[Yr7-10it] [Oz-teachers] CT and HCI

Mon May 6 13:01:52 UTC 2019

Thanks Ken, 

I recall back in the 1980’s trying to get to the heart of programming on my old Apple ][e computer.. peeling back the apple basic, then at the machine level and later realising I could go deeper by peeking and poking .. it was a revelation to come up for air and realise that it wasn’t about the machine but about the problem itself. 

The original question was first asked by Bill Kerr who is now teaching in Alice Springs but it is now also of interest to my preservice teachers .. and good on them for taking pause to think about it. 

Oddly enough, we discussed something similar in my Science Education class today, about teaching science to all when so few will become scientists. The discussion shifted to the dangers of ignorance or the illusion of knowledge .. especially when some seek to manipulate our understanding of science and how the world works

Regards Roland

> On 6 May 2019, at 10:40 pm, ken price <kenjprice at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I'm with Mark Guzdial on this, at least for the school sector - we're teaching an approach to thinking, and it is this that students will still find useful in 20 years' time. It's very practical to teach this via computer programming, in much the same way as some other subject areas are effective ways to encourage other specific forms of thinking. 
>  
> At the same time there are elements of the programming fraternity who will maintain that Scratch and other drag and drop programming interfaces are "not real programming".  I suspect once there were people who claimed programming in a text-based language that has a vague resemblance to English was "not real programming" either, as real programming would require directly loading binary values into memory locations manually...
> 
> There is also the belief in some quarters of the IT industry that the only "real programming" is what takes place in their own workplace. This is perhaps more understandable in some sense, but doesn't take into account the purposes of compulsory education. We don't teach poetry in order to fill a demand for poets in the workplace.
> 
> Ken
> 
> 
> On Mon, May 6, 2019 at 9:43 PM Roland Gesthuizen <rgesthuizen at gmail.com <mailto:rgesthuizen at gmail.com>> wrote:
> This is a bit deep but I thought to share it here. A preservice teacher with a solid CS background remarked a couple of weeks ago about the maturity of junior secondary students to think about coding and computational thinking (CT), remarking that there are many pedagogical and maturity challenges. I have been reading up about CT and the benefits to students, even if they don't go on to study CS.
> 
> Lu, J. J., & Fletcher, G. H. L. (2009). Thinking About Computational Thinking. Proceedings of the 40th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, 260–264. https://doi.org/10.1145/1508865.1508959 <https://doi.org/10.1145/1508865.1508959>
> Much of the recent thinking comes from this discussion paper by Wing that points out the unplugged nature of CT, that it goes beyond just the hardware and software (and perhaps even the programming). This is quite readable at 2 pages and well worth a glance.
> 
> Wing, J. (2006). Computational thinking. Communications of the ACM, 49(3), 33–35. https://doi.org/10.1145/1118178.1118215 <https://doi.org/10.1145/1118178.1118215>
> "Computational thinking is reformulating a seemingly difficult problem into one we know how to solve, perhaps by reduction, embedding, transformation, or simulation ... Computational thinking is thinking recursively. It is parallel processing. It is interpreting code as data and data as code... Computational thinking is using abstraction and decomposition when attacking a large complex task or designing a large complex system. It is separation of concerns. (Wing 2006:33 <>)
> 
> The debate is still going on with this recent post that is even challenges, do we need to even program to teach about CT?  What is the role for Human Computer Interaction (HCI) when we consider how Scratch made it easier to teach coding? Have a think about this notion of reducing the friction between people and computers.
> 
> Guzdial, M. (2019, April 29). A new deﬁnition of Computational Thinking: It’s the Friction that we want to Minimize unless it’s Generative, (2019) Mark Guzdial [Blog]. Retrieved from Computing Education website: https://computinged.wordpress.com/2019/04/29/what-is-computational-thinking-its-the-friction-that-we-want-to-minimize/ <https://computinged.wordpress.com/2019/04/29/what-is-computational-thinking-its-the-friction-that-we-want-to-minimize/>
> "computational thinking is about framing problems so that computers can solve them ... To meet Alan Kay's point about generativity, there are some things in computing that we want to teach because they give us new leverage on thinking. We want to teach things that are useful, but not those that are necessary just because we have bad user interfaces." (Guzdial 2019:2)
> 
> If you feel brave for a reply, please share your thoughts.
> 
> Best of Wishes, Roland Gesthuizen
> 
> 
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> Dr Ken Price MACS(Snr) CP ACCE Professional Associate.
> Immediate Past President, TASITE http://www.tasite.tas.edu.au <http://www.tasite.tas.edu.au/>
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