STEM is Hard but Valuable
SUPERGIRL
There’s an 11-year-old girl I know and she’s a force to be
reckoned with. She’s not your average kid, she’s been coding in Python and scripting
HTML from the age of 8 and she’s completed the National Computer Science School
Intermediate Challenge with a perfect score. She’s no fading violet either. She’s
a scout, she competes in martial arts tournaments and rides a road bike at nearly
30 km/hr and when she occasionally falls off she wipes the blood off and gets
right back on again. She is resilient and she has some mad skills.
The other day she was working on a harder competition and was
faced with a coding problem she didn’t know how to solve. She burst into tears.
She said she didn’t feel good enough at programming.
RESEARCH?
All of the research I’ve read suggests that confidence issues
in Technology and Maths stem from bad experiences when young, negative
attitudes to technology and Maths from female role models such as primary
school teachers, negative attitudes to technology and maths from the mother –
none of these applied here. And maybe it was a bad example, maybe she was tired?,
having a bad day?, it’s by no means a representative sample but it struck me
none-the-less. How can this happen? How can a capable, resilient, skilled young
girl feel so overwhelmed by a tricky coding problem? And what hope is there for
the rest of us?
IS THE ON-RAMP
TOO STEEP
I’ve told this story to people I know.
My teacher friends say – the problem was too hard, the
student needed more scaffolding, the on-ramp was too steep. Who agrees with
that? I don’t really think so. I know the kinds of problems this
kid has solved in the past – I think it *was* appropriately on-ramped and I’m a
bit of a geek so I enjoy this stuff but, if you scaffold things too much I
think it takes the fun away and makes learning a tutorial. People get
frustrated by tutorials.
My tech friends have a different take. The kid cared too much
about the mark and not enough about the problem. It was a motivation issue.
This feels true. We heard about this kind of thing from Carol
Dweck. The kid was crossing that line to the Fixed mindset rather
than the Growth mindset. She was pushing herself forward to achieve an
arbitrary outcome – it was an intellectual exercise. The only reason to
complete the problem was to say she completed the problem. Let’s look at the
rest of her life and see if we can determine her motivation in other things.
She is an active Scout. Scouts involves social games and
problem solving and small
fabric arbitrary outcomes that you can sew onto your uniform. You can
even get a small fabric arbitrary outcome for sewing other arbitrary outcomes
onto your uniform. But I get the feeling that the motivation is more playing
around in the dirt and lighting fires than it is about the badges and research
seems to agree with me. There’s a fun article by Deci, Koestner and Ryan that
argues with the previous debunking of the original paper that posits that
badges probably undermine intrinsic motivation (I like tracking the arguments) --
but it all kind of depends on the learner and the type of learning.
The next thing we know about the kid is that she trains in
Martial Arts. Martial Arts definitely involves extrinsic motivation but it’s by
no means arbitrary. If you watch a Martial Arts class you see that the belt
colours are more a representation of levels like in a computer game. They are
motivating because they define the ranking in the class and the social
structures are all built around the levelling. Those high-ranked colours earn
you some respect but they’re also not the reason you work hard, they just keep
track of where you are on the continuum!
Finally, we know that she rides a bike, not in competitions
but for the joy of getting from one place to another fast. It’s not about
ranking or winning (except she thinks it’s awesome to “beat” her brother -- but
doesn’t everyone?).
None of these things only derive a sense of accomplishment
from the checking off of tasks – the completion of the next pre-defined
difficult problem. But so often our school type problems – and particularly abstract
STEM challenges do.
So how can we help our girl to continue to grow her skills in
STEM without breaking her spirit? We must make the problems meaningful to her.
The Digital Technologies Curriculum and the draft Curriculum for NSW Digital Technologies
both talk about “real world” problems.
REAL WORLD
So, what is a “real world”
problem?
Dan Meyer is one of my favourite educational bloggers. He’s a
former maths teacher who did a TEDx talk on how we should do Maths differently –
it went kind of edu-viral a few years back. He makes a distinction between real
world problems and interesting problems. He says the interesting problems are
the ones that hook the kids to have them want to know the answer – or indeed to
come up with their own questions. This is actually how I define “real world” problems
when I read them in the syllabus documents. This reminds me of the Melbourne
Declaration which states “Successful learners– are creative, innovative and
resourceful, and are able to solve problems in ways that draw upon a range of
learning areas and disciplines.”
STEM-EMBEDDED
AUTHENTIC PROJECTS
The place to start is STEM embedded in authentic projects. The
challenge our original little girl was faced with was a difficult file
processing problem. Now I don’t teach many 11 year olds but I do teach a bunch
of high schoolers and in a bunch of my classes we have to do file processing with code. I
can teach the iteration and what to do with strings line by line and slowly
watch the kids’ eyes glaze over as I lose them. Or I can have them make a computer game. Once
students have been making a game for a while and they’ve had some success and
let their friends play some of the early levels they start to ask how they can
keep track of high scores even after the program is closed down. How can they
do that? Computers don’t do a good job of holding onto information after the
power has turned off. – The students need to do it by writing to a file. And
when they open the game the next time the first thing that game has to do is
open up that file and process the information in it. Suddenly the kids care
about file processing and teaching them how to solve those problems are no
longer my idea but theirs – it’s practically no longer teaching!
