It tolls for thee

On Thursday, I had the opportunity to visit a high school and talk to some students about Computer Science. I brought two of my own students with me. We arrived early so that we could get signed in and set up. As we were getting oriented in our room, there was a piercing monotone played over the PA system. We all assumed that this was the "bell" to change classes, and one of our hosts confirmed that this was true. A few minutes later, the PA played an alternating pitch, a series of tones akin to an ambulance. Indeed, it sounded like an alarm. One of my students started from her seat, and the three of us looked up at each other. Seeing that our host was unperturbed, we asked what that sound indicated. He told us that it was a warning that class-change time was half over.

The school played a terrifying sound over the loudspeaker, and no one was terrified but us.

School seems to be working.

Inquiry

"Conventional wisdom holds that different people learn in different ways. Something is missing from that idea, however, so we offer a corollary: Different people, when presented with exactly the same information in exactly the same way, will learn different things. Most models of education and learning have almost no tolerance for this kind of thing. As a result, teaching tends to focus on eliminating the source of the problem: the student's imagination."

Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown, A New Culture of Learning, 2011, p79.

Education and Industry

Developing software is the process of learning how to develop that piece of software. As in any craft, there are similarities among projects, yet each one is different and each one enriches the creator.

If learning is an explicit goal of software development as well as the means to its end, then what is the difference between industry and education?

The best hypothesis I have is that there's a value-oriented ordering of goals. In business, shipping a product has preference over improving the team; in the academy, improving the individual has preference over completing a project.

As we transition higher education toward a more enlightened, learning-centric model, I think that it will become increasingly important for us to address these issues—especially considering decreasing public support and the administrative desire for additional revenue streams. Are my students more or less than my apprentices?

No answers, just more questions.

Recruitment for the Virginia Ball Center, Spring 2012

(My proposal to the Virginia Ball Center for Creative Inquiry was recently approved, and so begins recruitment. What follows is the statement I will be spreading around campus in order to recruit students into the project. I welcome your feedback on the announcement itself, and I encourage you to share the announcement with any BSU undergraduates who might be interested.)


In Spring 2012, I will be mentoring a team at the Virginia Ball Center for Creative Inquiry (VBC) in a seminar entitled "Games and Learning: The Underground Railroad." We will be exploring the intersection of play and learning within the challenging context of American slavery. The team will work together to design and develop a game based on the Underground Railroad, a game that is both fun and educational, whose playing and enjoyment will result in a deeper understanding of the theme.

This is an ambitious student-driven project, and its success requires a team of talented and dedicated students. Game development requires creativity and interdisciplinary collaboration. We will need artists, writers, programmers, editors, marketers, managers, musicians, and researchers. The input of historians and anthropologists will be as important as that of designers and technologists.

Our community partner for this project is Conner Prairie Interactive History Park. We will also be visiting the Indiana State Museum, the Levi Coffin House, and the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center.

The VBC provides a unique experience in undergraduate education. It is the ultimate immersive learning experience: students spend the entire semester working together on this one project, meeting in the beautiful Kitselman Center off the main BSU campus. Students earn fifteen credits for participating in the VBC seminar, and the VBC staff and I will work with your major and minor departments to ensure that you continue making progress in your studies through your participation.

The application process involves completing a form and providing two letters of recommendation, with interviews following. Application instructions can be found online.

About the faculty mentor: I am an associate professor in the Computer Science department, and I have been researching game design and development with BSU students since Summer 2006. Our most ambitious project to date has been Morgan's Raid, a history education game for Indiana 4th-graders developed over three semesters. I am interested in software development, board games, computer games, and the science of teaching and learning. Much of my recent scholarship has been on what people learn by creating games, and I am excited to work with an interdisciplinary team at the VBC.

Brontosaurus and BDUF

My 4-year-old son loves dinosaurs. He draws them, he pretends to be them, we read about them, we tell stories about them, and today we even we ate pancakes shaped like them. Many contemporary children's books on dinosaurs include types I'm sure I never saw as a child, such as carcharodontosaurus, deinonychus, and one of my favorites, therizinosaurus. My son could also tell you—since it comes up a lot—that there really is not such a thing as a brontosaurus. Turns out, what was called "brontosaurus" was really an apatosaurus, and since the latter name had historic precedent, it was the one that stuck.

