CS + X

This week was the first week that I did not get to see students with the Upward Bound program, so I was able to reflect on the curriculum and send a reflection report To Professor Gertner.

To start, I would just like to say how much I appreciate programs like Upward Bound because they expand participation in computing in a fun and safe environment. Well I do not know a lot about the other subjects and internships the students were able to participate in, I can say for certain that the students talked excitedly about their other programs. It is experiences like this that build confidence in students and their ability to learn in new subject areas. I hope that throughout their time with the Upward Bound program they discovered new activities that they enjoy and potentially an exciting future career path.

In my reflection report I talked about the strengths of the computer science curriculum that we presented to students, especially the times where we were able to work as a full group and have active and interactive participation. The students really enjoyed the times where we would go through programs together and then have time to work with one another and collaborate. The daily dojos were popular because each of the worksheets had a menu of choices they could pick from, so they were able to choose what they wanted to work on and they enjoyed sharing their results with others. They also enjoyed the game based learning of the quiz that I created and they enjoyed getting to know each other and us through the icebreaker game. I can say for certain that when I was a teacher the most important part of teaching is that first initial stage of relationship building, and it is hard to do when you are only seeing students for a short period of time.

Something to consider for the next cohort of students is the scope and sequence of the curriculum. Although our students rose to the occasion, it is difficult for students to understand the concepts of using a programming language such as Python, learn about the intricacies of the field of linguistics, and then synthesize those together for a final project. If we had more time, for example if we got to see our students every day for 3 weeks, I believe that this curriculum could be very successful because it allows students the time to absorb the concepts and then demonstrate their learning. I do believe this project would benefit from a more narrow scope where students are only responsible for a smaller fraction of the concept so they can feel more confident demonstrating their mastery.

Well I was doing reflecting, I had an idea that I would like to suggest for the Upward Bound program. I understand that the students are in different classes such as history, World Language, Aerospace, and computer science, so I think it would be interesting to consider a cross collaboration experience that would result in one artifact of learning that synthesizes all of those courses together. The students would take the concepts they learn from one class to another and have more in-depth knowledge than if each class was doing a different project. When I was a music teacher I would often work with the language arts teachers to create a poetry and songwriting unit that would borrow ideas from both to show that all the subjects are connected and interesting ways. I believe this would fall perfectly into the upward bounds mission statement to prepare students for exciting careers and to show them the possibilities of professional life and how Nuance they can be.

Study Skills and Belonging

The team was not able to meet this week unfortunately, so I was able to complete the transcriptions and the keyword identification. Two resources that kept popping up in these final seven interviews where the practice exam was and the textbook.

Many of the students start their studying process with the textbook, and they reread the chapters when it is initially assigned and also a few days before the examlet. Two of the students talked about how the textbook is an all-encompassing, comprehensive resource that they felt that after reading the assigned passages in the textbook they did not need to use any other resources besides the practice examlet to prepare for the exam. Conversely, two students mentioned that the textbook was important but also difficult to understand and they felt like they needed to seek out outside external resources in order to be able to have the foundation to be able to go back and understand the textbook. So it may be the case that the textbook is a great resource to use but perhaps some students will need additional support to be able to get into the technical reading that is required of them. I think this is important because when I was a teacher I would use literacy techniques to be able to help all students read and comprehend passages, and I noticed that some of the passages required some previous knowledge to be able to parse through it effectively. Perhaps this textbook makes so much functions on previous classes taken or previous math knowledge that may be superficial for some students but for other students require additional resources and support.

The students mentioned how important it was to go through the practice exam was before the exam for a multitude of reasons. One reason is because the layout of the practice exam it is very similar to how it will be on the exam. Other students mentioned that the concepts on the exam that were a good indicator of what was going to be evaluated on. And lastly other students appreciated the practice exam was because it gave them many opportunities to demonstrate their learning and get that immediate feedback. The practice examlets are a combination of multiple choice and free response, so many students had their notes beside them as they went to complete the practice examlets so they had that reference. Other students had the textbook nearby so they could reference formulas and Concepts if they got stuck.

Two resources that had more lukewarm reviews were the lecture videos and the study problems. Students were not utilizing the lecture videos because they felt that the information was presented to them already in the textbook and that sometimes the lecture videos felt redundant due to that. Other students did not utilize the lecture videos because they felt it confused them even more and so they would go back to do more reading. And lastly some students felt that they could get the ideas presented in the lecture videos through the accompanying lecture notes so they did not spend time watching the lecture when they could just read the notes.

The study problems also had positive and negative reviews. The general consensus is that the study problems are way more difficult than what is on the examlet. So it appears that some students were able to complete them with either help from the Tas and office hours, or friends and classmates, or simply by themselves. Other students ignored them completely when they figured out that these problems were much harder than was what expected of them and they decided to invest their time in other areas to study. Because so many students did not utilize office hours due to the setup of the Town Hall style question and answer, many students simply did not try to do things that were out of their comfort zone with regards to the study problems. I hope that the college reconsiders the structure of this course because there are a lot of things that it is doing well but it appears that a lot of students did not feel comfortable attending these office hours and discussion sections.

General Reflections

I am grateful for my time that I got to participate and teach with Upward Bound, and I am grateful to have known and worked with the students. They showed me a lot about what it means to be a computer science teacher and how to support learning in a more mathematical field. There are Concepts that I would have liked to explain better and moments that I could have done something differently, so I feel more prepared for the next time that I am in a position to help support another’s learning. I hope I will be able to continue to work with Upward Bound, and I have several ideas for a new experiential curriculum that I would like to share with the team. I think learning how to do computer science can be a little intimidating especially when it requires background in math, so I think some interesting beginner activities could revolve around game-based learning because it was so successful when we implemented it in our lessons. For example one of the beginning activities could be to generate a simple rock paper scissors game with a computer; perhaps we could even try to do some game building in a language such as Scratch that is designed for beginners.

This coming week I would like to revisit my sentiment analysis. It is difficult for a machine to figure out the feelings of a person because sometimes the sentences can be long and the points can be varied. For example a student could start out a sentence talking about how the study problems were useless in a waste of time and then finish the sentence by saying they still did them. So with this conflicting information it is difficult to assign a single value for the sentiment. So perhaps I could look at the code and try to gather fractions of a sentence to see if that impacts the accuracy of the sentiment analysis.