14 research outputs found
Glass-Boxing Computing With Electronic Textiles: Teaching And Learning With Notional Machines In An Introductory Computing High School Classroom
No full textDeveloping a conception of the invisible and abstract internal processes that translate computer programs into observable outcomes is essential yet challenging for learners. Notional machines are simplified notions that educators adopt to make transparent or glass-box program dynamics to learners while teaching. In this thesis, I examined teaching and learning with notional machines during a 14-week online introductory electronic textiles unit in a charter high school. Two broad groups of research questions guided this dissertation—one, exploring teaching, and two, examining student learning with notional machines. Research questions on teaching included: (1) What notional machines did the teacher adopt? (2) What forms did the notional machines take in practice? Research questions on student learning included: (3) How did students interact with notional machines during the unit? (4) Did notional machines support students’ development of computing conceptual agency? If so, how? (5) How did students’ conceptions of computing systems shift after learning with notional machines? Multimodal data—online class recordings, student pre- and post-unit interviews, and student-generated artifacts—were qualitatively analyzed to answer the questions posed. Overall, observational data analysis provided one of the first frameworks to capture notional machines in practice. Notional machines belonged to one of the five themes depending on the electronic textiles concept being simplified and differed along the levels of granularity. Also, notional machines took two distinct representational forms—verbal explanations and participatory roleplays. Analysis of student interactions with notional machines highlighted the agentic roles learners took: questioning, adopting, explaining notions, and roleplaying program execution. Further, student pre- and post-unit interviews indicated that students’ conceptions of program dynamics shifted from being simplistic to more advanced in a set of everyday physical computing devices, showing promise for student sense-making of computing devices outside their immediate programming context. Overall, findings from this study point to future research directions to further explore teaching and learning with notional machines and their potential to expand computing learning beyond classroom contexts
Program Comprehension with Physical Computing: A Structure, Function, and Behavior Analysis of Think-Alouds with High School Students
No full textDisaggregating Asian Identities through Case Studies of High School Students in Electronic Textiles Classrooms
No full textWhile most of the identity-related work within STEAM education has examined learners from different marginalized groups, Asians and Asian Americans are some of the least studied identities despite the underrepresentation of several Asian sub-groups within STEAM fields. Educational research has embraced the “model minority” myth, adopted a White-colonial gaze, aggregated Asians into a single “racial group”, and treated it as a dominant group within STEM fields. By resisting the White-centered, colonial simplifications and also conducting ways of engaging with learners that identify with Asian communities, we present four case studies of “Asian” high school students in two STEAM classrooms (which were both implementing an electronic textiles unit) in an attempt to disaggregate and to highlight the diversity and complications in the the otherwise simplified “Asian” identity. We answer the question of how electronic textiles projects support students’ “Asian” identity expression, negotiation, and development. We share how our cases accentuated the role of materiality and pedagogical context in opening possibilities for students to narrate stories of historical, cultural, and familial significance while navigating their complicated “Asian” (or not) identities. We discuss the implications of our findings for the research, design, and practice within STEAM activities to better support the highly diverse and invisibly marginalized Asian-origin students
Communicating Computational Concepts and Practices Within High School Students’ Portfolios of Making Electronic Textiles
No full textPortfolios have recently gained traction within computer science education as a way to assess students’ computational thinking and practices. Whereas traditional assessments such as exams tend to capture learning within artificial settings at a single point in time, portfolios provide more authentic opportunities to document a trajectory of students’ learning and practices in everyday contexts. Furthermore, because communication itself has been defined as an important computational thinking practice, portfolios give students a place to practice this skill in the classroom. In this study, we report on the implementation of a digital portfolio with a class of 21 high school students used to capture the process of creating of an electronic textile mural project. While students’ understanding of computational concepts were only partially captured within the portfolios, their engagements with computational practices—such as debugging and iteration—were better highlighted. Much of this was due to the students’ existing communicative strategies themselves, both in terms of how precise they were in describing issues, as well as how they leveraged images and code to explain their process. Recommendations for designing more effective portfolio assessments are discussed, which include greater emphasis on creating shared classroom discourse, and leveraging students’ existing experiences with multimedia
