TITLE: Problems Are The Thing
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: March 14, 2005 2:47 PM
DESC: The era of toy problems should pass. Let's make learning to make software be about *something*.
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BODY:
In my
last blog,
I discussed the search for fresh new examples
for use in teaching an OO CS1 course. My
LazyWeb
request elicited many interesting suggestions,
some of which have real promise. Thanks to
all who have sent suggestions, and thanks for
any others that might be on the way!
While simple graphical ball worlds make for
fun toy examples, they don't seem as engaging
to me as they did a few years back. As first
demos, they are fine. But students these days
often find them too simplistic. The graphics
that they can reasonably create in the first
course pale when compared to the programs they
have seen and used. To use ball world, we
need to provide infrastructure to support
more realistic examples with less boilerplate
code.
Strategy and memory games engage some students
quite nicely. Among others, I have used Nim,
Simon, and Mastermind. Mastermind has always
been my favorite; it has so many wonderful
variations and offers so many opportunities
to capitalize on good OO design.
Games of all sorts seem to engage male students
more than female students, which is a common
point of conversation when discussing student
retention and the diversity of computer science
students. We need to use a broader and more
interesting set of examples if we hope to attract
and retain a more broader group of students.
(More on whether this should be an explicit goal
later.)
I think that this divide is about something
much more important than just the interests of
men and women. The real problem with games as
our primary examples is that these examples are
really about nothing of consequence.
Wanting to work on such a problem depends almost
solely on one's interest in programming for
programming's sake. If students want to do
something that matters, then these examples
won't engage their interest.
This idea is at the core of our desire to create
a new sort of CS 1 book. As one of my readers
pointed out in an e-mail, most introductory
programming instruction isn't about anything,
either. It "simply marches through the features
of whatever language is being used" at the time.
The examples used are contrived to make the
language feature usable -- not always even
desirable, just usable.
Being about nothing worked for
Seinfeld,
but it's not the best way to help students learn
-- at least not if that's all we offer them.
It also limits the audience that we can hope to
attract to computing.
So much of computer science instruction is about
solutions and how to make them, but the solutions
aren't to anything in particular. That appeals
to folks who are already interested in the geeky
side of programming. What about all those other
folks who would make good computer scientists
working on problems in other domains? Trying to
create interesting problems around programming
techniques and language features is a good idea,
but it's backward.
Interesting problems come from real domains.
I learned the same lesson when studying AI as
a graduate student in the 1980s. We could build
all the knowledge-based systems we wanted as toys
to demonstrate our techniques, but no one cared.
And besides, where was the knowledge to come from?
For toy problems, we had to make it up, or act as
our own "domain experts". But you know, building
KBS was tougher when we had to work with real
domain experts: tax accountants and chemical
engineers, plant biologists and practicing farmers.
The real problems we worked on with real domain
experts exercised our techniques in ways we did
not anticipate, helping us to build richer theories
at the same time we were building programs that
people really used. I thank
my advisor
for encouraging this mindset in our laboratory
from its inception.
Real domain problems are more likely to motivate
students and teachers. They offer rich interconnections
with related problems and related domains. Some
of these problems can be quite simple, which is
a good thing for teaching beginning students. But
many have the messy nature that makes interesting
ideas matter.
At OOPSLA last year,
Owen Astrachan
was touting the new science of networks as a
source of interesting problems for introductory
CS instruction. The books
Linked
and
Six Degrees
provide a popular introduction to this area of
current interest throughout academia and the
world of the Web. Even the idea of the
power law
can draw students into this area. I recently
asked students to write a simple program that
included calculating the logarithm of word
counts in a document, without saying anything
about why. Several students stopped by, intrigued,
and asked for more. When I told them a little
about the power law and its role in analyzing
documents and explaining phenomena in economics
and the Web, they all expressed interest in
digging deeper.
Other problems of this sort are becoming popular.
We have started an undergraduate program in
bioinformatics and have begun to explore ways
to build early CS instruction around examples
from that domain. The availability of large
databases and APIs opens new doors, too.
Google
and
Amazon
have opened their databases to outside
programmers. At
last year's ITiCSE conference
the invited talks all focused on the
future of CS instruction by going back
to a time in which computing research
focused on applied problems.
