A caveat: I’m supposed to be writing about the computational thinking experiences I have observed at my school. Because I started my teaching career the same year as that pesky global pandemic, I haven’t really had much of an opportunity to observe others’ teaching of computational thinking and participation besides one two-week practicum during my BEd, so much of this is related to my own experiences in computer engineering and teaching computational thinking as a new specialist.
Kafai (2016) describes computational participation as moving from just teaching technical skills in isolation to bringing communal, contextual activities into computational thinking. I loved this article, because it lines up with the skills and values that I experienced as a computer engineering student. We generally worked collaboratively on projects based on solving real world problems. Not only does computational participation make computational thinking accessible, it authentically replicates how much of the computer programming sphere functions.
Remixing and Authenticity
Kafai mentions the open source movement – open source projects are widespread and a great way to find both explicitly educational materials and authentic works for remixing for older students. These sorts of projects are widespread in university CS education. For example, while studying software testing and analysis, my university class used the jPacman framework, an open source Pacman clone that includes both complete unit tests for some sections and intentionally incomplete tests in others. Later in the course, we were expected to contribute fixes to actual open-source projects.
For younger students, we can similarly find both educational programs that are designed to be extended and interesting authentic programs others have made to remix through platforms like Scratch and Pencil Code. Harvard’s Creative Computing Curriculum for Scratch includes scaffolding to get students to a functional base program, then invites them to experiment and extend that program using their new and existing knowledge; additionally, this document includes intentionally broken programs and asks students to fix their functionality. On the Scratch website proper, there are millions of student-made games, stories, and animations on the Scratch website that are remixable and include built-in attribution (although we run into trouble in Canada with privacy laws if we choose to share our remixes).
Speaking of attribution, open source software is a natural way to integrate digital citizenship topics, including copyright law, licensing, and online privacy.
Building Community
There are, of course, major issues around equity in computer science communities. Geiger (2017) reports that around 97% of Github users are male, and NCES (2014; via K-12 Computer Science Framework Steering Committee 2016) found that for American computer science degrees, 17% of graduates were women, 8% were black, and 9% were Hispanic.
When teaching computational thinking topics, building a sense that we are a community of learners who are all on the same side is incredibly important. This includes your standard programming practices like pair programming (where one person codes and a second reviews and critiques on the fly) and scrum (where a team working on a longer project 1) breaks up the project into shorter two week sprints and 2) meets daily to update each other on what they are working on), but should also include other practices that build comfort and inclusion to traditionally excluded groups.
Fortunately, there are a lot of resources in this area for educators. The American K-12 Computer Science Framework (K-12 Computer Science Framework Steering Committee 2016) includes several practices around fostering inclusion and collaboration:
Equity is a challenging problem that our institutions at all levels need to work for years to address. It’s a tough one to address in the secondary classroom without colleagues from Kindergarten up fighting the good fight to tackle unconscious bias and stereotypes, as well as exposing students from underrepresented groups to computational thinking in contexts that align with their interests. There are things I can do at my level to make my electives appealing to students, as well as support colleagues in exploring computational thinking themselves, but on some level, this requires vision from the district or ministry level to put into place and prioritize for all grades, so I feel like I’ll be stuck muddling along with my overwhelmingly male elective classes for the foreseeable future.
Authentic Tasks
Many an engineering educator has asked a crowd of children: “Who saves more lives: engineers or doctors?”. Obviously, there is room for debate here, but the argument goes that it is the engineer who ensures safe infrastructure to keep folks from needing a doctor in the first place, not mention designing the tools and technologies that doctors use on a daily basis.
I think that equity must also tie into our choice of task. One of the stereotypes people have about CS is that it is detached from real-world problems, that there is no room for helping others. By using computational thinking in authentic, community-based problem solving, we can help dispel this notion. For example (yes, I always use this example), the do your :bit challenge ties computational thinking into the Global Development Goals and local action on those goals.
In addition to asking “how can we get girls and women to participate in tradi-
Buechley et al 2008, p. 431
tional computer science and support them once they are there?”, we should ask: “how can we integrate computer science with activities and communities that
girls and women are already engaged in?”
In their incredible essay Making Through the Lens of Culture and Power: Toward Transformative Visions for Educational Equity, Vossoughi et al. (2016) examine how we often try to fit students from diverse backgrounds and cultural contexts into a white, western-dominated framework (in this case, making, but applicable to others) without critically looking at how how our frameworks align (or don’t) with other cultures’ ideas. There’s a lot of great ideas in that essay that are outside of the scope of this post, but one idea they critique is the concept that technology is an end to itself – for people with means, they tinker and make things for fun, and if inspiration strikes, then they take what they make and sell it.
The broader purpose of making, according to this discourse, is to cultivate and harness individual capabilities that will ultimately contribute to corporate agendas and strengthen existing economic structures.
Vossoughi et al. 2016, p. 208
Conceptions of making don’t line up with folks making clothes or weaving baskets because they need to, nor do they really challenge the power structures that keep broad swathes of society in poverty. It’s not as though we don’t have the tools to create experiences that connect computational thinking to the everyday creations that aren’t traditionally valued – for example, wearable microcontrollers like the Lilypad Arduino allow for students to combine sewing, electronics, and coding (Buechley et al. 2008). In computational thinking, as in making, we need to critically analyze whose experiences are implicitly valued in our task choices (and whose are not).
Sources
Buechley, L., & Eisenberg, M. (2008). The Lilypad Arduino: Toward wearable engineering for everyone. IEEE Pervasive Computing, 7(2), 12-15. doi:10.1109/mprv.2008.38
Geiger, R. S. (2017). Summary analysis of the 2017 Github Open Source Survey. doi:10.31235/osf.io/qps53
K-12 Computer Science Framework Steering Committee. (2016). K–12 Computer Science Framework. Retrieved May 09, 2021, from https://k12cs.org/
Kafai, Y. B. (2016). From Computational Thinking to Computational Participation in K-12 Education. Communications of the ACM, 59(8), 26–27. https://doi-org.proxy.queensu.ca/10.1145/2955114
Van Deursen, A., Roosen, J., et al. (2019, January 4). JPacman-Framework (Version 8.1.1) [Source Code]. Retrieved May 8, 2021, from https://github.com/SERG-Delft/jpacman-framework
Vossoughi, S., Hooper, P. K., & Escudé, M. (2016). Making through the lens of culture and power: Toward transformative visions for educational equity. Harvard Educational Review, 86(2), 206-232. doi:10.17763/0017-8055.86.2.206