box

  scaffolding i'm going to give you some

  supports but i'm going to show you

  exactly what i'm doing so that when i

  take it away

  you know what i was doing and i'm

  helping with it there's other times that

  i'm teaching you with black

  box scaffolding i don't want you to ever

  have to deal with this part of it

  because i want you to skip over that

  part so that you can go do the part

  that's really relevant to your learning

  right in some sense all programming

  languages are black box scaffolding

  i don't really want you to see the

  assembler code underneath i don't need

  you to understand the interpreter or

  compiler

  i just want you to be able to do the

  thing like using sonic pi for learning

  about music composition

  right i don't want you to know how sonic

  pi works it's black box scaffolding

  i think we have to figure out what it is

  that we're trying to help students learn

  building a rocket to the moon is such a

  fabulous activity

  for kids who are interested in stem but

  not all kids are interested in stem

  if i want to grow up to be a playwright

  you making me

  build a rocket to the moon is going to

  be this painful activity

  and what do i really want you to learn

  you know i think it's probably important

  for everybody to know

  how much effort it takes to get a rocket

  free of earth gravity

  and that's why space travel is so

  expensive

  and so i want citizens to know that so

  they realize okay if you really want

  space travel

  you're going to have to give big budgets

  to places like nasa because that's what

  it's going to take

  and i think that is important for

  everybody to know but everybody doesn't

  have to know how to design a rocket to

  achieve that kind of

  technological citizenry kind of

  understanding and literacy

  so i'm curious what your perspectives

  are you mentioned like the cs4

  movements and whatnot like especially in

  the younger grades where it is required

  like the districts that we work with

  that boot up like it's required that

  everybody across the district is taking

  the

  computer science class by the time we

  finish our implementation with them

  how do you recommend keeping kids

  engaged because

  not everyone's gonna enjoy the same

  thing like i love music and we'll

  code music all day long if i could but i

  would be less interested in doing

  something else in another area even if

  it's

  through the same medium through the same

  platform through the same language

  the thing that i create i just might be

  like i don't really care about that but

  i love to do this other thing

  i think this is where this idea of

  contextualized computing education comes

  in

  that when we developed media computation

  we explicitly developed it to solve a

  problem our problem was

  that georgia tech decided in 1999

  to require all incoming undergraduates

  to take a course in computer science

  and the definition of what that course

  had to achieve the learning objectives

  were pretty stiff they said that after

  the class you should be able to make

  algorithmic and data structure choices

  when writing a program

  which means that i've got to show you

  two different ways of coding the same

  thing and two different data structures

  for doing the same thing

  and give you the facility to understand

  the choices that you're making when

  choosing between those so

  this is already a pretty hefty intro

  computer science class to achieve that

  for the first four years of this

  requirement there was only one course

  that met the requirement the one that

  was originally created for

  cs majors and overall the course had

  about

  a about a 79 pass rate

  which for an intro course in just about

  anything is pretty good that's

  aggregated by major

  engineers and computer scientists and

  scientists

  were doing great at the class liberal

  arts

  architecture design and business

  management students

  were passing the course at about a fifty

  percent rate so

  every semester about half the students

  got through from those majors

  and students started talking about

  repeating the class by the third time

  almost everybody passes

  and this becomes a real problem then so

  we decided to create

  three different intro computer science

  classes one for computer scientists and

  scientists

  and that became a course in programming

  robots in python

  one for engineers and that became a

  programming course in matlab

  and then i got the liberal arts

  architecture design business management

  students

  i formed an advisory committee a faculty

  in those other disciplines because they

  should be the ones telling me what their

  students need to know

  about computing in their discipline and

  the big insight one of the students i

  was working with andrea forte who's now

  a professor

  at drexel she came up with this really

  pithy phrase that for these students

  computing is less about calculation and

  more about communication

  what they're going to use the computer

  the most for is digital media they're

  going to produce videos and

  presentations and

  graphics and they're gonna care about

  well how does photoshop

  work anyway and what does it mean when i

  drag a line

  in a powerpoint and why is that

  different than making a line in

  photoshop

  and how does digital sound editing work

  anyway and how do you make people

  disappear in a video those are all the

  things that we built the class around

  and so we were explicitly building on

  what makes sense

  for those students for their values

  that's still part of the insight of what

  i'm trying to do today

  with task-specific programming languages

  i'm trying to say

  i want to make programming so easy that

  you can learn the language and be useful

  in it

  in less than 10 minutes and if it's in

  less than 10 minutes

  it's got to be tuned to particular tasks

  not just a whole domain to a particular

  task

  and if it's tuned to particular task i

  can change the user interface

  in hci we know something about how to

  make programming work well for

  particular tasks

  and if it takes only 10 minutes to learn

  use it for one hour lesson

  and then you throw it away the return on

  investment is already there

  so it isn't going to be a big language

  it's not likely going to be turing

  complete

  but now i can think about multiple

  languages and if you don't like this

  language you know if you're

  the playwright who's being forced to do

  something with the simulation of the

  rocket ship

  that's okay it's only one class period

  you'll do something different the next

  class period

  so we can think about programming in

  lots of different places in lots of

  different

  kinds of courses for lots of different

  kinds of tasks so instead of a big

  language like scratch or snap that you

  can use for a lot of things

  how about little languages that some

  totaled

  you know maybe if you see a half dozen

  of these little languages

  before you see your first computer

  science class will that be

  enough that it will help you i'm curious

  i've got

  like at least a dozen or so articles

  that i can point to where in the

  abstract it specifically states like the

  purpose of doing these like

  cross-curricular connections in higher

  education was for

  increasing enrollment numbers in

  computer science and to me that puts it

  in like the arts and other subject areas

  in a subservient relationship

  the way that you described this is not

  that it is very symbiotic in that it is

  complementing

  both or all of the subject areas that

  are in there

  i'm curious like how do you design for

  plan

  for that kind of an approach as opposed

  to the

  subservient relationship oh i love this

  question because

  to me it's the heart of what i'm doing

  now i do participatory design with

  teachers

  so for example i have a big project with

  tami shriner who is a social studies

  education researcher at grand valley

  state

  she's in the history department there

  and as she puts it to me

  most people who become a history teacher

  don't choose that because they love

  numbers data and computers but as her

  research shows

  most state standards now require social

  studies teachers to teach about data

  literacy

  and explicitly to teach how to read

  interpret

  understand critique and argue with data

  visualizations

  so suddenly these history teachers are

  being pushed into the position

  of having to have kids make graphs

  charts to be able to read

