CS + X

The first session of the Upward Bound started this week, and we met on Tuesday, 6/13 and Thursday, 6/15 with our six students.

On Tuesday, after some technical issues with getting students set up in the computer lab and appropriate Zoom set-ups, the teaching staff introduced themselves and invited the students to do the same. Our students range from incoming freshmen to seniors, and they have different interests and career paths but are united in their interests in math, science, and curiousity about computer science. Afterwards, we jumped into our first activity which was the “Get To Know You” Python program. I wrote a simple function that outputs a randomly generated “get-to-know-you” question, and I walkted the students through reading the program and breaking it down into its base components: defining functions, a variable, and a return statement. Having fun answering questions and comparing answers helped to break the ice! Lastly, we started presenting on Python basics of printing statements, variables, and data types until we ran out of time.

On Thursday, after different technical issues arising from the students’ private access school email and our University email, we were able to finish the presentation on Python basics and begin the Introduction to Python Google Colab notebook that I had prepared. I approached this part of the lesson with the “I do, we do, you do” technique of having the students watch as I demonstrate task, students and I do the task at the same time, and then the students tried the task on their own while Sophia and I floated around the classroom facilitating and helping as needed. The students were eager to get started, and we realized that there were some previous knowledge gaps that created barriers for student success. Some students found difficulty understanding the concepts, while others struggled to find appropriate symbols on the keyboard, so Sophia and I helped the students find their footing.

In the end, we were not able to finish the Introduction to Python notebook due to lack of time. I called a meeting with the team to discuss the students’ progress, and we decided to swap gears and encapsulate the Python knowledge more. While I firmly believe it is important for students to understand Python and its concepts and logic, I ended up being too ambitious with the limited time we had and I lost sight of the scope of the project. We are going to read through the project with the students, identifying and practicing concepts along the way, but our focus is on having students be able to read and edit code rather than write it from scratch.

On Friday, we met with the other group of students from a local high school who will be completing the same curriculum as Upward Bound, but they will be asychronous and will attend our office hours for help and check-ins. In our brief meeting, we again started with team introductions, an overview of the course, student introductions and the ‘Get-To-Know-You” program generator. We will only have three students in this group, and I am looking forward to getting to know them better!

Study Skills and Belonging

I am happy to announce that I have completed hard-correcting all 16 of the transcribed interview texts. Through this process, I saw that the students had similar approaches to studying that involved reading the textbook nearly two weeks in advance of an exam, completing the homework, completing previous years’ examlets, and then taking the examlet. Even though the students repeated their emphasis on the importance of one resource over another, this pattern is beginning to emerge, and I am interested to see if my initial gleaning will be supported or rejected by the statistics. With regards to their sense of belonging, the students seem to be split; one general trend is that this course was very difficult for them and thus they feel less capable of belonging in computer science, while another trend is because of the difficultly, the students feel more comfortable in computer science.

Deb was able to compile my coded transcripts and his coded transcripts into an Excel spreadsheet with a built-in analysis to see where we are closely aligned to tagging keywords and where we were farther apart. He noted that there were times that I tagged something that he missed and vice-versa, so together we are capturing a lot of keywords in the set of our joint analyses. I have begun to compare our tags, and I see that we are tagging strategies and resources very similarly and that we differ when the student is talking about their self-perceptions and course expectations. This makes sense to me because the students in the interview talk about their resources very explicitly, while their perceptions may be more hidden or implicit.

General Reflections

I was not as successful as I thought I would with the Upward Bound sessions with regards to instruction. In my mind, I have many memories of successful lessons with my music students, so I was taken aback when we were not able to move as fast as I had hoped for originally. In hindsight, I wish I had taken another look at the scope of the Introduction to Python and approached it more from a “how can I help students to read through code” than “how can I help students to write code”. If we had more than six meetings, I would have liked for students to take more ownership in the structure of the project in terms of programming, but I now better understand the limitations of what is possible in six sessions. I will adapt accordingly because it is important to be flexible!

Deb and I have had multiple discussions on the complicated process of quantifying qualitative ideas. For example, the students when they are speaking about their experiences and perceptions in the interview, there is emotion behind their words that one would not readily be able to tell from just reading the transcript. With this in mind, I suggested that we could use a sentiment analysis on these responses to better quantify and measure the sentiment and polarity of the students’ responses. I am researching Python libraries that could assist with this, and we will discuss it more this coming week.