Yet, in our family furor for all things dinosaur, we frequently find references to the brontosaurus. My first reaction to such occurrences is usually, "Why don't they know better?" A good follow-up question is, "How would they?" That is, why would the designer of, say, dinosaur-shaped pasta even think to investigate whether or not there really is such a thing as a brontosaurus? Second-order ignorance remains the malady of the ignorant.

My son's love of drawing recently blossomed, and it was initiated by a visit from my father—who, I should mention, is an excellent artist. My dad got my son into drawing, unlocking what must be an artistic skill and passion that skips generations. However, every time my dad drew a tyrannosaur, it was standing upright with its tail on the ground. These were fine drawings in their own right, but they also happened to be wrong. How would my father know that his archetypal dinosaur's posture is scientifically passé?

I was idly considering dinosaurs this morning when an analogy popped into my head: teaching children about brontosaurus is like teaching novice software developers to do Big Design Up Front (BDUF). For years, the status quo assumed software development was like manufacturing, and hence one can measure productivity in man-hours and lines-of-code. As long as you design it right from the beginning, all will go well. Of course, as far back as the 1970's, Fred Brooks was predicting agile methods. Despite the popularity of his essays, I have seen little evidence of their impact (q.v. the CHAOS report) until relatively recently, as "agile" is less frequently used as a profanity. From a modern perspective, we know that software development is the process of learning how to develop that software. By necessity, you know the most about a system when you have finished building it. This is why you always feel like you could do it better if you could do it again, or why you should always build one to throw away.

I look forward to a day when software engineers take a page out of modern children's dinosaur books: any time BDUF is mentioned, there's a an explanation that well-meaning people used to think it was a good idea, but now we realize that its really just a shadow of iterative and incremental design processes. The positive side is that I don't foresee BDUF-shaped pasta ever being included in Software Engineer Mac & Cheese.

CS Ed Week

Today marks the end of 2010 CS Education Week. I could enumerate all the reasons why this is significant, but it's certainly easier for you to just follow that link and see for yourself.

In honor of CS Education Week, I want to reflect a little on how the field of CS Education has impacted me personally and professionally. I have always had a penchant for teaching, possibly because both of my parents were trained to be teachers. (Not that it's the training that matters per se, but that they both had interest and aptitude in the pursuit.) I had several teaching experiences prior to entering graduate school, and I knew that it was something for which I had a passion. However, entry into the academy is not through a focus on teaching, but rather on the individual intellectual pursuits represented by the doctorate. I spent seven years at the University at Buffalo, first on my masters and then on my doctorate. Although I would occasionally talk with my advisor about my interest in teaching, he sagely recommended avoiding teaching until the doctorate was complete: both are at least full-time jobs, and one who begins a lectureship tends to have much more difficulty finishing the dissertation.

I taught a few courses while at UB, but it wasn't until I became an Assistant Professor at Ball State University that I could really focus in on what it meant to be a good teacher. I found it challenging to keep up with my work on JIVE, partially due to the distance from UB and partially due to the stresses of the new job, being as how BSU is not a research-focused institution: with no grad students to work under me, I was unable to keep the pace of research and development.

My interest in design patterns and games led me to explore the intersection of these ideas with students, and this led to my first CS education publication, "Computer Games as a Motivation for Design Patterns," which I presented at SIGCSE 2007. This was my first time attending the conference, but it was an eye-opening experience. I learned more about education research and realized how many more opportunities I could make for significant research, but most importantly, I was inspired by being surrounded by a thousand CS professors who care deeply about student learning. Most professors are good folks who want their students to learn, but the SIGCSE community is different: these are scholars who have devoted their lives to helping make computer science education better. I'm proud and humbled to be among their ranks.

I have also become involved in the Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges, Midwest Region. I think I first went to this conference in 2006, inspired primarily by the idea of bringing a team of undergraduates to the programming competition, even though I didn't know any of the three members of the team. Since then, this has become one of my favorite annual trips, gathering several of our high-achieving students and spending two days chatting about research, education, and life. The regional conference serves a role similar to the international SIGCSE conference: it brings together a vibrant community of dedicated faculty from around the Midwest, and it's always reinvigorating to spend time with them. In fact, this is now my second year as the publicity chair for the conference and my first year as an at-large member of the regional steering committee.

