Creative Expression to Motivate Interest in

Computing

Mark Guzdial & Barbara Ericson

School of Interactive Computing

Story

• Programming is hard:

Need motivation to get there

• Rigor, Jobs, Creative Expression

• Media Computation

• Example Lesson with Media Computation

• Along the Pipeline:

From Elementary Students to Teachers

The Rainfall Problem

• Problem: Read in integers that represent

daily rainfall, and printout the average daily

rainfall.

• If the input value of rainfall is less than zero,

prompt the user for a new rainfall amount.

• When you read in 99999, print out the

average of the positive integers that were

input other than 99999.

Results at Yale in Pascal in 1983

% of Students who got

it right

Novices (3/4 through first

course)

14%

Intermediates (3/4

through second course)

36%

Advanced (Jrs and Srs in

Systems Programming)

69%

Programming is hard

• Elliot Soloway and his students replicated this

study several times.

• Others have used this same problem with similar

results (Most recently: Venable, Tan, and Lister,

2009)

• 2001: McCracken Working Group Study

• The first of several Multi-Institutional, Multi-National

(MIMN) studies of CS education

• Out of a possible 110 points, average score was 22.89.

• 2004 Lister Group; 2010 Allison Elliot Tew

"There are three things to

emphasize in teaching: The first is

motivation,

the second is motivation,

and the third is (you guessed it)

motivation."

- Terrel H. Bell, U.S. Secretary of Education,

1981–1985 (Bell, 1995)

So why study programming?

• In Europe and Australasia, Computer

Science is a discipline worthy of rigorous

study.

• In The United States, Computer Science is

about jobs.

Simon Peyton-Jones,

CAS

Emphasis in US: Jobs

1.4M IT jobs in US400K graduates

OCTOBER 5, 2012

Code.org

Why another motivation?

• Who is not motivated by the current

approach?

• Whose talents are we missing out on

because of this motivation?

Thanks

to Brian

Danielak

Media Computation:

A Context to Motivate Learning Computing

• Fall 1999:

All students at Georgia Tech must take a course

in computer science.

• Considered part of General Education, like

mathematics, social science, humanities…

• 1999-2003: Only one course met the requirement.

• Shackelford’s pseudocode approach in 1999

• Later Scheme: How to Design Programs (MIT Press)

• Less than half of students in Liberal Arts, Architecture,

or Business passed this course.

Contextualized Computing Education

• What’s going on?

• Research results: Computing is

“tedious, boring, irrelevant”

• Since Spring 2003, Georgia Tech

teaches three introductory CS

courses.

• Based on Margolis and Fisher’s

“alternative paths”

• Each course introduces computing

using a context (examples,

homework assignments, lecture

discussion) relevant to majors.

• Make computing relevant by teaching it

in terms of what computers are good for

(from the students’ perspective)

Media Computation:

A Context of Digital Expression

• Programming across data abstractions• Iteration as creating

negative and grayscaleimages

• Indexing in a range as removing redeye

• Algorithms for blending both images and sounds

• Information encodings as sound visualizations

15

def negative(picture):

for px in getPixels(picture):

red=getRed(px)

green=getGreen(px)

blue=getBlue(px)

negColor=makeColor(255-red,255-green,255-blue)

setColor(px,negColor)

def clearRed(picture):

for pixel in getPixels(picture):

setRed(pixel,0)

def greyscale(picture):

for p in getPixels(picture):

redness=getRed(p)

greenness=getGreen(p)

blueness=getBlue(p)

luminance=(redness+blueness+greenness)/3

setColor(p, makeColor(luminance,luminance,luminance))

17

Open-ended, contextualized homework

in Media Computation CS1 & CS2

Sound collage

Linked list

as canon

Flags

Your assignment is to write a function that will create a

collage of pictures. Your collage will be made by

copying at least 3 pictures onto a blank canvas. You

must use at least 3 different pictures. When finished,

your collage should look like the flag of a country.