  maps and timelines how do they do that

  they have a need computing can really

  serve that need

  i work with teachers to figure out what

  meets their needs

  i think that we in computer science do

  too little particularly those of us

  looking at

  integrating do too little to pay

  attention to the teachers

  we do a lot of things with well the kids

  really like this the kids are enjoying

  this activity

  and that's great but you don't get into

  the classroom

  unless the teacher buys in the teachers

  the gateway to the classroom

  and while we can reach a lot of kids via

  informal education

  in the united states we have mandatory

  schooling everybody

  is in school and so if you can get

  computing that a teacher says yes this

  actually helps me teach something in

  history

  that i know i'm supposed to teach but

  i'm a little bit afraid of it but this

  tool helps me

  that's a huge win that's what we're

  trying to do

  so i work closely with teachers to make

  sure that i

  am meeting their needs so we do

  participatory design activities where i

  put in front of teachers several

  different tools

  and have them compare each of them and

  say i like this part of this one

  i hate this part of this one i tell my

  students as we're building

  the prototype so when we do this with a

  group of social studies teachers

  we intermix our tools with other

  people's tools and we don't tell them

  which is which

  so that we can get a fair understanding

  about what the value is

  and i tell my students we are building

  things in order for teachers to say

  oh i see what you're doing here yeah

  that really sucks let me tell you what

  would make it good

  that's what we really live for right

  right because that's when we know that

  we're getting to something that could be

  useful in a classroom

  so we've been making data visualization

  tools for

  graphs and charts we've got another one

  for timelines that we're building

  and we're creating another one that

  helps middle school students in order to

  be able to

  identify the elements of a graph be able

  to say oh that's what the

  legend is telling me that's what the

  x-axis labels are telling me things like

  that i want computing to be in service

  computing is changing fields all over

  the world from

  computational science and engineering to

  computational journalism

  if i can't help a history teacher figure

  out how to use computing well

  then i'm not doing a good job with the

  computing at what point does it go too

  far though

  where it puts like computer science into

  like that subservient relationship where

  it's

  not necessarily helping somebody

  understand computer science or does that

  matter

  i think that's a really great question

  that i think we know too little about

  so because of these task specific

  languages we're literally building

  languages

  that teachers are able to learn and use

  in less than 10 minutes

  which does create this opportunity to

  ask well what if you saw a whole bunch

  of them

  and they had different notional machines

  they thought about programming in

  different ways

  does that help you in getting a broader

  notion about what computing

  is i hope so but i need to build a bunch

  of these and have these in different

  classes to be able to ask this kind of a

  question

  i mean it's a hard question to ask i

  have this broad vision

  i also think that we overestimate

  what people are learning or can learn

  about computing

  if you consider this what i was telling

  you about esep that there is no state in

  the union

  there are some northeastern states where

  they're up to nine percent of their high

  school students

  are taking computer science but in no

  state is it over 10 percent

  that means that we have not introduced

  computing to about 90 percent

  of the high school students in the

  united states we don't know what the

  challenges are yet

  we know what the challenges are with the

  students who come into our classes

  but they're a pretty biased

  self-selected group and i think that

  we're going to find that there are a

  whole bunch of really hard

  ideas that we haven't yet identified as

  being hard

  here's one that we're starting to

  identify our teachers the history

  teachers who come into our workshops

  for the most part have never seen html

  the whole idea

  of here is one representation html or

  code

  that generates this other representation

  a web page or an execution or a

  visualization

  they've never seen that before the idea

  of a computer as a device that

  transforms representations

  is a novel concept i think that's the

  sort of thing that we have to think

  about we actually have to teach that

  that's a hard idea but that comes before

  anything that we could teach

  about coding yeah i think it also

  requires

  a lot of shifts both in pedagogical

  approaches but also

  in the way things are designed so i

  co-authored this paper that was

  talking about like the neoliberal

  culture in music technology and how

  we are creating these artifacts that are

  not meant to be

  modified in any way and that is forcing

  certain kinds of music engagement and

  limiting others or preventing others and

  so what we argue in that paper is just

  basically

  if we learn from like i don't know if

  you're familiar with like chiptunes and

  [ __ ] musicians

  and like the whole mod culture scene

  both with the hardware and software

  modifications that people do around

  video games if we took that kind of

  way of being an approach to technology

  and applied it to

  other things like a physical thing or

  even software

  then we could start thinking of what are

  the affordances constraints of this

  hardware

  or software and what can we do to

  actually get rid of some of those

  constraints and make it do something new

  that we couldn't previously do and

  thinking beyond

  what is and rather thinking about what

  could be

  i think that's really cool i strongly

  agree with the argument that you're

  making

  something that i've complained about in

  my blog

  is i would like to move media

  computation to other platforms

  but being able to access individual

  samples

  of a sound turns out to be something

  which is not well supported

  cross-platform

  on very many languages i can do it in

  java

  because i can do it in java i can do it

  in jython

  which is what i taught at georgia tech

  for a lot of years it's python

  implemented in java so i can use my java

  libraries

  i can do it in squeak i can do it in

  snap and i can do it in javascript

  but for example i can't do it in c

  python yet aim doesn't let me do

  everything that i'd

  want to do with sound samples and work

  exactly the same on all platforms

  i find that shocking i mean samples of a

  sound

  just give me a sound buffer any sound

  buffer and i can do what i need to do

  with it

  right and i can't get that in a lot of

  different languages and that's really

  surprising to me so yes i agree with

  that notion

  the idea of being able to hack the

  hardware and to make it do new things

  i strongly agree with i want students to

  understand the technology well

  enough that they can build things that i

  wouldn't have thought of

  and we already see that happens the

  things that we're building for math

  teachers

  i'm really blown away they say you know

  i have a particular way that i designed

  it i have it do this

  and they start doing this other thing

  it's like i didn't know it would do that

  it does well that's cool

  right i love that idea i really come to

  this task of building task specific

  programming languages

  as an hci designer i think that it's

  really cool to be able to you know stick

  wires into the video game

  and change the way the circuitry works

  but i don't know how to make that

  accessible for a teacher with low

  self-efficacy about computing

  so i am trying to do user-centered and

  even learner-centered design

  of technology and i want to do that in

  such a way that the technology is

  flexible

  but i also want to make sure that i do

  that with an understanding of not

  everybody wants to geek out

  but i do want to reach cs for all i want

  things to be accessible yeah that's a

  good point i know

  going back to like the mod culture there

  are some like video game

  developers that will actually release

  like tutorials of how to modify games

  like so you want to change the sound in

  this and make it so that it's all human

