I have divided the course into three broad areas that I think are most important to cover: computer science (as a discipline: concepts like variable scope, Boolean logic, object-oriented design, and so on), programming in Java (concrete details like how a for loop works or how to declare a class) and design and implementation. Design and implementation is actually really the core of my fascination with this course: how do you teach problem solving? And how do you get students to apply those skills.

In doing this, I’m plowing through a lot of articles.

• Jason Tselentis does a great job of identifying the challenge (with a special focus on graphic design problem solving and software, to be honest), although what he’s really talking about has more to do with my general challenge in academic computing: developing able and fearless tinkerers.
• Anthony Cowling goes into much deeper, and more software specific, detail, pushing the idea not just of scaffolded design education, but helping students learn to assess the quality of design (subscription).
• Phillip Greenspun tackles not just the problems of teaching problem solving and design, but discusses MIT course 6.916, on developing web applications with an eye towards developing broadly competent and self-reliant alumni. Again, his basic ethos flows directly into my primary concern in any approach to academic computing: are we teaching a shamanistic approach to computers (”follow these specific steps in this order and it works.”) or are we supporting the development of true independent learners who can sit down and “just figure it out.” Greenspun and I are in the same camp, supporting the latter option.
• Gary Pollice wrote a great article describing his introductory software engineering class — which touches not just on design, but on teamwork. Again, he’s preaching somewhat to the choir as I read about his students working on semester-long courses with real clients.

Of course, the challenge is now to boil down all these design concepts into something that is useful not in a first-year computer science or software engineering undergraduate course, but in a first-semester high school course. How much do my students really need to know about UML, CRC cards, flow charts, eXtreme Programming, incremental development, rapid prototyping, functional requirements and use cases? Not a whole damn lot. Mostly, I want them to learn to enjoy the process of rigorous problem solving as manifest in learning to program a computer.

But I’d certainly like them to not be starting down the garden path of bad habits based on ill-considered pedagogical frameworks.

Ah, for the days of Pascal as a first programming language!

I’m painfully aware of my propensity to put off inordinate amounts of work for my next medium-sized chunk of free time. My canonical example is the year in college that I put off about a dozen errands until my Thanksgiving break. Boy howdy, was it ever a rude awakening to realize that Thanksgiving break is only about three or four extra days on the weekend, and probably at least two to four of those days are chock full of commitments to family and friends. Not so much time.

With that in mind, I was fascinated by Steve Pavlina’s article on calculating your fudge factor: that ineffable amount that your horseback estimate of the time necessary for a project is off from reality. My fudge factor is approaching 1.0 for things like driving time — and has been for years. But for coding projects and curriculum development, it might be closer to 3-10 (as in, it takes me 3 to 10 times as long as I plan for).

I’m not convinced that I have Steve’s discipline, but I rather suspect that I can use old data to get some sense of how off I usually am in my time estimates. I have surely made lots of promises archived in my email and then documented my progress (and extensions) in that same medium. Sounds like an interesting project to work on this summer…

Although building an intelligent project monitor that used heuristics to identify project commitments and updates in my incoming and outgoing email and automatically calculated the fudge factor… Now, that could keep me off the street for days at a time. Or weeks. Depends on what my fudge factor is.

I read Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind on my flight from Dallas to Chicago this morning. It turned out to be a shockingly quick read. While I was put off for several chapters by his apparent need to ingratiate himself to left-brain directed skeptics (myself included), I was gratified to find that he did have a clear line of reasoning, rich in examples of why right-brain directed folks will be in greater comparative demand in the coming years. Much like Thomas Friedman, but much, much quicker to get through. And with interesting portfolios to match each of his new six senses.

Ironically, Pink’s last sense is the sense for meaning, touching on what he perceives a general human need for meaning in life beyond, say, comfort or safety — Viktor Frankl was his dramatic example of this. (I have some doubts that this is really a “sense” per se — much like Howard Gardner’s intelligences: they represent ideas that are hard to categorize, so any categorization is necessarily arbitrary.) Pink offers some interesting suggestions for how to try to hone this sense, particularly focused on establishing reflective rituals for oneself. I say ironically, because I just saw that my friend Rachel posted this reflection earlier this week. Way to go Rach!