There is a lot of room for improvement in higher education, and so there is a lot of room for improvement in Computer Science education. Thank you to all the scholars who have gone before me and the ones who will come afterwards—this year is my sixth as a professor, and I am proud to have seeded two alumni into CS graduate school who I know will be excellent professors. Thank you to organizations like ACM and IEEE who promote computing. Thanks to CCSC for their support of regional conferences, especially with tight travel budgets being the new norm. Thanks to CSTA for their work in K-12, where there is the greatest need to help students see the value of computational thinking, regardless of their future careers. Thanks to you, dear reader, for considering the value of computing and computer science education.

Future of Education: Challenge Statements

About two weeks ago, I wrote about my six-hour meeting with the BSU Future of Education Task Force. One of the primary outputs of this meeting was a list of ten challenge statements. There's no secret recipe involved, so here they are, in no particular order:

1. How might Ball State University foster learning in college?
2. How might BSU help students embrace serendipity and uncertainty?
3. How might BSU assist/encourage faculty to modernize their teaching?
4. How might BSU provide more opportunities for experiential or immersive learning?
5. How might Ball State University make the educational experience more relevant and interesting for students?
6. How might BSU increase classroom engagement and interaction?
7. How might BSU give students more choice so they can personalize their education?
8. How might Ball State University get faculty to accept the opportunity costs of change?
9. How might BSU align awards and incentives to change teaching and assessment?
10. How might BSU increase awareness of resources to help faculty improve their teaching?

So, dear reader, how might we?

Future of Education Task Force

As you may have read in the Muncie Star Press, I am on the Future of Education task force here at Ball State University. Contrary to the headline, competition from online institutions is not the primary motivation for the task force. Rather, our mission—as articulated by the task force co-chair— is:

Students coming to Ball State now and in the future are more technologically inclined, how do we tap into their expectations and mindsets to create a more relevant and better learning community?

I suggested that this be edited into a more relevant form, to wit:

How do we create a learning community?

Be that as it may, we had a major meeting yesterday, running from 9am until 3pm. The meeting was expertly facilitated by task force member and Entrepreneurship Center director Michael Goldsby. I would like to share here some of the highlights from this meeting.

We began with a SWOT analysis. Michael referred to all of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats explicitly as "facts," and he used continuous numbering over the facts. This strikes me as significant, since I would have naively numbered strengths differently from the weaknesses, but using continuous numbering—and even continuous pagination—emphasized the fact that the ideas are more important than their categories. Several times, a task force member would say a single word or phrase that is known on campus, such as "The Working Well Program." Michael challenged with the simple question, "Why?" That is, he raised the level of discourse by forcing us out of academically-comfortable buzzwords towards meaningful facts. (For example, "The Working Well Program promotes physical and mental health among faculty and staff," a strength of the institution.)

A critical part of effective SWOT, as with brainstorming in general, is supporting divergent thinking by postponing criticism. This can be challenging for any group, and we were no exception. At several points, we devolved into discussion over points rather than supporting the creative brainstorming process. The facilitator was not always able to pull us back out. I have to admit, there was one point where I challenged a fellow task force member on a cited weakness, and it was completely unproductive to the process. I guess it's OK, though, since I did it because of my circumstances and everyone else did it because of who they are.

One of the task force members is Michael O'Hara, whose opinions on higher education I greatly respect even though we don't completely agree. He has a propensity for expressing complex ideas using just the right words, perhaps an artifact of his being both an academic and an actor. During the SWOT analysis, he championed the perspective of higher education as a humanistic endeavor rather than a utilitarian one. This point—the conflict of utilitarianism and humanism in higher education—is a critical aspect of the current debates, and I hope to return to it in later writings.

Another theme of the SWOT was the "placeness" of Ball State University. It is important for us to leverage our brick-and-mortar nature, given that much of our competition is from purely digital institutions. Martha Hunt pointed out that sustainability plays well into this discussion, that having a physical place allows for serious and grounded academic discourse on respect for physical space. As a Computer Scientist, I tend to abstract space and work with intangibles, and so it was good to have a Landscape Architect to bring us down to a discussion of what space really means.

