Making History in Computer Science Education...on an iPad.

While the title of this post doesn't sound very humble, rest assured that the content will be steeped in meekness and weakness as I retrospeculate teaching 65 mostly-freshmen this past semester in one, yes one section of Exploring Computer Science (ECS1).

Last spring a good friend and chair of our Science Department suggested that I teach what was to be the largest section in the history of the school.  It's hard to say for certain if it is in fact thelargest ever, given that we've been around since the 1850's.  Several personality flaws led to me saying 'yes', including, but not limited to: habit - I say yes a lot, eternal optimism, arrogance, and a lustful sense of adventure. Whenever I'm in a high place I often get an uncontrollable urge to jump, because the thought of flying is seductive.  Being of the flightless mammal variety, I realize this is on the dumb side of stupid, but, there it is.

Adventure, excitement: a Jedi craves not these things.

The reason we opted to offer a class like this was simple: demand.  No less than 135 students tallied in for Exploring Computer Science 1.  Our ability to offer a class of this size meant we could accommodate a large number of students who were opting to forgo a free period in order to be in the class.  At any rate, taking this on presented a number of challenges and spin off topics that should provide fodder for loads of blog posts down the road.

Space:  There are really only a few viable "classroom" spaces (topic on what constitutes a good classroom space coming soon...) to use when you've got a classroom with 65 students.  The theater and...another smaller theater.  The second one, we'll call it Andrade (cause' that's what it's called), was superior but less available, and also inside a library(hold onto that one for later).  Se we'd meet there on most Mondays and then switch to the Sobrato theater.  Not to go to deeply on the topic of space, but the idea of literally becoming a sage on a stage made me throw up in my mouth a little.  It goes against most if not all of what I want to be about as a teacher, and ultimately led to some pretty sub-par experiences on those days when I did the traditional talk at students approach.  Our school is home to some brilliant lecturers - I don't consider myself to be one of them, so this space was clearly going to be a challenge.  We were a class in desperate need of modern space working within an ancient design.

Time: Given that I teach blended learning through the university down the street, the original intent was to walk the walk and create a blended learning-esque rotating schedule and meet with the whole group once per week, and rotate three groups through the lab for the remaining three class meetings per week.  As our schedule is already highly irregular, this concept wound up looking a lot better on paper than it did in reality.  I still believe that with the right time and resources it is the better option down the road.  The bottle neck here was really the time needed to curate or create the independent work to be done.  Really, this one came down to a lack of trust on my part that first semester freshmen would be OK on their own for that amount of instructional time.  I fell back on traditional models of teaching and I don't think that served the class well.  Also, I'm a shameless advocate for block scheduling, particularly at a college prep school, but more on that in another post.  This issue of time affects curriculum...

Curriculum: I have one semester to introduce students to the whole of Computer Science.  I did not major in Computer Science at Purdue; my degree is in Computer Graphics Technology from the School of Tech, and my Master's is in Educational Leadership.  The unversed might think: "CGT - close enough", but there's a pretty large separation between CGT and CS.  I did create a concentration course schedule in CS on my own while at Purdue, and in post-graduate studies through UCSC, but nonetheless, it is a point of anxiety in my own schooling that leads to many questions when it comes to curriculum design.  Insecurities aside, my teaching and coaching throughout the years has solidified a pedagogy rooted in student-centered learning, problem solving, creativity, and care for the student.  I didn't have to look too far for a good template.  A couple years back, I was pointed to Dan Garcia's work at UC Berkeley in his course The Beauty and Joy of Computing which has since contributed to a new AP CS Principles course that we might be offering in the future.  It's intentionally broad and not deep, with the hope of exposure and inspiration.  Once I had crafted a course outline from several sources, including content from the Exploring Computer Science curriculum itself,  the CSTA Standards, and Parson's Computer Concepts 2016, I then needed to figure out how to deliver the content and provide students the resources they needed to do their projects.

Resources: First and foremost things like this can't happen without the support of administration and dept. chairs, and anyone else crazy enough to trust me to get this right.  I am blessed to be in a school where I went forward with the faith and encouragement, and yes, the permission to fail a little.  It's really what kept me from going off the deep end, or really even approaching it.  If you told me that I'd have to teach 65 students how to do CS projects including programming on the iPad one year ago, I'd have laughed loud and hard in the general direction of your face.  I was back to the space issue - where do we have a computer lab on campus with 65 machines?  Nowhere, that's where.  So it was iPads or bust, although the blended learning tactic would have alleviated if not solved this issue - but again fear of the unknown got in my way. This need led me to a number of required apps in order to create a mobile platform programming workaround which would allow for the creation of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript content, and allow to students to upload via secure FTP to a web server in order to make their pages live and viewable...again, from the iPad.  It turns out Textastic for the iPad fits the bill in almost all regards, at a cost of $7.99.  But what about digital images?  Computer Graphics is a unit in the course - how would we get our hands on a PhotoShop-like experience to give students an applied sense of RBG/HEX colors, pixel dimensions, bit depth, and file types which relates to image compression?  Pixelmator to the rescue.  As of August, this app out Photo-shops Photoshop for the iPad.  Students can create images with exact pixel dimensions and save them in several different file types.  Great, but how do they upload those images to the FTP server?  Documents by Readdle is probably one of the most valuable free apps on the App Store.  Students can aggregate all their iPad content and push it to multiple cloud storage solutions.  Here's the full no-particular-order list of required apps for the course and why:

Notability - for taking notes on the iPad  

Page Studio (paid;supplied by school)  Ok app for creating and viewing HTML, CSS, and JS content, which had to be replaced by the more expensive...

Textastic - Excellent app for creating HTML CSS and JS content.  Their preview tool leaves a lot to be desired, but this can be overcome by uploading and testing.