Study-Abroad

CS

Results:CS1“Media Computation”

Change in Success rates in CS1 “Media

Computation” from Spring 2003 to Fall 2005

(Overall 85%)

Architecture 46.7% 85.7%

Biology 64.4% 90.4%

Economics 54.5% 92.0%

History 46.5% 67.6%

Management 48.5% 87.8%

Public Policy 47.9% 85.4%

We have sustained that pace

Table 1: R et ent ion dat a for G eor gia Tech ’s M edia-Com p cour se fr om Fal l 2006–Fal l 2012

Fem ale M ale Tot al

Passing grades 2102 1659 3761

Failing grades 208 235 443

Withdraw 30 46 76

DFW Total 238 281 519

% DFW-total 5.5% 6.5% 12%% DFW-set 10.1% 14.5% 12%

t hat we were wrong. Whatever incites plagiarism, Media-Comp does not seem to impact plagiarism.

3. THE RETENTION HYPOTHESISThe retent ion hypothesis is the most explored and best

supported MediaComp hypothesis. We originally hypoth-esized that we would have a failure2 rate less than 15%.Our results in the pilot offering of the course showed thatless than 12% of students withdrew from the course or had

a failing grade (Unpublished internal report [23]3 ). In fact ,the retent ion rate rose compared to our t radit ional course

in both our MediaComp course and in our Engineering-oriented MATLAB course that started thesamesemester[14].The average failure rate for students from the Colleges ofArchitecture, Management , and Liberal Arts had been over

50% in the two years before MediaComp started, and lessthan 15% in the following two years [27].

A review of the last six year ’s of ferings of the Georgia Tech

MediaComp course (4,292 total students) show the failurerate cont inues to be below 15% (Table 1). We use 4,280

students in our calculat ions because students took an in-complete and finished the course the following semester, andare not considered to be passed or failed. We compute %DFW-total in terms of DFW for men, women, and totalover 4280, then %-DFW in terms of DFW over the number

within that set . The course at Georgia Tech was major-

ity female because the majors who were required to take it

(from the Colleges of Liberal Arts, Management , and Archi-tecture) are more female (than the other colleges at GeorgiaTech – Engineering, Comput ing, and Sciences).

In published accountsof other schools’ MediaComp courses,the retent ion hypothesis has been well-supported. We stud-

ied the first adopt ion of MediaComp at Gainesville StateCollege, and found an increase in retent ion over the t radi-

t ional course [43]. TheUniversity of I llinois-Chicago adoptedMediaComp for their “ CS 0.5” course, and they found a sig-nificant improvement in retent ion [38]. The University ofCalifornia at San Diego adopted MediaComp in 2008 and

document an improvement in retent ion [37]. Five yearslat er, Porter & Simon presented a longer term analysis onhow their adopt ion of peer inst ruct ion, pair programming,

and MediaComp in 2008 led to greater retent ion with thecomputer science major measured into the second year of

undergraduate [34].

2Students who withdraw from the course or earn a failinggrade are considered to have ‘failed’ (DFW) in this analysis.The students who earn a passing grade (A, B, or C) are saidto have ‘succeeded’ and were ‘retained.’3ht t p: / / coweb. cc. gat ech. edu/ medi aComp- pl an/upl oads/ 45/ FI NAL- r epor t - pi l ot - of f er i ng. 1. pdf

3.1 Explaining the retention effectWhy did retent ion improve at mult iple schools over sev-

eral years? There may be mult iple causes, and they may

be different at different schools. We can imagine differences

in grading pract ices between different MediaComp courseswhich might explain retent ion differences, for example. Giventhat the result was similar across different MediaComp in-stant iat ions, and that our goal is to build a theoret ical ex-planat ion, we will focus on the common curriculum between

the classes. How might the MediaComp curriculum haveinfluenced retent ion?

In our first year of implement ing MediaComp, we con-ducted several interview studies to understand how studentssaw the course. Students told us that the course was “mot i-

vat ing” and “ fun.” Why? Several explanatory themes arosefrom those studies:

• Students told us that they appreciated that the course

was “ tailored” t o their major, in both the MediaComp

and Engineering courses [14].

• Students told us that they found the course to be awelcome opportunity to be creat ive [24][35].

• The theme of relevance appeared in prominent ly inour findings. Female students told us that they un-

derstood what they would do with the content of theMediaComp, but those in the t radit ional course saidthat they did not know what they would do with whatthey were learning [35]. In a follow-on study a year af-

ter we started the MediaComp course at Georgia Tech,we found that 19% of the respondents to a survey hadactually done some programming outside any course

context [24].

