Sheikh - Striking the balance, Computational Practice and Algorithms

From the readings this week, Kafai’s point of view on Computational Thinking to Computational Practice is the one which particularly resonates with my ideas of how computation could be empowering in different settings.

“Computational participation involves solving problems, designing systems and understanding human behaviour, in the context of computing.”

One of my aims is to b able to understand how to create learner centric problem solving environments - because they can change the whole outlook of programming in education.

However, one struggling idea is how to create such customised environments, which strike the right mix of flexibility to have a rich game design experience, and whether such an experience is even possible without having strong background knowledge/skills to take on the challenge, as discussed by Peppler et al.

A question that I’d like to ask is, what are our end goals when stressing on programming? Efficiency? Accuracy? What Kafai deems these goals leading to boredom, are in fact among the primary goals of coders that I’m familiar with. How do we make them less boring? Or can we come up with ways to code which primarily focus on goals other than these? It also made me reflect on my personal goals of developing a better understanding of the hybrid of education, entrepreneurship and technology. And what would be the right proportion of each to create ideas which are powerful and self-sustaining.

Another observation I made was of the feeling that a child gets knowing that he/she has created something - and how it boosts their confidence. Our experience as a group, helping our student with Scratch was just another example of that.

In our class discussion before we went to the school, we were thinking of ways to execute the first class, when I recalled how when it was my first time learning a language, my professors insisted that we all penned down our algorithm - to help give clarity, structure and organization to the gazillion ideas that we had. And we decided that we would ask our students to sketch a story map, (more like a comic strip), for the communication he planned between the characters in the shadows.

We ended up being amazed at how much the student found it helpful to start with the algorithmic story board, versus jumping into the Scratch code right away. Because he was not only able to think deeply about each frame of the conversation he was trying to build, he was also able to recognize the connections between the frames - which background is consistent in two frames, when does it need to be different, which sound would be more suitable for which frame, what color scheme would he prefer to use, and in which  frames would he prefer the characters to communicate with actual words vs facial expressions and body language. He went back and forth to check his story board for coherence, in terms facial expressions, body language, and positioning of characters, just the we do when checking for gaps in the code.

This experience has made me consider the readings we have read and the discussions we have had in the past about enabling the teachers to transition into the computational thinking mode of curriculum and whether building this thinking with a focus on an algorithmic view, as the base, would work well or not.