  sounds instead of the sounds that we

  created cool here's like a little

  tutorial on how to do that

  so that can definitely help with the

  people who have like the low

  self-efficacy and are unable to

  like create something that they're

  unable to do or think through it rather

  i'm curious going back to like the

  constructivism constructionism what are

  some things that people misunderstand

  about either

  approach the big misunderstanding about

  constructivism is that jean piaget

  explicitly eschewed implications for

  education

  he saw himself as an epistemologist he

  saw himself

  at most maybe a developmental

  psychologist he cared about how ideas

  formed in children's minds and piaget

  says that we ought to have kids work

  with building blocks

  it's too far that's not what piaget said

  i think

  that this radical constructionist

  approach which says if i

  tell you something then i have stolen

  from you the opportunity to figure it

  out from yourself

  and i'm not a radical constructivist i

  don't buy

  that notion rather i tend to draw on

  cognitive science

  things like worked examples that telling

  people things tends to increase student

  self-efficacy they feel oh yeah i can

  get this then

  now there are things like expertise

  reversal effects

  that a lot of scaffolding a lot of

  guidance

  starts to become a hindrance as people

  develop expertise

  but for novices i think that we too soon

  try to fade our scaffolding that we try

  to

  remove the supports i sometimes get into

  fights with computer science teachers

  who say

  well i think that the unit tests should

  just give you a green or red

  you either got it or you didn't get it

  and i point out well the unit tests

  actually have a lot of error messages

  and feedback you could give to the

  students

  yeah but if we give them that they won't

  try to figure it out for themselves

  and i think that's wrong so i am not a

  radical constructivist i tend to believe

  in providing scaffolding and providing

  work examples and explaining things to

  people

  and my read of the cognitive psychology

  suggests that that's a better

  way of teaching than asking students to

  figure it all out for themselves

  my first advisor for my phd was pat

  baggett who's an experimental cognitive

  psychologist

  pat had this saying not every kid is a

  newton isaac newton looked at the world

  and saw it in radically different ways

  than

  all the people that came before him you

  can't expect kids to just

  look at light and say oh well i think

  this is the way light travels

  it takes a lot of insight to recognize

  that there's a difference between

  dynamics and kinematics you can study

  velocity and acceleration without

  considering force and you can consider

  force

  separate from thinking about motion

  those are really deep ideas and we're

  better off

  teaching kids the big principles the

  organizing big ideas

  rather than expect them to figure it out

  for themselves if i were to describe my

  own approach i'd say that i'm a

  multi-perspectivalist

  in that i'm taking many different

  approaches or perspectives and trying to

  apply it to fit the situation or the

  individual that i'm working with in

  particular

  so like when i've worked with

  undergraduate students in particular and

  even some of the grad students that i

  taught they

  often view this as like this false

  binary of

  well i have to either go 100 on

  constructivism or i'm doing it wrong

  or 100 on constructionism and it's like

  well no i mean like

  there are moments where it makes sense

  like if you

  want to give somebody like a

  high-powered electrical tool you

  probably don't want them to figure out

  whether or not it'll cut them or hurt

  them or maim them

  like you probably want to go through

  some direct construction in the

  beginning

  that might make more sense than

  constructionist or constructivism

  practices that are typically talked

  about like yes understand this theory

  but also understand as limitations and

  understand where other theories and ways

  of learning

  might be more beneficial for that

  particular situation

  so i'm curious for your own perspective

  like either in your research or your own

  pedagogical practices like are there

  other theories or philosophies

  or approaches that have informed yours

  even if it's just like something that

  you

  have felt through your own experiences

  not necessarily somebody that you can

  cite

  i draw a lot on situated learning jean

  lave and etienne wenger yep

  i think when i first started doing the

  media computation is when i really

  started realizing

  there's this whole issue of motivation

  and sociocognitive issues and learning

  sociocultural issues and learning that i

  really wasn't taking into account

  when i came at it entirely from a

  cognitive or educational psychology

  perspective

  so the idea that all of learning

  is a development of an identity that

  when students

  are learning computer science they

  might be learning in order to become a

  computer scientist

  or maybe they're learning in order to

  become a computational journalist or

  computational engineer or

  computational artist or computational

  musician that

  understanding the community practice to

  which they want to

  join is critical to understand what's

  going to motivate them

  a lot of the work that we do in media

  computation but also in work

  like katie cunningham's new purpose

  first programming

  is drawing from expectancy value theory

  if

  you reject something because it's

  counter to your identity

  then you're simply not going to learn it

  and so we need to think about how do we

  present things that have a connection to

  the identity that you're developing

  and then expectancy value theory also

  talks about

  utility is this fun for you is it

  something that you want to do

  and cost how expensive is it so

  by reducing the complexity of the

  programming language

  of improving the scaffolding that we

  provide

  we can reduce cognitive load we reduce

  cost and if we also make it more fun

  if we also connect it more to their

  identity we increase benefit

  so situated learning and expectancy

  value theory are two of the

  theories that i draw on a lot and how i

  think about my research

  i just had the opportunity this last

  semester to teach my first engineering

  education research class

  which was great fun because the course

  was on theoretical and conceptual

  frameworks of engineering education

  research

  and we covered a whole bunch of

  theoretical frameworks that i'd never

  used before

  and they were really pretty amazing so

  i'm now a big fan of variation theory

  which says i can teach you x there's a

  whole lot about x that you're really not

  going to understand until i show you x

  prime

  too and you realize there's differences

  between x and x prime

  and i really like that a lot in

  understanding

  how i have to give students more than

  one way of viewing the world if i really

  want them to understand

  the nuance of a particular approach and

  then i also had my first introduction to

  critical feminist and critical race

  theory

  which i'd never really drawn on before

  i just did my first blog post where i

  tried to use critical feminist theory

  because these are really important

  perspectives if i want to draw on a

  diverse student body

  so i'm learning a lot about all of these

  yeah i like that

  i too am continuing to learn i'm curious

  from the situated

  learning have you read james paul g yeah

  i just read

  i've just did my first reading his piece

  on identity and the four different types

  of identities

  that was pretty important in my class

  yeah he was a professor of mine so i

  took his discourse analysis course which

  ended up

  like i used corpus assisted discourse

  analysis for my dissertation

  and so like i took his class on

  discourse analysis and i've read pretty

  much all of his books

  he's like very heavily influenced my own

  thinking in terms of like the situated

  understandings and whatnot

  so a lot of what you were saying was

  like wow this sounds a lot like g so

  that makes sense that you've read him

  well only a little bit i want to dive

  more into it i haven't read much

  of g on discord's analysis i know it

  exists because i see it referenced when

  i'm reading the stuff on identity

  but more things that i have to learn

  about yet yeah well he built his

  understandings of like affinity spaces

