Tuesday, June 27, 2017

After ISTE–More Questions Than Answers

One of the great things about ISTE is a chance to talk to people face to face. When that happens a lot of things come up. Yesterday and today, along with walking the exhibit hall and attending sessions, I had some good conversations with people. It all has me thinking a lot. I’m going to dump a few thoughts here and hopefully follow up on them in future posts. Feel free to jump on them now though.

There are lots of things at ISTE for beginners. Not just for the younger grades but for teacher who haven’t taught computer science before. What is there for people who have been teaching CS for a long time and who have advanced students? Not really a lot. This has come up at the CSTA Conference a few times as well but today it struck me that we (the CS Ed community) need to fix that NOW! More on that in a future post.

Here’s another question that comes up. How many times can you teach students how loops work? If we have CS in grades K through 12 what is the sequence? Sure the standards are starting to cover that and the K12 CS Framework has stuff for all grade bands but how does that translate into curriculum sequences? More on that coming to this blog.

All these cool news toys for teaching? Do they work and if so how do we know? Anyone reading know of some research or are we all working on wishful thinking – again? I only have questions on that. I still want to try some of them though. Does that make me part of the problem or the solution? Time will tell I guess.

What should be the role of industry in developing curriculum? I got pretty excited about some of the things I saw from industry – especially from Microsoft. But the question becomes are they just gimmicks or are they the basis for real improvement in learning? Some companies are developing things that are clearly their platform specific – Apple and Swift and other iOS specific tools. Some less obviously platform specific. But clearly industry benefits from more and better trained CS people. Take a look at How Silicon Valley Pushed Coding Into American Classrooms on the New York Times. If that doesn’t raise questions read it again. Personally I see a lot of good coming from industry and Code.Org. But I have concerns as well.

The exhibit hall has a surprising (to me) number of Chinese companies seeing things like robots and 3D printers. Competition is good and I can see this possibly lowering prices. On the other hand most of these products come without curriculum and other things teachers need  for support. Most, though not all, of the American companies understand this and make an effort to provide some teacher support. Some more than others of course. My concern though is bean counters who show based on price alone. Anyone know administrators like that?

I’ve got one more day at ISTE and I am not yet done walking the exhibit hall or attending sessions. Already though I have a lot to think about. And to  think I still have the CSTA Annual conference to attend. If you will be there come find me and help me think about all these questions. If not, drop some comments. Please.


Michael Ball said...

I've been thinking about code.org and concerns raised (and not raised) by the NYT piece, and it seems like not much has changed in the past few years on that front, except that CS is gaining traction. This is super exciting, but there's one thing that's still unanswered:

Why are we teaching CS? Why do we believe in "CSforAll"?
Everyone seems to have a different answer, and in many ways that's great because it means there's lots of reasons to teach CS! :) However, I also see it as problematic, because it makes it hard for non-insiders to see why we're doing this work. Heck, I know CS teachers who really believe lowering salaries is a motivation. (They don't seem deterred by it though, so I guess there's that.)

I'm not sure there's a solution, but I do think some common ground about the "why"s would help others. Or at the very least, if each group were more clear about our beliefs. (I say this knowing full well that the stuff I work on doesn't communicate such things clearly.)

I will also be curious to see how the intro space fleshes out over time. Until we CS is as ubiquitous as Math or language arts, it seems like we'll always need a diverse set of intro points by grade levels. That definitely puts high school teachers (and more!) in a tough place, but I hope the solution will be to keep developing CS2 and CS3 and such for high school students. Or, we can go down the route of doing more domain specific courses like HCI, networking, or web development. I think almost all the topics that are university electives (except for the really math heavy ones, perhaps) can work in some from for certainly high school students.

Alfred Thompson said...

I think for a good long while high schools will need to be prepared to handle students with a very wide range of backgrounds in CS. It will be especially hard in small high schools though.