Inkpad  - Vector drawing tool

Pixelmator (paid;supplied by school) - Raster image creator and editor

Documents by Readdle - amazing tool for moving documents from local iPad to cloud storage solutions.  Includes FTP for Web stuff.  

Lynda.com - great supplement for one teacher versus 65 students. We pay for a school license, which is expensive, but I believe worth it down the road. 

Chrome Browser - because Google.  Some pages render content better, even with the unified underbelly enforced by Apple.

Nearpod - the only teaching with technology tool you'll ever need.  If there was only one app to get, this is it.

Zaption - Awesome active learning tool for video content

Socrative - classroom response system

Quizlet - when you've got to read and regurgitate

Hopscotch - Programming Basics - made for kids, works great for teens too.

Flipboard - Newsfeed and RSS aggregator

Twitter - Free - Social Media  

Blogging tool of your choice (Blogger, Wordpress, etc.) - Free - public web authoring tool.

Chronograph - for teaching binary
Lego Mindstorms Robot Commander - for driving Lego robots.

Lego Mindstorms Education - for programming Lego robots.

I was able to use most, but not all of these in order to facilitate my curriculum.  And all that curriculum was wrapped in a bow and placed on...

Canvas - our LMS: Canvas, our learning management system, on the iPad has been a mixed blessing.  When we started our 1:1 program, I'd argue that it was equally important to offer a learning management system where students and teachers could share files and other resources, assign homework, and do a slew of other things including quizzes, group work, and discussions.  Canvas is a great product.  Canvas on the iPad is not a great product.  There is a constant push and pull between using the iPad, which is the only real way to submit homework that's not an image from your camera roll on iPad, and using the mobile browser version, which does everything else - but only was well as a mobile browser can.  A mobile browser has limited functionality when compared to that of a full operating system.  This presented issues with tools including quizzes, group projects, peer evaluations in Canvas, and Prulu, which is a great app for creating a collaborative space in your LMS, when it works.  On the iPad it didn't work.  Prulu's issues aren't Canvas' issues directly, but illustrates what is probably my biggest and most timely point...

The Operating System: Every single woe and workaround with regard to technology and logistics in teaching this course could have been avoided had the students been working on a laptop or any mobile device with a fully-featured, non-mobile OS.  My students could have the used free equivalents of the paid apps, viewed source code through fully-functional browsers, and used the full features of our learning management system without issue, including non subject-specific features like group project spaces, peer reviews, submitting homework, quizzes, discussions, LTI tools like Prulu and others.  Three to four years ago, smaller laptop and tablet solutions with full operating systems and 8-10 hours of battery life were not viable.  They are now, and I'd argue that if a 1:1 program's purpose is to level the playing field for your students and eliminate the need to travel to computer labs with precious little class time, we should strongly consider fully-featured solutions for the benefit of our students.

Teaching Tools: This semester I've narrowed in on two active learning tools for the classroom.  If I were to recommend one tool for a teacher to work with to enhance their classroom with tech, apart from a sturdy Learning Management System, it would be either NearPod or Zaption.  Both cover my required bases when it comes to digital tools for teachers: easy to use, content sharing community if you'd rather curate than create, facilitates assessment and analysis, provides differentiated formats for assessment, integrates well with other resources like YouTube content, and they both have usable freemium formats, although you get what you pay for if you go paid versions.  (Full disclosure: I get zero kickback from these folks - I just love their work).

The Students:  Saving the best for last, this class consisted mostly of first-semester freshmen.  About 55 frosh and 10 of sophs through seniors.  Teaching any class presents challenges when it comes to the divide created by prior knowledge, level of interest, and other factors that lead to disparate starting points.  (Sidenote: Look up the strict definition of the word aptitude and think about the implications of calling a standardized assessment an "aptitude" test...).  With this class, the sheer size just exacerbated this challenge.  Couple that with the fact that it is an elective, and we're off to the races.  I differentiated instruction often, and differentiated learning and assessments even more in order in an attempt to accommodate.  Some students came in with extensive backgrounds in programming with a variety of languages.  Others had never touched an iota of computer code in their life.  One of my primary goals when working with ECS1 classes is to encourage collaboration early and often.  Traditional school models often stigmatize sharing sometime shortly after kindergarten and don't let up until students are released into the world outside academia and are then expected to "play well with others" again.  I usually spend most of the semester removing this notion like beating the dust from a rug.  Creative problem solving requires collaboration - and CS is nothing if not problem solving.  For the first month I fielded questions about how many points things were worth, and would this be on the test until we came to the mutual understanding that the class was about critical thinking and problem solving and not points and grades.  I'm still not convinced I got through, but I am convinced that distilling five months of learning about computer history, number systems, binary, the Internet, the Web, social media, algorithms, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, mobile web development, DNS, TCP/IP, and many other topics into the equivalent of a thumbs up or thumbs down (a letter grade) is ludicrous.  If feedback and formative assessments are proven elements of a quality learning environment, and our ABCDF system seems to serve everyone BESIDES the student, then, just, why...

The Bottom Line: What did they learn?  What did I learn?  I had a blast succeeding and failing this semester.  There seem to be no less than one thousand things I would do differently, and the good news is that I get the chance to do this all over again next semester.  We'll spend less time on the glorified book report that was the computer history project, more time in a PBL format for learning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and provide more time to use the EV3 Lego Robots to learn about algorithms and problem-solving.  As I sit here grading their final portfolios, I'm encouraged by how well they synthesized concepts and the applied skills that we emphasized this semester.  I hope to be able to provide more regular feedback, i.e. do a better job grading in a timely manner.  In short, I'm grateful to have had the chance to make history with a great group of guys, so here's to making history again next semester...