  and situated learning and whatnot

  off of laven wenger so like that was

  coming from there so

  you're starting with like the roots and

  whatnot of a lot of his discussions but

  so you had mentioned that you've written

  a lot of blog posts like one of them

  it was a while ago you had crossover

  like a thousand blog posts at that point

  like

  it was like blog post 999. i'm curious

  what

  has surprised you over all of those blog

  posts

  that you've written about i can never

  predict

  when a blog post is going to take off

  i'll put

  so much effort to this one block i mean

  sometimes i will take weeks

  to write a particular blog post i'll be

  developing the ideas i'll get

  feedback from other people and then i'll

  put it out there and it just goes

  you know people will read it and then

  there'll be no discussion

  and then other times i'll put out a blog

  post they're just oh okay this is what

  i'm thinking about right now and i'll

  get all this twitter responses and all

  kinds of comments and

  i'll annoy somebody so that's sort of

  been

  the biggest surprise what are the social

  trends and sometimes you hit a blog post

  that are touching on

  huge social trends and then other times

  because

  google you know will index my blogs

  i'll find an old blog post that suddenly

  explodes

  and i don't really know why that's

  fascinating

  my two most read blog posts i think

  still are

  the one i wrote on cognitivism versus

  cognitivism versus constructionism

  and one on disaggregating asian american

  attainment

  we tend to talk about asian americans as

  doing very well

  in terms of traditional academic success

  but it turns out that if you

  disaggregate

  the different asian countries you get

  very different

  success rates it makes sense there's

  different cultures there's different

  socioeconomic status

  and it's totally obvious in hindsight

  and this was just rick

  adrian had shared with me a report and i

  just shared this graph

  and then one day it's like your blog

  post has just had 10 000 hits today like

  what

  because i've blogged for a long time and

  tried to blog on the things that i don't

  see elsewhere

  i don't blog as much anymore because now

  there's a whole bunch of stuff on

  computing education

  csta and see us for all and there's a

  lot of folks that are producing material

  i can stay in my niche just computing

  education research i don't have to draw

  on all these different places

  but i'm still i'm trying to post the

  things that i'm not seeing elsewhere

  that i think are important for people to

  see for people to think about

  recently i've been blogging on the

  difference between

  computing education and engineering

  education because

  in europe there are several centers for

  computing and cs education research and

  in the united states

  most computing education research that

  if there's an academic unit formed

  around it

  it's about engineering education

  research or computing and engineering

  education research the new

  succeed center was just set up at

  florida international university

  which is the universal computing

  construction

  and engineering education i forget what

  the d

  stands for but that's where the succeed

  comes in that's really interesting

  buffalo has a engineering education

  research program with several computing

  education researchers there

  so i'm struck by the distinctions

  between computing and engineering

  education

  and the fact that europe tends to see

  them as being more distinct in the us we

  tend to clump them together

  engineering education doesn't do a lot

  with k-12

  in fact there's a national academy

  report on k-12 standards for engineering

  education

  and if you read the report you find that

  it doesn't have standards in it

  the report said we decided not to and it

  gives their reasons why

  much of engineering education and it's

  going to sound like just

  a totally obvious statement but it's

  been a revelation for me

  engineering education is about producing

  engineers computing education

  is not necessarily about producing

  computer scientists

  because there are so many other

  disciplines that need to know about

  computing

  to further their goals and all of k-12

  computing education

  can't be just about being a silicon

  valley jobs program

  it can't be we're teaching everybody in

  k-12 about computing in order for them

  to become programmers

  computing education tends to be broader

  and serving different diverse identities

  that it's not just about becoming an

  engineer

  yeah so one of the reasons why one of

  the many reasons why i came up

  with the idea of starting this podcast

  and alternating between like the

  interviews and then

  talking about scholarship is i felt like

  cs education in k12 settings in

  particular weren't talking about some of

  the topics that i really wish they were

  discussing like

  i mentioned before we started recording

  like pedagogy the press like that should

  be something that people understand and

  know

  and discuss and a problem that i've seen

  in academic publishing

  is it takes forever like i literally

  just received a couple weeks ago

  a handbook that i wrote a chapter for

  and my first draft that i submitted was

  in 2017

  and i just received this in 2021 so it

  takes that long sometimes for these

  publications to come through

  so you have an opportunity to reach a

  large number of individuals just by

  posting something on your blog and i'm

  curious through that

  you're able to kind of guide some of the

  discussions but what do you wish more

  people in the field were talking about

  that you have tried to initiate

  conversations on

  wow that's great a big one is teachers

  as i mentioned

  i'm doing all participatory design work

  now

  and there's so little work on how do you

  design

  for teachers there's lots of work on how

  to design

  for children but and that's important

  work it's important to be able to figure

  out how to design for elementary school

  kids versus middle school kids versus

  high school kids

  i saw a great talk by paul goldenberg

  last summer

  that made me realize how hard it is for

  a third grader

  to click and drag with the trackpad the

  physical motion of clicking down here

  and holding your finger down while you

  drag it somewhere and release it that's

  kind of hard for them and it never

  occurred to me

  designing in those ways is really

  important but

  in general kids find acceptable a wider

  variety of technologies and interfaces

  than teachers do kids like lots of

  things that don't help them achieve

  particular educational standards

  teachers need to achieve educational

  standards that's literally the job

  so designing for teachers is a much

  harder task

  i worry that sometimes technology

  developers and curriculum developers

  sort of cheat by playing directly to the

  kids ah

  kids will like this well yeah but kids

  don't necessarily know what's good for

  them

  getting teachers to like it means you've

  got to argue with an adult

  another adult who is at your same level

  and

  understands things that you don't and so

  i think it's really important for us to

  figure out how to talk to teachers

  i'm also really interested in the

  growing body of literature that says

  cs faculty undergraduate faculty

  are more resistant to change than other

  stem teachers

  really huh yeah so

  there's this wonderful paper by charles

  henderson this big survey of like 2

  get the numbers wrong but it's something

  like 70

  of them knew two or more research-based

  methods and 50 to 60 of them had tried

  one of them in their classroom similar

  surveys of cs teachers find the numbers

  are more like 12

  wow cs undergraduate faculty

  i mean they're dealing with huge numbers

  a lot of universities have just

  overwhelming enrollment these days

  there's not

  a culture of we ought to get better at

  our teaching

  yet stem education chemistry biology

  physics they've all been doing it long

  enough that there are

  really well developed discipline based

  education research communities dbrs

  computer science is really new ase the

  american society for engineering

  education

  is like 120 627 years old something like

  that

  national council teachers of mathematics

  was founded in 1920.

  the american association of physics

  teachers was founded in 1950

  and the computer science teachers

  association was founded in 2004.

