TITLE: SIGCSE Day 2 -- Limited Exposure
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: March 10, 2011  9:21 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
For a variety of reasons, I am scheduled for only two
days at SIGCSE this year.  I did not realize just how
little time that is until I arrived and started trying
to work in all the things I wanted to do: visit the
exhibits, attend a few sessions and learn a new thing
or two, and -- most important -- catch up with several
good friends.

It turns out that's hard to do in a little more than a
day.  Throw in a bout of laryngitis in the aftermath
of a flu-riddled week, and the day passed even more
quickly.  Here are a few ideas that stood out from
sessions on either end of the day.

<EM>Opening Keynote Address</EM>

Last March I blogged about
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2010-03.html#e2010-03-30T20_57_25.htm">
   Matthias Felleisen winning</A>
ACM's Outstanding Educator Award.  This morning, Felleisen
gave the opening address for the conference, tracing the
evolution of his team's work over the last fifteen years
in a smooth, well-designed talk.  One two-part idea stood
out for me: design a <B>smooth progression of teaching
languages</B> that are neither subset nor superset of any
particular industrial-strength language, then <B>implement
them</B>, so that your tools can support student learning
as well as possible.

Matthias's emphasis on the smooth progression reminds me
of Alan Kay's frequent references to the fact that
English-speaking children learn the same language used by
Shakespeare to write our greatest literature, growing
into it over time.  One of his goals for Smalltalk, or
whatever replaces it, is a language that allows children
to learn programming and grow smoothly into more powerful
modes of expression as their experience and cognitive
skills grow.

<EM>Two Stories from Scratch</EM>

At the end of the day, I listened in on a
birds-of-a-feather session about Scratch, mostly in
K-12 classrooms.  One HS teacher described how his
students learn to program in Scratch and then move
onto a "real language".  As they learn concepts and
vocabulary in the new language, he connects the new
terms back to their concrete experiences in Scratch.
This reminded me of a story in one of Richard Feynman's
books, in which he outlines his father's method of
teaching young Richard science.  He didn't put much
stock in learning the proper names of things at first,
instead helping his son to learn about how things work
and how they relate to one another.  The names come
later, after understanding.  One of the advantages of
a clean language such as Scratch (or one of Felleisen's
teaching languages) is that it enables students to
learn powerful ideas by using them, not by memorizing
their names in some taxonomy.

Later in the session, Brian Harvey told the story of
a Logo project conducted back in the 1970s, in which
each 5th-grader in a class was asked to write a Logo
program to teach a 3rd-grader something about fractions.
An assignment so wide open gave every student a chance
to do something interesting, whatever they themselves
knew about fractions.  I need to pull this trick out
of my teaching toolbox a little more often.

(If you know of a paper about this project, please
<A HREF="mailto:wallingf@cs.uni.edu">
   send me a pointer</A>.
Thanks.)

~~~~

There is one unexpected benefit of a short stay: I am
not likely to leave any dynamite blog posts sitting
in the queue to be written, unlike
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2010-03.html#e2010-03-10T19_40_55.htm">
   last year</A>
and
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2008-03.html#e2008-03-13T19_22_31.htm">
   2008</A>.
Limited exposure also limits the source of triggers!
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