Here is a quote that captures the relevance point well [24],where a student describes coding beyond the requirementsof the course:

I just wish I had more t ime to play around with

that and make neat effects. But JES (thePythonIDE for the MediaComp course) will be on mycomputer forever, so... that ’s thenice thing aboutthis class is that you could go as deep into the

homework as you wanted. So, I ’d turn it in andthen me and my roommate would do more afterto see what we could do with it .

We found student react ion to the course surprising whenviewed from a perspect ive of “ thick authent icity” [36]. Stu-dents found MediaComp relevant and something that theycould use for later programming. Yet the course is quiteinauthentic [27]. Real programmers who manipulat e me-

dia do not write code like what students do in MediaComp.MediaComp is far too slow to be usable in pract ical set -

t ings. However, students clearly saw that they could douseful tasks with code in MediaComp [24], even if thosetasks would not be performed in that way and with thosetools by professionals.

We made a theoret ical choice at this point in our explo-rat ion of MediaComp, in part driven by the finding that theretent ion effect occurred in both the MediaComp course andthe Engineering-focused course. The Engineering course did

not make an effort to provide a creat ive out let . We decidedto focus on the sense of relevance. Creat ivity may be an im-

portant part of why MediaComp is mot ivat ing to students.

UCSD’s PI+PP+MediaComp Experiment (SIGCSE 2013)

• UCSD changed CS1

(quarter system) in

2008 to:

• Peer Instruction

• Pair Programming

• Media Computation

• Tracking students

since 2001.

• Increase retention of CS

majors into second year

by 30% (from 51% to

81%)

BS in Computational Media

• Joint between School

of Literature, Media,

and Communications

(Liberal Arts) and

Computing.

• 45% Female

• Most gender-balanced

ABET-accredited

computing program in

US

A Sample Lesson

How sound works:

Acoustics, the physics of sound

Digitizing Sound: How do

we get that into bytes?

• Remember in calculus, estimating the curve by creating rectangles?

• We can do the same to estimate the sound curvewith samples.

Now let’s talk about information

• Get a sound and make an empty picture.

• For each pixel in empty picture,

• Get the next sample from the sound.

• If the value is less than -2000,

make the pixel blue.

• if the value is greater than 2000,

make the pixel red.

• Otherwise, make the pixel green

Beyond Undergrad

• Using creative expression to motivate

elementary and secondary students.

• And teachers.

AP CS APicture Lab - Lots of Fun

We just completed the Picture Lab and I wanted to take a moment to thank

Barbara Ericson for all her hard work on such an engaging unit. We had a lot of

fun working through the exercises. And there were plenty of interesting

peripheral concepts that could be explored to whatever depth felt right.

We worked in groups of 3 students. For each set of exercises, students could

choose one problem to tackle. When they were done, they shared their solutions

with the other 2. For an added challenge at the very end, I had them choose

between the Green Screen, Hidden Message, and Pesky Tourist problems.

Has anyone else worked though the unit and have any ideas to share?

--Tonya Herron

Anderson High School

Cincinnati, Ohio

Summer Camp Collages

Summer Camp Collages

Summer Camp Collages

Summer Camp Green Screen

Summer Camp Green Screen

Teacher Collages

Teacher Collages

Teacher Collages

Teacher Green Screen

Other Creative Tools for K-12

• Scratch

• Alice

• LEGO Robots

• Artbotics

• EarSketch

• Writing programs to remix music

Scratch – Elementary School

Scratch – Middle School

Alice – High School

Alice – High School

WeDo Spin Art

Drawing with Robots

ArtBotics

• Use LEGO NXT and EV3 to make art

• http://artbotics.cs.uml.edu/wordpress/?page_id

=177

• https://www.youtube.com/user/Artbotics

EarSketch

• Write programs to remix music

• http://earsketch.gatech.edu

With thanks to our supporters

• US National Science Foundation

• Statewide BPC Alliance: Project “Georgia Computes!”

http://www.gacomputes.org

• Expanding Computing Education Pathways Alliance,

http://expandingcomputing.org

• CCLI and CPATH Grants, and now CE21 to produce new media

• Georgia’s Department of Education

• GVU Center, and Institute for People and

Technology (iPaT) at Georgia Tech

Thank you!

• http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~mark.guzdial

http://home.cc.gatech.edu/csl

• http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/ice-gt

For more on MediaComp:• http://www.mediacomputation.org