  we just know so little about cs teaching

  and how to influence cs teaching and how

  to disseminate

  good practices out to computer science

  teachers

  there's a lot of assumptions that we

  make

  about teaching computer science that are

  based on the fact

  that so much of programming in computer

  science has grown

  out of industrial practice so our

  languages weren't designed to be easy to

  learn they were designed to serve the

  needs of software engineers that's why

  python and java and c plus

  these were all why they were established

  and somewhere along the line

  people made the argument that the first

  language didn't matter

  the idea was any language you're just

  going to learn the concepts

  and i think all the data that we have

  says that's wrong and i'm kind of

  curious as to where we ever got that

  idea in the first place my hypothesis

  is because the early programmers were

  all really good at math

  and so they transferred their knowledge

  of math into different languages

  but if you learn a language for music

  for example and now i'm going to teach

  you web scraping

  it's not at all obvious why you think

  there would be any transfer from sonic

  pie

  to working with beautiful soup in python

  i think the first language matters a lot

  yeah i agree we mentioned before the

  recording the conversation like talking

  about how

  i was unsure how kids would do going

  from syntax like to syntax heavy

  whereas the other way around they might

  feel liberated finally i don't have to

  worry about semicolons curly braces but

  when they office then have to add that

  in it's like well why do i need to add

  in all that extra junk

  there's this really interesting body of

  research which

  when i tell it to cs teachers they're

  often very skeptical but it's actually

  been replicated a couple times

  if you're going to teach both iteration

  and recursion

  you should teach iteration first because

  recursion is actually an easier concept

  there's a bunch of evidence that says if

  you teach recursion first

  students will just want to do recursion

  all the time and then when you try to

  teach them a for loop in javascript

  that's a pretty complicated thing

  they're like why do i have to learn all

  that why can't i just keep doing

  recursion

  and so it turns out that if you do

  iteration recursion recursion

  is hard then because well it doesn't

  look like iteration and you don't

  specify all the things the way that you

  did an iteration

  and so there's this negative transfer

  from iteration to recursion

  but if you have to do both iteration

  before recursion turns out to be

  a better sequence to do yeah that makes

  sense

  and then what you're talking about just

  before that like talking about the the

  different languages and which one to

  pick it reminds me of the interview that

  i did with andreas stefik and

  his investigation of basically like a

  normal programming language

  versus a placebo language and how like

  some of them underperformed against the

  placebo and i was like whoa

  that's not good language design yeah

  pearl is worse than random oh and quorum

  is amazing

  your mention of computer science being a

  relatively new field it comes with like

  some benefits and then some constraints

  to it

  like i was mentioning with music

  education a lot of it's anachronistic

  we're building off of ideas from low

  mason

  who introduced music education in the

  schools in the 1800s

  and like yeah that means we have had a

  lot of trial and error but it also means

  we're kind of like set in stone in a lot

  of ways

  and it takes a lot of effort to like get

  more up-to-date with

  modern music-making practices and

  whatnot but with computer science it's

  like the other way where it's like well

  we don't really know what works so we're

  just going to try anything and

  everything

  yeah absolutely my teaching

  changed dramatically when

  i was introduced to peer instruction and

  i was actually blogging

  when beth simon convinced me to finally

  try it in my class

  and i remember the first time that i put

  up clicker questions

  using eric mazur's peer instruction

  technique i talked about it in my blog

  it's like

  my students don't know this i can't

  believe my students don't know this

  and now i do peer instruction all the

  time first of all because

  i deeply believe in active learning and

  that the idea of active learning

  it's constructivist but it's also so

  much about

  motivation just get everybody to stop

  sitting there and falling asleep

  listening to me and make them do

  something

  that that's just about shifting helping

  them to re-engage

  getting them to talk to somebody else

  making sure that all of their ideas get

  tested

  that's what it's about but i also do

  peer instruction all the time to inform

  my teaching

  i always put up questions that i think

  everybody's going to get

  and they don't it's like holy cow i'm

  not getting this across yet

  so it's about computing there's been

  these wonderful studies of peer

  instruction with paper and pencil

  where people have to hand in their votes

  it does not work computing

  is actually critical to making things

  like peer instruction work

  but the insight isn't about computing

  the insight is about well this is how

  teaching and learning really work

  and this is about how hard it is to

  learn some of these concepts

  so at the start of a conversation you

  had mentioned that you'd spent some time

  working with policy in education and i'm

  curious

  if you were to be able to like wave a

  magic wand and change some kind of a

  policy

  in education to have an impact what

  would you change and why

  i would build computing learning

  outcomes

  into the standards for math science

  social science art and music

  i think that separate computer science

  standards

  make it too easy to ignore or you create

  computer science classes that nobody

  take

  i think by integrating it everywhere

  there's so many things that happen once

  you do that once you wave that magic

  wand

  indiana did this they built their

  computer science outcomes

  into their science standards

  massachusetts did this they built

  computer science standards into their

  digital literacy standards

  suddenly in massachusetts librarians

  care about computer science in indiana

  suddenly all science classes teach

  something about computer science

  it creates a reason for teaching

  pre-service teachers about computer

  science

  there's a separate non-public policy

  magic wand

  that i would love to be able to waive

  and that is to require

  everybody at all universities to take a

  course in computer science make it a

  general education requirement

  like the phys ed requirement which just

  about every state has

  at the undergraduate level i think if we

  did this

  everybody includes all the pre-service

  teachers

  and if all pre-service teachers had a

  course in computer science

  aimed at them it becomes so much easier

  to do integration

  across the board i tend to think about

  computing education as being a form of

  literacy education

  that it's really about giving people a

  tool for them to express themselves to

  understand ideas

  in whatever it is that they're going to

  be doing in their lives and in their

  career

  the way you get to literacy is not just

  by teaching it in schools

  the way that we got textual literacy or

  numeric

  literacy numeracy is by making it

  pervasive in the culture

  and then kids learn it because well

  that's what everybody's doing

  so the only way you're going to get it

  in the culture

  is to make sure that everybody does it

  if you build it into

  university education then all

  professionals

  have some computing they won't all use

  it in their lives in their career

  but many more will use it than use it

  now

  and that's the best thing we could do

  for k through 12 computing education

  so one magic wand is change universities

  wow is that hard let's

  focus on public policy if we could

  integrate computer science into all

  these other standards

  there's a reason for doing pre-service

  computer science education

  there's a way of putting computing in

  front of

  everybody i mean that's the part that

  i'm so excited about with the history

  stuff

  three four percent of kids take a high

  school computer science class

  everybody takes history the difference

  in diversity between

  ap us history and apcs principles is

  mind-blowing apcs principles is like

  u.s history is 56

  female there are six times as many black

  students

  will take ap us history as take apcs

  principles

  something like 14 times more hispanic

  students

  take us history than cs principles if

  you can put

  any computing into the history classes

  you've made

  such an advance on giving more students

  the opportunity to say

  hey this is kind of cool i think i'd

  like to take more of this

  or computing programming is not scary

  look i did it before it's okay

  that's the kind of changes in

  self-efficacy that i'd like to get to

  and we only get there if we put

  computing into everything yeah that's a

  brilliant solution that it reminds me a

  lot of what they did with the technology

  standards