The most challenging and intellectual elements were contributed by Matthew Wilson, whose scholarship as a humanities-minded geographer is directly tied to both virtual and physical space. In my opinion, the most meaningful challenge of the whole SWOT analysis was Matt's call for post-disciplinary thinking. Like the utilitarian vs. humanistic dichotomy, the call for post-disciplinarity cuts to the heart of much of higher education's problems. When a fellow task force member asked for my thoughts on post-disciplinarity, I pointed out that we are in disciplines, but problems, by and large, are not.

After the divergent SWOT analysis, which generated 200 facts in about three hours, we moved to a convergent mode in which each task force member had to select at most five of the greatest importance. The highest vote-getters moved to the next round, which consisted of an articulation of challenge statements of the form,  "How might Ball State University...?" Similar to the divergent-then-convergent SWOT, we started with some 25 challenge statements, each selected three, and the highest vote-getters moved forward. The final step involved the creation of a "map" of challenge statements, connected to their antecendents. As one who is well-versed in graph theory, visual rhetoric, and graph drawing, I saw this last step as particularly subject to manipulation and misintepretation, since we assumed a planarity in the articulation of a wicked problem.

I have many notes on the SWOT analysis in my blue notebook, which could be attributed to the fact that it was in the morning and was done with free coffee on hand. Upon reflection, though, I did find the SWOT the most interesting step, and the rest logically followed. I am not completely convinced that I would not have come up with the same output without investing a full collaborative day into it, but that's not really the point: the point is that now the task force has a shared experience that forms a collectively-owned starting point for the prototyping process.

Speaking of which, prototyping is next. Task force members are being put into teams to iterate through prototypes on the Future of Education. I am eager to see who the task force chairs assemble into groups, though in any case, I plan on using some of my software development tools to assist, definitely user stories and possible risk matrices. Assuming time allows, I will share my prototypes here, for my continued exercise in reflective practice and to invite commentary from the community.

Civilization, War, and Learning

Those of you who follow my Facebook posts have probably figured out by now that I broke down and bought Civilization V. It's the latest by Sid Meier, whose Pirates! is one of the best games I have ever played, but that's a post for another time. For those who are not familiar with the Civilization series, they are turn-based strategy games that follow the development of civilization from ancient times up to the modern age. Although they are a hallmark of PC turn-based strategy gaming---and I love turn-based strategy games---I have never played any games in the series until now.

Last night, I finished my first game of Civ V. I used the default settings, which were for beginning players, and I happened to be playing as the British Empire. My civilization developed much faster than the opposition, probably more because of the low difficulty setting than any clever strategy of mine. There are multiple ways to win the game peacefully: scientific leadership, diplomacy, and cultural development. Because my civilization was advancing so much more rapidly than my opponents, I took the classic gamer's optimization approach: military victory. After all, why wait for my inevitable cultural victory when I can just send my superior army to crush the opposition and annex their land to mine, thereby winning the game?

As my army crushed the opposition, the in-game music turned from pleasantly ignorable and ambient into rather dark and sad compositions. Every time I declared war and sent my troops over their borders, the music set the mood not of a glorious conquest, but of grief and despair. As my navy bombarded coastal cities, they caught fire, and I could hear the screams of civilians. As I destroyed the last city of the Indian empire, Gandhi appeared on the screen and congratulated me on destroying a kind and peaceful people. As I defeated my last opponent, I received the end-game screen, an image of WWI-era soldiers marching over a barren land, and again the music set a somber tone.

Here is a great example of the power of learning in games, following the themes in Koster's Theory of Fun. The game is clearly designed to be fun, and there is a sense in which my military victory was enjoyable, but even more than that, it made me think. The formal elements of the game (the rules) combined elegantly with the dramatic elements (the music and story) to produce a unique experience. Most games I play follow a single hero who single-handedly destroys the vanilla-evil opposition, and there was much rejoicing. In Civ, I actually felt guilty for destroying these other civilizations just so that I could "win."

I hope to be able to draw on this in my current efforts with the Morgan's Raid game (as well as the potential Underground Railroad project), where there is a similar lesson we wish to subtly teach: although the player takes the role of John Hunt Morgan, he is neither inherently a hero nor a villain, but the Civil War was undeniably an ugly and painful thing. We have an interesting design constraint in the game as well. Since it is designed for 4th grade students to play in schools, it's likely that it will be played without music, in crowded labs or during free time. It was the somber music of Civ that moved me the most; I can only wonder what would have happened if I had been playing without my speakers on, since I can never go back to my first experience.