I'm curious how we can more efficiently translate research in computing education to open tools, content and practices:
→ How can we balance speed vs. rigor to best serve learners and educators?
Open Education
- De Nepo: Open Ed: A collection of resources & tools for computing education. Some highlights:
- Software as a Second Language - a new project, still in development
- InTechgration
- Helping adapt DeNepo approaches and resources
- Instructional design advice for WDX-189
- Blocks to Text
- Thoughts about helping learners transition from blocks to text
- Also an experiment in hosting essays+slides+demos in one organization
- JS for Open Computing Education. The code is wonky, the ideas are solid:
- Micromaterials! they are focused, they are free, they give automated feedback
Research
- Computing Education Research as a Translational Transdiscipline - video
- Codeschool in a Box: A Low-barrier Approach to Packaging Programming Curricula
- Micromaterials
- Study Lenses
- Mobile App
- Curriculum Packager ...
- Speaking and Paneling at the Migration Summit '23
- Explorotron: an IDE Extension for Guided and Independent Code Exploration and Learning - video
- Automated Questionnaires About Students’ JavaScript Programs: Towards Gauging Novice Programming Processes
- qlcjs libarary
- by Teemu, inspired by Study Lenses
- And, my notes
Professional
- Places where I have designed instruction:
- MIT Emerging Talent (current)
- Elewa (current)
- Moringa School (current)
- Academy
- HackYourFuture Belgium
- Before these, I ran my own classes for 3 years.
- I volunteer for the Migration Summit
- Obligatory Linkedin link
Fun
I've always loved language, linguistics and reading more than I liked playing on computers. So when I program I think more about the writing, the language and the rhetorics than what I'm actually building. My teaching follows this too, I like using rhetorical situations as a foundation for teaching computing.
If Hemingway Wrote JavaScript has influenced my programming life more than any other single source. How to Draw a Bunny is in second place.
My main computery hobby is snippetry → what can you do with under 40(ish) lines at a time? → in any language, programming or otherwise. And I recently discovered Dwitter.
Send me an email if you also think this sounds fun. We could write a snippet together.
You may have heard this before:
Now try this on for size:
Wait. How could you have a hammer if everything is a nail? And wouldn't you be a nail too‽ |
Many years ago this question captured me:
I got stuck at "discipline". It's not so hard to define existing disciplines, but how do you know when you're looking at a new one? or at a hidden discipline? "Discipline" started to make sense when instead of looking for a single thing, I saw combinations of these two things:
I now think of disciplines as conventional combinations. Disciplines have a conventional type of question, and conventional methods for answering them. So what does it mean to be an expert in a discipline? I think it means you've developed the intuition to ask certain questions and are very good at certain methods for finding their answers. no more, no less. |
Where do unexpected questions come from? And how can you find an answer to a question no one understands yet? Conventional disciplines may have constrained themselves to asking questions for which they already now how to search answers. But what if you reject known constraints and set new ones? You'd have to ask unknown questions and find unexpected ways to answer them. |
Try replacing "question" with "problem", and "answer" with "solution":
Listening and empathy are the keys to finding problems you couldn't know exist. Collaborative design is the way to find answers you never expected were possible.
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Here's the question I've spent a few years trying to answer:
Rephrased as a problem:
Hold on. What does it even mean to teach programming? Maybe it means first teaching students to ask questions that can be answered with code. I certainly haven't found the answer yet, but I do have lots of ideas. Let's compare notes. |
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