  so like back when i was going through my

  k12 tenure like technology was his own

  separate class its own separate thing

  you didn't do it in your normal classes

  but now they've integrated it so that

  like you're mentioning the social

  studies standards will have like

  technology components and

  talking about that and using technology

  so it makes it so that you're

  learning how to apply and use the

  technologies

  like laptops and whatnot inside of a

  situation which you need it for a

  specific subject area rather than

  standalone and separate from

  everything else so that totally makes

  sense for you to do that with computer

  science

  and if we were to do this we'd have to

  be more flexible about our definition

  of computer science i'm a big fan of the

  everyday computing work in diana

  franklin's lab

  at the university of chicago and katie

  rich was lead author on several papers

  they did

  about learning trajectories this idea

  that

  there's a whole bunch of ideas you have

  to know to be able to do computing well

  and some of the ideas at the left most

  edge the start of these trajectories

  we're not explicitly teaching to many

  kids like the idea that

  programs are deterministic if you run

  them and they accept no input nothing

  from the outside world

  they will run exactly the same every

  time i got lots of data to show you

  students don't always believe this they

  run the program multiple times without

  changes thinking well

  maybe something different will happen

  this time

  and unless you believe that programs are

  deterministic you can't debug

  right it's a critical belief in order to

  be able to figure out your programs

  and this idea we talked earlier about

  representations the computers transform

  representations those are not

  part of university definitions of

  computer science

  they're not part of the k-12 cs

  standards but they're absolutely

  critical ideas

  which we could address in just about any

  subject

  but speaking of representations i'm

  curious what your thoughts are

  recommendations for improving equity and

  inclusion

  in cs education that's a really big one

  how do we

  get computer science to be more diverse

  and

  it's one that i've cared about for a lot

  of years part of doing media computation

  was by making computing

  accessible in liberal arts subjects

  where students

  would succeed at it it was automatically

  getting a more diverse

  audience to have access to computing

  education

  and it brought more diversity into

  computing

  soon after we developed the media

  computation course

  and these aren't directly linked things

  georgia tech decided to create

  a joint undergraduate degree between

  liberal arts and computer science

  it was called computational media it

  came about because

  as all new majors do a bunch of

  researchers

  in that space said hey let's do this

  this is fun i

  think the course that i created enabled

  that because more liberal arts students

  were succeeding at computer science it

  was possible to start thinking about

  doing a joint degree

  computational media became 40

  female it was far more gender diverse

  than our cs major at georgia tech i

  think that that gets enabled when you

  start thinking about

  making computing fit into a lot of

  different disciplines to a lot of

  different needs

  so i think that by making computing

  integrate into lots of other subjects we

  are going to be about expanding our

  definition

  of what is computing who should be doing

  computing

  what they're going to do with computing

  and i think that opens the door

  for more diverse participation in

  computing

  i'm cautious i write about this in my

  blog post where i started using critical

  feminist theory

  i'm cautious of the goal that says we

  need to get

  more black engineers into google or more

  women engineers into amazon

  because i feel that that's this

  perspective of

  well if we can only get the black

  students to act like the white students

  if we can only get the women to take on

  the same jobs as the men

  it's not terrible but it's also

  not as powerful as saying well what

  would a female computer science

  look like and how would we create a

  computer science that speaks to

  the values in communities of people from

  marginalized populations

  so i'm really interested in thinking

  about computing becoming

  more things having a pluralistic

  computer science and a pluralistic

  computing education

  lots of languages lots of perspectives a

  pet peeve of mine

  is web pages and tweets and headlines

  x language is dead here are all the

  languages that have now

  lost why didn't these languages succeed

  i mean

  we're judging success by what gets

  picked up by the mainstream

  of developers which are mostly white

  nation males

  i would rather say these languages

  didn't die they're just used by

  different populations they're being used

  for different purposes

  from a computer science perspective i

  actually just saw one of these pieces i

  mean they're pet peeves but i click on

  them anyway

  they're making the argument python and r

  are dead

  what does that mean that r is dead or

  python is dead

  stations really like these languages

  they're used a lot and that's a positive

  thing

  yeah i like the way that you framed the

  like challenging some of the assumptions

  in just increasing numbers based on

  demographic information like really

  likes to talk about how

  you need to make sure that when you're

  trying to bring up

  that you start from within and through

  conversation through dialogue

  rather than this like ontological or

  epistemological colonization where

  you're saying your way of knowing and

  understanding

  needs to conform to my ways of knowing

  and being an understanding

  and so like having that conversation

  that challenges well what does it mean

  to be a computer scientist i really like

  the way that you frame that with it

  do you know ron iglush i don't think so

  he does

  culturally situated design tools he's an

  ethno

  computationalist and ethio mathematician

  and so he looks at things like he talks

  about

  heritage algorithms the algorithms that

  certain aboriginal people may have used

  in how they lay out their villages

  or the algorithms that are used in how

  he talks about

  hand printed cloth in various

  populations he works with

  a variety of different groups neat paws

  there's this notion in nsf about the

  future

  of work what do we do when ai and

  technology puts lots of people out of

  work

  ron thinks about it exactly the opposite

  direction he says

  you know there are all of these

  artisanal economies

  people are always going to value things

  that are made by hand

  how could we use ai and robotics and

  technology

  to support artisans artisan economies i

  mean artisans are happy people

  people like doing things with their

  hands they like to make individual

  things

  how do we support their economy and how

  do we use technology

  to make what they do more profitable so

  that they're more successful

  i'm not necessarily turning them into

  computer scientists though we want to

  make sure they know about their

  technology so they can adapt it to new

  purposes

  like the modders that we were talking

  about earlier but it's about making the

  computing serve their needs as opposed

  to saying

  now let me train you all to become

  amazon engineers

  that's not the goal the goal is how do

  we help artisans to continue doing what

  they're doing because it's a good thing

  that they're doing

  it's good for the economy it's good for

  happiness but we have to think about

  the technology not taking away their

  jobs i'm curious

  how do you try and stave off

  the burnout that can come with your

  output so you're able to write

  a lot both from a research side of

  things and then from like your blog

  you're teaching classes you are doing

  research like there's a ton of things

  that you're doing like you did the

  keynote at 60 back when it was in person

  before it shut down last year like

  how do you prevent that burnout that can

  come with this

  high demand in a career in cs education

  research

  i can't tell you that i don't get burnt

  out i will tell you

  that it helps that i have a really good

  family life you know we take off certain

  time every night you know we have dinner

  together and just talk we can make sure

  that we take off hours and spend time

  together

  i run the things that one picks up

  during the pandemic is i've become

  a big fan of meditation i try to do

  meditation a couple times a day and it

  really helps to

  be mindful and to ground myself and

  that's helped a lot with stress and

  sleep

  so i actually have fun doing this

  i do computing because i enjoy it

  my wife and i barbara erickson who's

  been my research collaborator

  on lots of things we wrote the media

  computation books together and did

  georgia computes and egypt together

  barbara sees computing as being a puzzle

  she loves to figure out how the

  algorithm works and how to make it

  better and

  what's going on here i've never had that

  puzzle perspective i've never

  gotten into computing as problem solving

  for me programming is this cool set of

  lego bricks

