One aspect of this week's readings that was interesting to me was the example of the girls who were referenced in the Kafai and Burke article who were not interested in continuing into a career which included programming or code. This was concerning to me and I wonder how we can use programs like scratch to engage both girls and boys to be interested in a computer science career. I had also noticed that all of the students at USN for our club were also young boys. I am interested in why there is the trend that computer science and programming is for boys and the only way to interest girls is to include a story telling or narrative component.
Girls are most certainly capable of high level and computational thinking strategies such as simulations or debugging. Where is the disconnect between the opportunities for children to learn to create games and to code, and the interest of girls to carry these skills in the work force as a career opportunity. As we continue to work with the students at USN, is there a way to get girls more interested, should we be framing our curriculum in a different way?
Another aspect of the readings which sparked some ideas for me was the concept of students working together, as described in Lee's article. When the boys were discussing how to proceed through the games using simulations, and debugging strategies, they were working as a team. One member of a group would present an issue or game play strategy and the other members of the group would either suggest a possible alternative or debug that plan in order to make it more successful within the context of saving the world from an outbreak to win the game. This made me consider how we encourage the students to solve problems at USN. If we are to follow the pedagogical implications that are outlined in the theory of constructionism, we must shift our roles from instructors to facilitators. For example, wait time is important for the students to draw their own conclusions and we have to be careful not to over instruct in order to promote "powerful ideas". However, if students worked with peers as described in the Lee article I believe that they could scaffold each others thinking in a way that was more powerful than something that was overly teacher guided or forcing them to work through an individual productive struggle. *
*Usually I find productive struggles very worthwhile, but in order to keep them engaged it must be a balancing act with producing challenging concepts that encourages computational thinking but also is not too difficult were it discourages the student. *
It would be really interesting to talk about where to draw the line for "productive struggle" and instructor vs. facilitator in class - I'm glad that you brought this up! I think it is especially relevant given our high adult:student ratio!
ReplyDeleteIt would be really interesting to talk about where to draw the line for "productive struggle" and instructor vs. facilitator in class - I'm glad that you brought this up! I think it is especially relevant given our high adult:student ratio!
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with you on the gender bias. I was pretty irked by these articles and others that we've read that think it it is the type of programming that is the problem rather than the larger context in which the programming is being offered. There's some interesting research that says women who study STEM fields in undergrad also have a secondary area of expertise that's non-STEM, whereas men do not. It's this idea that girls and women develop a secondary plan if the STEM plan doesn't work out. I wonder if that's part of the problem. Are young girls feeling like they can't become STEM professionals or that it will be too hard, so they decide not to? Or that they see so few women in STEM professions, that they don't think of it as a viable option at a sub-conscious level?
ReplyDeleteI do think a cooperative aspect could be interesting. Girls do tend to enjoy more social/cooperative environments than competitive or individualistic ones (granted big generalization). So perhaps if there was cooperative aspect that could be more engaging?
I second Ruth - it is always troublesome to see the disconnect that young girls have with coding. There was a study recently, I believe it was from the University of Sussex, that showed how girls tended to be better at developing more complex video games than boys. There are many great programs that aim to decrease this disconnect - Girls Who Code, Black Girls Code, and even Kode with Klossy (by model Karlie Kloss). I wonder what our projects would be like in the hands of students at an all-girls school here in Nashville?
ReplyDeleteYour discussion of productive struggles is important and something I believe our group faced as well. In a different light -- as our student was creating his storyboard, we all wanted to jump in with ideas and were very excited about his plan and development - but how interactive should we have been? Maybe we were interactive because we wanted to ensure he utilized certain computational thinking skills and, although we didn't state them directly, perhaps this took away from the empowering idea.
Thanks for the term "Productive struggle". According to my reflection on our literacy group's experience last week, for the brainstorming session I think it is really important to listen to the students and give them as much of wait time as possible and also to be supportive and critical to their thoughts simultaneously. On the other hand, if they are stuck in developing a part I could imagine it could get really trickier to understand when to interrupt them. I think it is necessary to learn programming in order to learn something by programming. So, students should be given sufficient time to spend in the productive struggle themselves. But I would say if necessary they should also be provided with higher level library modules(i.e. Multi body collision system) to not make them disengaged from the goal of learning. Another thing is that, I think it is also a part of CT to revise an Idea so that developing that would be easier.
ReplyDeleteI found this quite saddening too, because it's a misrepresented notion - that one gender is above/better than the other. In one of my vourses, on he American education system, we watched a video on 'Girls and Science' which highlighted that many girls tend to lose interest in science and related fields when they start middle school, because they think that science is a man's field to excel in.
ReplyDeleteDrawing a comparison to Pakistan, the lack of females in science and computation can be attributed to the fact that education as a whole isn't seen as a privilege girls deserve. I'd like to better understand the reason for bias in the US though, and whether the same underlying assumptions about privileges apply or not.