Karan Ideas for USN + Readings

I. Project Ideas

1. Ants

Intro: This video is a good introduction, because it talks about how ant colonies are emergent and introduces complex phenomena like pheromone trails and ant foraging patterns: TedEd Video.

EXPERIMENT? This is optional, but sometimes it's fun to bring in ants and observe foraging patterns in small vs. large spaces.

Embodied model: to get kids to think about what a program looks like, it is sometimes helpful to have them act out a program in an "embodied model." This is an ant script that I've used with kids in the past:

Ant Script

When I start as an ant:

         Set my sign to "No Food."

         Go to a random location.

         Point in a random direction.

Forever:

         If my sign says “Food”:

                  Point toward the nest

                  Take one step forward

                  If I am at a wall, turn around

                  If I am at the nest:

                           Switch my sign to “No Food”

         Otherwise (if my sign says “No Food”):

                  Take one step forward

                  Turn in a random direction

                  If I am at a wall, turn around

                  If I am touching food:

                           Switch my sign to “Food”

They start out acting out the script. Then they can add variables (For example: Counting numbers on their fingers for how many other ants they have run into. Left hand could hold number of ant interactions with food, right hand holds no food interactions. Conditional statements tell ants what too do given these variables. OR, kids have used post-it trails as pheremones, etc.)

Computational model: Then, we get kids to translate their embodied model into scratch. We can introduce more content or more ways of getting content. 

2. Immune System: We could do very similar things with the immune system, it's just less tangible. 

3. Natural Selection: Peppered Moth Sim We can have kids do something really similar to ants here. The peppered moth sim and natural selection tag with different length tails are good for helping kids build intuitive understands of concepts. Then, we could have them translate these activities to scratch and use them as predictive tools over large populations, ecosystems, or times scales.

4. Flocking: Kids can watch videos of flocking birds and try to understand the rules that allow these shapes to form more from an animation perspective. Looks cool, three simple but challenging rules to program. Here are some examples: Boids with Predators, standard boids, 1986 Boids

II. Computational Thinking in Science and Lit

In Wing(2008) we get an explicit definition of abstraction in terms of computational thinking. Wing refers to thinking in layers of abstraction, which seems to resonate with Wilensky's ideas about thinking in levels, though Wing's definition applies to contexts beyond emergent phenomena.

Still, some of Wing's ideas seem counter to the Simpson, Noss, and Hoyle article that we read last week. My small groups agreeed that SN&H emphasized using computational tools to scaffold the understanding of science content knowledge, with science content knowledge being the ultimate goal of their intervention. In their interactions with students, they low-lighted the practices of computational thinking and foregrounded collisions. Wing, on the other hand, advocates for making ideas like parallel processing and recursion explicit within science domains. 

Throughout, Wing emphasizes opportunities to use computational thinking as a tool that supports science, math, and engineering. However, she spends less time explicitly considering computational thinking as a tool to support literacy.

Vee aligns with Wing by emphasizing the value that both human and machine computers bring to computing by highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of textual vs. computational literacy. She also agrees that computational literacy will (or at least should) become as widespread as textual literacy, and that people can benefit from computational thinking/literacy regardless of whether they become professional programmers. 

Burke (2012) & Burke, O'Byre & Kafai(2016) share Wing's perspective that computers are a tool; their presence alone does not support learning, but using them in meaningful ways can. Burke's idea  of code as "hidden" words aligns with Wing's description of modular and hidden layers of programs, where access  code is unnecessary to experience the project at a higher level. This alignment might be because scratch is  a version of programming, so words (code) are necessarily abstracted in the process of running the program. Reading, on the other hand, requires readers to interact with the lower level of words and the higher level of ideas at the same time. 

The expressive nature of the projects described in both papers provide one possible answer to Wing's questions about how to empower students to use computational tools in a way that values their culture and context. 

A concern is that students don't seem to as deeply engage in computational thinking in the context of story telling compared to making games or models. The goal of story telling does not afford students many natural opportunities to store or manipulate data. The code snapshot in Figure 1 shows a linear program that does not include the type of abstraction that comes with more complex algorithms. While Burke reports that 10% of students use variables, his sample is only 10 kids, meaning that only one kid used a variable. Only 2-3 kids used boolean logic or conditional statements. This is with a one teacher to 10 kids classroom - how can we support students in using these ideas with the even lower ratio that we see in typical classrooms?

Tangentially, I'm excited about the findings in the Cruzon paper in terms of demystifying computational thinking for adults. Maybe a similar strategy could be used as a PD series to make computational thinking less scary for teachers and to encourage them to learn more about incorporating computational thinking in their classrooms. I'm not sure that I would say that the important thing is storytelling though. Ba sed on their account, it seems like the tangible/unplugged aspect was more important than the context of locked-in syndrome.