  and i can put them together in all kinds

  of different ways to make things

  and if it gets hard i sort of like okay

  i'm going to do the simplest

  dumbest inefficientist way of making

  this work

  when barbara and i were writing the

  books i would leave notes

  in the source code okay barb i know this

  is a sucky algorithm could you please

  just fix it and not give me grief about

  it because she's much better at that

  than me

  so i get to play with tinker toys and uh

  erector sets

  all day long it's great it definitely

  resonates and makes me laugh

  there are times where i look at the

  things that i'm able to create

  and explore through my job i'm like wow

  this is fantastic

  not many people can say that they are

  able to have fun doing these things

  and then have fun creating things that

  actually have a large

  impact like the boot up curriculum it's

  free anyone can use it and it's used

  around the world so like

  that's awesome not many people can say

  that yeah it's true

  what do you wish there was more research

  on that could inform your own practices

  i'd like to know more about where non-cs

  teachers

  could use computing and this is a hard

  area to do research in

  it's not so hard to identify the

  challenges

  students have in learning something it

  is harder

  to figure out which subset of those

  might be addressed by appropriate

  computational tools but i think that

  that's an area of research that would be

  important to work on we do a lot in the

  sense of

  we work with social studies educators

  and math educators

  and say okay students have a hard time

  understanding

  this about counting processes um that's

  good to know

  anything about process is something that

  computing can likely help at

  but then trying to figure out what's the

  right notation or representation that

  students will understand

  it's this recognition that it's a design

  task too so just knowing the problem

  isn't enough to solve the problem

  a lot of what my students work on

  creates questions about what comes next

  so i just had a student graduate i was

  actually be able to at her hooding on

  friday morning

  in atlanta at georgia tech amber solomon

  dr amber solomon's dissertation was

  on the role of embodiment in learning

  computer science

  we use gesture what does that gesture

  mean

  i mean we have these great videos amber

  studied a whole bunch of videos

  of people lecturing about things like

  recursion and lists

  and you have people doing this are they

  pointing at

  there's no there there you can't point

  at elements of an

  array right all right and if you do this

  what if the student's impression of an

  array is actually like this

  they're pointing horizontally and they

  think about it vertically

  does that create a conflict for them and

  then she studied their language

  the language we use to teach computer

  science

  is so embodied but we don't think about

  it and we don't design it when somebody

  says

  okay now we're here in the code what

  does that really mean

  we somehow jump down inside the code i

  think what you're actually meaning

  is we're imagining an execution of the

  code and the program counter is on this

  line right now but to jump from all of

  that to

  we're here in the code how many students

  are getting confused

  that they're not making that connection

  of shifting metaphors and shifting

  language

  right and we don't know anything about

  this we now know from her dissertation

  that there's a lot of embodiment in the

  way that people talk about computer

  science

  we don't yet know how the students

  understand all of that embodiment

  so that's a big area of research katie

  cunningham

  just finished her dissertation she's

  presenting at kai

  i think on thursday on purpose first

  programming

  where she's teaching people programming

  in terms of pieces of code

  that help them achieve their goals where

  they can just assemble these

  pieces of code if you're going to think

  about it in a derogatory sense you're

  saying oh they're just learning plug and

  chug programming

  but what she showed is the students

  think about how they tailor the code how

  they change the pieces of code for their

  needs

  and how they debug in terms of the

  semantics of those chunks of code

  not the individual lines it's so

  important it really led to high

  self-efficacy

  students were successful like coding

  with these programming plans that she

  identified

  but we don't know is what happens next

  can they learn more plans do they

  transfer that knowledge

  can they start learning the details of

  those individual lines of code

  does the purpose first programming go on

  to something else

  we don't know any of that either and

  there's a whole bunch of

  sort of technical research that i'd like

  to see done too

  since i've gotten to michigan i'm

  building things again which is great fun

  but you know what web programming is

  really hard

  it's way hard it really needs to be made

  way easier

  i was using a tool called gp which is a

  general purpose programming tool john

  maloney the guy who originally

  implemented scratch has been developing

  gp

  along with jens monnig who did snap also

  worked on gp

  and one of the things about that's cool

  about gp is that it's the speed of

  python so you can do things in gp like

  real-time sound visualization i built

  real-time sound visualizers with gp

  which is like

  super cool but there's very few things

  like gp and john hasn't been able to

  keep gp

  supported i think there's a whole lot of

  tool space

  that needs to be filled with research to

  make it easier for us to do things like

  task specific programming languages for

  teachers

  and what's something that you're working

  on that you could use help with

  like a listener who might be able to

  help you with blank what would that be

  we've got a bunch of tools now some of

  which like

  our history tools we're pushing out now

  that we've been building

  task specific languages for

  combinatorics and english language arts

  i'd like to connect with teachers who

  say that sounds cool

  i'll actually put this in my classroom

  if you make these changes

  i actually would welcome that because

  right now we've got tools that teachers

  are saying

  oh i like your tool way better than any

  of these others

  but they're still not adopting them

  understanding what

  gets a teacher a non-cs teacher to adopt

  a cs-based tool is really hard

  so we're trying to shift our research

  into more of a co-design model

  what we're doing now is we're building

  tools i work closely with my

  collaborators in social studies and math

  education and then we do

  teacher workshops and say here's the

  tools the teachers say cool

  silence rather we'd like to work with a

  handful of teachers

  who say okay i promise you i will use

  this but i need x and y features

  okay i'll give you x y features now

  let's study what happens

  because we haven't really been able to

  study much classroom

  implementation yet now part of this is

  the pandemic right that makes everything

  harder for everybody

  yeah hopefully there's somebody who's

  listening that's got some teachers in

  mind that they could reach out to you

  and

  recommend them to actually assist with

  that do you have questions for myself

  or to the field i'm going to generalize

  that last one

  if you could have any kind of

  programming language you'd like for your

  classroom

  what would you want a lot of the work

  that i've been doing

  was inspired by a conversation i had

  with colby toefl growl

  who is a science education researcher at

  utah state

  and she said to me you know what would

  really change my world

  is if i could type any scientific

  equation a mathematical equation

  directly into scratch

  so rather than drag and drop blocks to

  do a mathematical equation

  let me just type the equation and better

  yet if the equation could look like the

  way it looks in the math book or the

  science book

  and that just blew my mind because i

  mean we're not actually adding

  anything computational to scratch what

  we're changing is the user interface

  right and that's what made me realize

  that a lot of what teachers want

  is not about adding anything new

  computationally

  it's just could you make the user

  interface mesh better with my class

  so i'd love to hear more of those things

  i would love it if snap did x i could

  use code app but i want to be able to

  see

  a textual coding language on top of code

  app whatever it is those sorts of things

  because it's just the interface now

  i don't want to belittle doing user

  interface i work with hci researchers i

  see myself as an hci researcher that's

  hard work

  but that's not like inventing a new

  programming language that's about taking

  a little bit of programming and wrapping

  a new interface around it

  and that's doable and i think that's

  really important

  yeah i agree it'd make my life a lot

  easier if i could just type it out into

  scratch rather than having to drag in

  all the different operators when

  creating something

  yeah are there questions that i haven't

  asked that you'd like to discuss

  you had this great comment about what is