Right now I’m starting to overhaul my computer science courses for the 2008-2009 school year, while simultaneously talking with my colleague about a potential joint course in 2009-2010. I have a strong personal preference for project-based learning as a teaching tool because I believe that it provides both an engaging and demanding environment in which students are challenged to learn more in order to do more (rather than just to keep me off of their backs). I also think that projects are an ideal forum in which to draw together the disparate strands of a student’s education — helping them to accomplish an integration for which there is rarely, if ever a formal structure at any level of education. (Perhaps the course on How to Make Almost Anything at MIT is the exception.)

Some of this is based on my experience working with summer programs where we pushed students — during their vacations, in the wilderness — to take on an ambitious personal project over the course of the summer. The outcomes of these projects reflected a great deal of real learning, as well as some very idiosyncratic fascinations. I worked with students who were mapping and analyzing the population of our program over the past three-quarters of a century, students who were focused on writing collections of place-based poetry and short fiction, students who were determined to build a new tool that the expeditions could use in years to come. Anything and everything. But the key was that, by and large, students were genuinely excited about these self-designed projects and put in far longer hours and more effort to complete these projects than they would with normal schoolwork (as I know based on some conversation with their school faculties). Engagement and the discovery of an intellectual passion are no trivial accomplishment for an adolescent summer.

Two summers ago, the faculty reading for my school was Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat, a book which raises some interesting questions about the direction of education and economics (I suggest skimming liberally through the early chapters… I think it got interesting around page 600 or so). In large part, Friedman’s argument (which is not novel to the educational world) is that those who are able to integrate knowledge and create and construct new ideas based on that integration will have the whip hand in the world of tomorrow (a phrase normally uttered only in echo chambers).

Where in our schools do we offer those opportunities, practice or guidance for our students to integrate the knowledge that they have learned in each discipline. Certainly our instinctual tendency is often to “silo” that education, each discipline focusing exclusively on its own branch of learning, without substantial interaction with other disciplines, or alternatively engaging with other disciplines only as subservient tools of our own, intrinsically more important, discipline. (God knows I’m guilty of this: I’ll look at anything, so long as I get to write some code to work with it down the road.)

As we each start to move towards a project-based curriculum, rich with alternative assessments and challenges to individual student’s passions and interests… we’re going to burn the little puppies right out. This realization came to me as I walked past the Kennedy School, where I took a superlative accounting course last spring — the only course in which I did not have a final project. None of my final projects connected with any other final project, and several were in areas in which I had but marginal interest. This is not something unique to me: all of our students take classes in which they are only marginally interested, in order to fulfill requirements (yes, I’m starting to think about course selection advising as well!).

If every class is so well-designed that it uses the breadth of our pedagogical knowledge and the entire scope of our educational best practices, no student will be able to take a breath long enough to even start to integrate what it is that he or she is learning through this process. How much more powerful would it be for us to guide our students towards a grand, culminating project that required them to draw on multiple disciplines, integrating their knowledge and uniting their teachers as a team in support of this creative work?

Perhaps this is an overly idealistic rendering of the scene, but as I discussed curriculum planning and projects with my mad scientist friend, it became rapidly apparent that the most interesting projects were those that would require more than just one of us (and often more than just one or two of our friends and colleagues) to accomplish. This will require a culture shift at my school. But it will accomplish three major feats, if done well:

1. Engagement. These projects will be truly fascinating, whether it’s developing a process for fermenting ethanol, building a room-mapping robot or carving giant toltec figures in the landscape.
2. Authentic Challenges. These projects are clearly not artificial: students working on real problems (often with real professionals) are challenged to learn real things. With careful design, they might even learn the real things that we want them to learn!
3. Integration. These projects will drive faculty to role model and guide students through making connections between distinct educational disciplines in new and creative ways, in order to accomplish the overall goal.

So why is there a picture of my cat on a table up above? Because I’m struggling with all of this at once and finding it fairly overwhelming. If you click through and look at the list of texts, you will either wonder if I’m trying to build SkyNet by myself, or if I have technology-induced ADD. I suspect the latter. But my hope is that out of this chaos, I will be able to start to bring first order, and then some new ideas for the coming year. And then maybe I can look at training the cat to stay off the table.

I wonder.