CS + X

This week was busy with considering student strengths and needs, designing lesson plan materials, and collaborating with team members.

• Daily Dojo
  • We know from psychology and learning theory that students need to engage with and practice new skills frequently, so I created “bellringer” activities meant to be completed at the start of class. I researched exisiting curriculum and theory from computer science teachers and created my own interpretation based on what I know to be successful learning activities from my time as a teacher.
  • There are four mini lessons designed to have students continuously practice their Python and problem-solving skills and are intended to take between 10 -15 minutes at the start of each class: Dictionaries, NLP, Machine Learning, and Linguistics.
  • Within each lesson, there are three differentiated activities that we as educators will recognize as beginner, intermediate, and advanced; however, when presented to the students, they will be asked to complete the one they are most interested and most comfortable performing. That way, the students can pick which of these, Illini/Blue/Orange, fits their needs and feel successful in their own way. They are encouraged and welcomed to complete more than one of the activities if they have extra time.
  • I chose to have the three activities because I know that differentiation is critical to engage and support students at all levels.
  • With beginner programmers in mind, the coding required is well-structured for them, and the topics are varied to cover NLP, linguistics, and machine learning, and introductory data structures such as dictionaries.
  • In addition, the top of each Google colab Daily Dojo workbook has an uplifting image or quote to encourage a sense of belonging in computer science.
• English Grammar Review Game
  • The final project that my team member has designed works with parse trees and grammar rules to construct English sentences, so I created a review game to help the students remember their parts of speech and English grammar rules.
  • This is a Kahoot, a quiz-based interactive game, to help students remember, relearn, and practice recognizing verbs, nouns, proper nouns, intransitive verbs, transitive verbs, and direct objects.
  • Within this Kahoot, there are informative slides about the concepts of parts of speech, and the trivia questions are applications of those concepts to avoid surface-level recognition and promote deeper learning.
  • This Kahoot will be made available to students who wish to review and practice on their own time outside of class.
• Icebreaker
  • I created a simple Python program that will output a randomly generated “get to know you” question.
  • This program will be presented to students, and we will read through the code that includes the “random” package that the students will need to incorporate in their project. I am pre-teaching this vocabulary and package to students, so when they are ready to formally learn about the random package with regards to the project, they have seen the content before.
  • From the Autism Hub website, they define preteaching as “a strategy that involves teaching students concepts or skills prior to a lesson on the subject”. Even though this website discusses preteaching in terms of supporting students with Autism, preteaching has been shown to be helpful to all students. You can read more here: https://autismhub.education.qld.gov.au/resources/functional-behaviour-assessment-tool/help/pre-teaching#:~:text=Pre%2Dteaching%20is%20a%20strategy,to%20a%20lesson%20on%20geography
  • As I was researching teen-friendly “get to know you” questions I came across some that seemed okay at first, but after I pondered, I decided to keep out to ensure an equitable and safe environment for the students. I saw that some questions can have classist undertones that are exclusionary and othering like “What has been your favorite vacation?”, “How many times has your family been to Disney World?”, “What kind of phone do you have?”, or “What’s your allowance?”

Study Skills and Belonging

This week we met as a team to discuss how we will “code” the interviews. I will use the word “code” or “coding interviews” to mean identifying keywords in the written transcripts, and then commenting a note in Google docs or Microsoft Word to be used for a qualitative analysis later. We aggred to tag noteworthy parts of interview with a main code, a subcode, and then a brief description of the meaning and context.

We decided to use the following main codes: Strategy, Self, Resources, Exam, and Course.

1. Strategy
   • Strategy refers to a student’s plan of action on learning the required course material and earning their desired grades on the examlets (exams).
   • The students have identified the textbook, lecture notes, practice examlets, office hours, study groups, and external resources as some of their strategies.
   • Our preliminary findings show that the subcodes that are most used are for the textbook and practice examlets.
2. Self
   • The Self code is used whenever a student is expressing their opinions, reflections, and perceptions of the course, material, their peers, or themselves.
   • The subcode for belonging is one that we are seeking to understand more. Does this course impact how the student feels about themselves continuing and pursuing computer science?
3. Resources
   • Closely related to strategy, this code is used to mark when the student refers to the tools they use to learn the material and study for examlets.
   • In our first few coded interviews, we are seeing the frequent subcode of textbook as students are expressing the importance of using the textbook as a resource to learn the higher level concepts and how to structure and solve the proofs.
   • Other resources are study groups and peers, social connections (people who have taken the course in previous semesters), and lecture notes.
4. Exam
   • While not utilized as much as the above codes, we felt it was important to create a code for when students talk about the exam structure and frequency.
   • A notable change in this course this previous semester is that the number of examlets drastically decreased and a few students have expressed how this impacted their strategies and resource utilization.
5. Course
   • Similarly not used as often as codes 1, 2, and 3, we create a course code to reflect student’s opinions about the nature of this asychnronous, online course.
   • We will use this code when a student expresses their perceptions on online and asynchronous courses with relation to the course material.

General Reflections

I am enjoying getting to know my team members and the projects at hand, and I have felt empowered to contribute to conversations and express my ideas. They and my advisor have been supportive of my ideas, and it was been encouraging and affirming. I have found that I need to be careful about my time management, as I have found that I lose track of time when I find a part of the project particularly interesting and then have less time for other needed tasks.

Looking forward to the next week, I will be creating extension and literacy activities for CS + X as well as coding more transcripts and beginning to perform quantatitve analysis on the data.