So all we have to do is make our students care about each
individual content dot point and everything will be rosy! Except…
THE
SITUATION SO FAR
In primary schools Science and Technology make up a minimum
of 6% of indicative teaching time. The Technology portion is 3% (charitably) In
the shape of the new curriculum Technology is made up of Design Technologies
and Digital Technologies so that leaves 25 minutes per week to work on a
programming project. Tricky to get to those moments where the students are
begging to learn the thing they need to solve the next problem.
Google talks about future careers being CS + X where CS is
computer science and X is whatever it is you’re interested in. I think this needs
to be reversed in our classrooms, particularly in primary schools. Our focus is
not to make hundreds of thousands of computer scientists but to teach students
authentic problem solving and algorithmic thinking and STEM is just a hammer
with which to hit that particular nail. Steve Jobs once said “Everyone should
learn how to code because it teaches you how to think.” So let’s enrich Maths, English,
Arts, HSIE with projects that incorporate STEM. Designing projects that allow
us to do double duty lets us make the most of the time we have with the
students.
PROJECTS
I have a few projects I can talk about here as integrated
with STEM to make the best of time with students while also meeting DT outcomes.
The first is a Mandatory Technology project in the area of textiles that has
been adapted to incorporate computational thinking and coding. The students
were encouraged to design their own outline and features for a monster soft toy with ahidden switch and soft circuitry. They then worked with Arduino version of C to
write a simple program. Some of the students extended their project to
incorporate a squeeze switch to change the sequence. The good thing about this
project is that it’s student defined (within a defined framework) it hits the
required outcomes, it’s engaging, it extends the original textiles project and
it’s scalable to meet the skills of the students. The difficulties with this
project were the frustration with sewing unshielded conductive thread with
beginners stitching… can you say zigzags and short circuits? Debugging of the
circuit is only possible once complete lines of stitching are done but then fixing
that requires the unpicking of complete lines of stitching. Unpicking is very
hard on motivation. It’s slow and arduous and we watched students become slightly
less enamoured with their monster with each time they had to unpick anything.
The second case is a cross curricular project centring around
Health from PDHPE. The students spend 19 weeks (totalling about 30 lessons) learning
the components of health and how they’re measured. They also concurrently learn
about using MIT Appinventor and being reminded of the design cycle by following
the design thinking model. The students then define their line of inquiry,
choose a target audience and develop
an app that meets the need of their target audience to try to improve a
component of health. The benefits of this project are that it is student led,
they choose their audience, their area of health, their motivation techniques
and they use the LMS to learn the skills they need Just in Time. The detriments
were that the time was quite short all told and the students had pretty high
expectations for what they could achieve in that time. ---
It is a problem these days. Even when I first started teaching
the skills required to make something that looked professional were within the
grasp of the average computing student but now everything is so slick and the
User experience is so good that there’s a chasm between what our students can
make in the time allocated and what they see on their phones every day. ---
That said it was an extremely successful project and we’re
looking forward to running it again.
One of my favourite concepts was an
app where young children were encouraged to move more to earn points to get water
and food and accessories for their pet cactus. Cactuses are way cool with 14-year-olds right now.
The showcase was a “shark tank” like presentation where the
students showed their Minimum Viable Product to a panel of judges to ask for
investment (the most persuasive presentation got a gold bar {of chocolate}). This
project shows that you can meet outcomes from very disparate KLA silos. It
showcases the best of the idea behind X + CS. But STEM is still hard.
WHAT'S NEXT?
I believe that things are going to get easier. As Digital
Technologies implementation gets smoother and teachers become more comfortable
with the content, as senior primary teachers can start to rely on the kids they
teach to come into upper primary with sound algorithmic thinking skills from
lower years and high school teachers can build even further. The kids are going
to be bouncing off the walls if we give them a Scratch project or Blocks based
App inventor project – they’ll want to break any benchmark we set them now.
The girl from the beginning of my story is fine. She slept on
it, asked some questions, picked herself up, wiped off the blood and cracked
the problem the next day. But it’s still not the best way to motivate a student
to push themselves in STEM learning.
Authentic real world projects involving student autonomy that
are well designed to cover syllabus outcomes and allow for embedded just in
time learning. I just said that so quickly it sounds almost easy. I don’t think
that’s easy that’s what they say in the tech biz is a non-trivial problem. Extremely
difficult but not impossible. So I’m going to leave you with a question to take
home just before I open for questions from you. Can you think of ways to incorporate
authentic STEM enriched
projects into your non-tech units?
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