If you've been reading here for a while,
then you have read about the importance
of context in learning before. A big
part of
Alan Kay's talks
there focused on how students can learn
about the beauty of computing through
doing real science. His
eToys
project has students build simulations
of physical phenomena that they can
observe, and in doing so learn a lot
about mathematics and computation. But
this is a much bigger idea in Kay's
work. If you haven't yet, read his
Draper Prize talk,
The Power Of The Context.
It speaks with eloquence about how people
have great ideas when they are immersed in
an environment that stimulates thought and
connections. Kay's article says a lot about
how the working conditions in lab foster such
an environment, and perhaps most importantly
the people. In an instructional setting the
teacher and fellow students define most of
this part of the environment. Other people
can be a part of the environment, too, through
their ideas and creations -- see my
article on Al Cullum
and his catchphrase "a touch of greatness".
But the problems that we work on are also an
indispensable element in the context that
motivates people to do great work. In his
Draper Prize talk, Kay speaks about how his
Xerox PARC lab worked with educators, artists,
and engineers on problems that mattered to
them, along with all the messy
distractions that those problems entail.
Do you think that the PARC folks would have
created as many interesting tools and ideas
if they had been working "Hello, World" and
other toy problems of their own invention?
I don't.
Alan's vision in his OOPSLA talks was to create
the computing equivalent of Frank Oppenheimer's
Exploratorium
-- 500 or more exciting examples with which
young people could learn about math, science,
computation, reading, and writing, all in
context. With that many problems at hand, we
wouldn't have to worry as much about finding
a small handful of examples for use each semester,
as every student would likely find something
that attracted him or her, something to engage
their minds deeply enough that they would learn
math and science and computing just to be able
to work on the problem that had grabbed a hold
of them. The real problem engages the students,
and its rich context makes learning something
new worthwhile. Whenever the context of the
problem is so messy that distractions inhibit
learning, we as instructors have to create
boundaries that keep the problem real but let
the students focus on what matters.
Having students work on real problems offers
advantages beyond motivation. Remember the
problem of attracting and retaining a wider
population of students? Real problems may
help us there, too. We geeks may like programming
for its own sake, but not everyone who could
enrich our discipline does. Whatever the
natural interests and abilities of students are,
different kinds of people seem to different
values that affect their choice of
academic disciplines and jobs. This may explain
some of the difficulty that computer science has
attracting and retaining women. A
study at the University of Michigan
found that women tend to value working with and
for people more than men, and that this value
accounted at least in part for women tend to
choose math and CS careers less frequently: they
perceive that math and CS are less directly about
people than some other disciplines, even in the
sciences. If women do not have this perception,
many of our CS1 and 2 courses would give it to
them right away. But working on real problems
from real domains might send a different signal:
computing provides an opportunity to work with
other people in more different ways than just
about any other discipline!
I know that this is one of the reasons I so
loved working in knowledge-based systems. I
had a chance to work with interesting people
from all over the spectrum of ideas: lawyers,
accountants, scientists, practitioners, ....
And in the meantime I had to study each new
discipline in order to understand it well enough
to help the people with whom I worked. It was
a constant stream of new and interesting ideas!
I don't want you to think that no one is using
real problems in their courses. Certainly a
number of people are. For example, check out
Mark Guzdial's media computation approach
to introductory computing courses. Media
computation -- programs that manipulate images,
sounds, and video -- seems like a natural way
to go for students of this generation. I think
an example of this sort would make a great
starting point for my group's work at ChiliPLoP
next week. But Mark's project is one of only
a few big projects aimed in this direction.
If we are to reach an Exploratorium-like 650
great CS 1 examples, then we all need to pitch
in.
One downside for instructors is that working
with real problems requires a lot of work up
front. If I want to use the science of networks
or genomics as a my theme for a course, then
I need to study the area myself well in advance
of teaching the course. I have to design all
new classroom examples -- and programming
assignments, and exam questions. I will
probably have to build support software to hide
my students from gratuitous complexity in the
domain and the programming tools that students
use.
Another potential downside for someone at a small
school is that an applied theme in your course
may appeal to some students but not others, and
your school can only teach one or a few sections
of the course at any one time. This is where
Alan Kay's idea of having a large laboratory of
possibilities becomes so appealing.
This approach requires work, but my
ChiliPLoP
colleagues seem willing to take the plunge.
I'll keep you posted on our efforts and results
as they progress.
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