  holding back educators the field or what

  we can do about it

  and i think the thing which gets in the

  way a lot

  is cs arrogance that's not real

  programming

  i mean you're learning scratch maybe one

  day you can go learn a real programming

  language

  right i think that we see computer

  science

  as being owned by a computing elite as

  opposed to

  being something we want everybody to

  have access to that we want to push it

  out

  and it's about sharing this wealth as

  opposed to just being

  kept with the wealthy land owners i'm

  part of this

  task force i'm a co-chair with a

  computational cosmologist gus ephrat

  such a cool job

  this task force is defining computing

  education for

  undergrads in the college of literature

  science and the arts the largest college

  at the university of michigan it's sort

  of the liberal arts and sciences part

  and we're trying to define computing

  education for all of these folks

  a couple weeks ago gus and i made our

  preliminary report to the executive

  committee of the college of lsa

  and one of the members raise your hand

  says you know

  i got one of those requests for an

  interview or a survey

  but i didn't respond because you said

  you wanted people who do computing

  education

  and i don't do computing education now

  that i see what you mean

  could you use the word digital instead

  of computing please and then

  another member of the committee yeah i

  noticed that too

  if you use the words computing or

  computational

  that's just a conversation stopper i

  think you should change your language

  and those two comments i've been

  thinking about for

  weeks now it makes me realize the

  culture

  and their perceptions that we have set

  up around our field

  and i think that if we really want to

  reach cs for all

  cs has to become a service field rather

  than

  an elite we have to think about serving

  all these other fields

  and building things that they want as

  opposed to saying

  oh but wait we have to teach them this

  way because otherwise it's not real

  computer science

  yeah that'd be interesting to a way to

  kind of

  step around some of the baggage that

  comes with what does it mean to be a

  computer scientist

  if it were defined as something

  different but then we get into the

  arguments that we get into with like

  computational thinking with well what's

  the definition

  of this thing yeah when you list things

  that i used to believe i used to believe

  that we could define computational

  thinking

  i have now done it so often in my blog i

  totally give up on that

  [Laughter]

  yeah i'm much more interested in putting

  computing into classes that serve those

  classes needs

  data literacy is hard counting processes

  are hard

  thinking about language in english

  language arts

  is hard computing can help with those

  and make them more fun

  let's do that and let's not worry about

  whether it's computer science or

  computational thinking

  i like that so i'll ask the last

  question so where might people go to

  connect with you and the organizations

  that you work with

  so probably best way is through my blog

  computinged.wordpress.com from there i

  link to

  just about everything all the papers

  that i work with i've mentioned some of

  the groups that i work with like the

  esep alliance

  while i'm no longer involved it's still

  going on i'm so glad that other

  principal investigators have come along

  to carry the torch so esepalliance.org

  i think they're up to 23 states in

  puerto rico that they're working with

  which is

  really tremendous you google mark

  gosdale there's not that many of us you

  might get confused with my son matthew

  guzdal

  who does machine learning and creativity

  at the university of alberta but we're

  pretty distinguishable

  and with that that concludes this week's

  episode of the csk8 podcast

  i really hope you enjoyed this interview

  with mark i know i certainly did

  i hope you consider checking out the

  show notes to learn more about the

  different topics that we discussed

  or to reach out to mark or myself to

  collaborate on future research

  or to simply go to my website and check

  out all of the free resources that are

  for computer science educators

  including the podcast presentations

  publications lesson plans etc that i

  have created for the kids that i work

  with and for the non-profit buddha pd

  and all of which is 100 free to use

  thank you so much for listening

  i hope you're all staying safe and are

  having a wonderful week and i hope you

  stay tuned next week for another

  unpacking scholarship episode in two

  weeks from now for another interview

Guest Bio

Mark Guzdial is a Professor in Computer Science & Engineering and Engineering Education Research at the University of Michigan. He studies how people come to understand computing and how to make that more effective. He was one of the founders of the International Computing Education Research conference. He was one of the leads on the NSF alliance “Expanding Computing Education Pathways" which helped US states improve and broaden their computing education. He invented and has written several books on the “Media Computation” contextualized approach to computing education. With his wife and colleague, Barbara Ericson, he received the 2010 ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator award. He is an ACM Distinguished Educator and a Fellow of the ACM. His most recent book is Learner-Centered Design of Computing Education: Research on Computing for Everyone (Morgan & Claypool, 2015). He received the 2019 ACM SIGCSE Outstanding Contributions to Education award.

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  • Reconceptualizing “Music Making:” Music Technology and Freedom in the Age of Neoliberalism

    • In this episode I unpack Benedict and O’Leary’s (2019) publication titled “Reconceptualizing “music making:” Music technology and freedom in the age of Neoliberalism,” which explores the use of computer science practices to counter neoliberal influence on education.

  • Should I Say “Disabled People” or “People with Disabilities”?

    • In this episode I unpack Sharif, McCall, and Bolante’s (2022) publication titled “Should I say “disabled people” or “people with disabilities”? Language preferences of disabled people between identity- and person-first language,” which summarizes findings from a survey on participant preferences for language around disability and an analysis on language in conference abstracts.

  • Situated Language and Learning with Bryan Brown

    • In this interview Bryan Brown, we discuss the importance of language in education. In particular, we discuss the role of language in teaching and learning, discursive identity, situated language and learning, the importance of representation in education, the role of language on stress, how smartphones and virtual communication platforms (e.g., Zoom) could change learning, and many other topics relevant to CS education and learning.

  • The Subservient, Co-equal, Affective, and Social Integration Styles and Their Implications for [Computer Science]

    • In this episode I unpack Bresler’s (1995) publication titled “The subservient, co-equal, affective, and social integration styles and their implications for the arts,” which “examines the different manifestations of arts integration in the operational, day-to-day curriculum in ordinary schools, focusing on the how, the what, and the toward what” (p. 33).

  • More episodes related to constructionism

  • More episodes related to constructivism

  • More episodes related to engagement

  • More episodes related to integration

  • More episodes related to pedagogy

  • All other episodes

• Learn more about Expanding Computing Education Pathways (ECEP)

• Read Personal Dynamic Media, the paper Mark mentioned

• Learn more about Georgia Computes! by reading a paper Mark wrote with other authors

• Constructionism vs constructivism

  • Learn more about constructionism

  • Learn more about constructivism

• Read the paper I mentioned on reconceptualizing "music making" in the age of neoliberalism (I promise it’s relevant to CS)

• Learn more about situated learning

  • Lave and Wenger’s seminal book

  • James Paul Gee’s book that discusses this more

  • Interview with Bryan Brown, which discusses situated learning

• Learn more about Katie Cunningham’s purpose-first programming

• Read some of the blog posts Mark mentioned

  • The Bigger Part of Computing Education is outside of Engineering Education

  • Constructivism vs. Constructivism vs. Constructionism

  • Disaggregating Asian-American educational attainment

• Learn more about FIU’s School of Universal Computing, Construction, and Engineering Education (SUCCEED)

• Learn more about participatory design

• Learn more about Everyday Computing

• Connect with Mark

  • Read Mark’s blog

  • Follow Mark on Twitter

  • Learn more about Expanding Computing Education Pathways (ECEP)

• Find other CS educators and resources by using the #CSK8 hashtag on Twitter

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Free CS Resources I Have Created

• Scratch resources

  • Free Scratch and ScratchJr curriculum I continue to develop

• JavaScript (Khan Academy) resources

• Media arts and technology makerspace resources

• Sonic Pi resources

• Swift resources

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