Category: edci335

This blog post is in response to https://edtechuvic.ca/edci335/prompt-interaction/ and is about this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhpslN-OD_o

In what way are they likely to respond to the video on their own, e.g. make notes, do an activity, think about the topic (learner-generated)?

The video does quite a good job  tying different programming languages to pop-culture references or other topics that a learner unfamiliar with programming languages would understand. For example, in the video he states that COBOL is the language used for the Terminator’s UI display in the Terminator movies. The video also talks about what influences these older programming languages have had on the more modern languages, which “foreshadows” the strengths and weaknesses of those languages. Thus, I believe that the video successfully causes the learner to think about the topic in more depth than simply memorizing the different programming languages by using other topics that the learner would be familiar with, and thus giving them a more comprehensive understanding of how programming languages have changed over time.

What activity could you suggest that they do, after they have watched the video (designed)? What type of knowledge or skill would that activity help develop? What medium or technology would students use to do the activity?

I think the activity that would generate the best feedback for the learner would be a questionnaire of short-answer questions, all about the general themes of the video rather than specific programming languages. For example, “What trends did you notice in the very early days of programming?” rather than “What does the L stand for in LISP?”. This way, learners are encouraged to think more critically about the information presented to them and engage with it more than simple memorization. It also would combine nicely with the topic of our interactive learning resource, which has to do completely with how programming languages have changed over time rather than any specific programming language. Since the questionnaire is simply short answer questions, it could be done online or simply written down on a piece of paper.

How would students get feedback on the activity that you set? What medium or technology would they and/or you use for getting and giving feedback on their activity?

Unfortunately, the best way to provide feedback is for someone to manually add qualitative comments on each learner’s answers. This way, the students can receive  more valuable feedback than simply correct/incorrect. For topics such as “which programming languages are easier to use?” and “how have programming languages changed?”, which is dependent on personal preference as well as a variety of other factors, it would be best to provide as qualitative feedback as possible.

How much work for you would that activity cause? Would the work be both manageable and worthwhile? Could the activity be scaled for larger numbers of students?

While this could be feasible for a single classroom of students, for a learning resource online it is not really possible. So, an alternative method would be to provide either several different possible answers or an example answer that touches on all the possible answers itself. For example, the answer to the question “What trends did you notice in the very early days of programming?” could be “I noticed that a lot of the earlier programming languages had to do with solving mathematical problems rather than programming things for everyday people. The earlier programming languages also seemed much more difficult to work with, and while each one was an improvement on the last, they all stayed very simple and basic compared to the ones showcased in the later part of the video”. Thus, the learner can still receive some qualitative feedback without the required man hours.

Disclaimer: I have not received the actual learning resource, so this review is based on the blueprint.

General Feedback

While Quizlet is a great resource for learners, I am not sure that it alone works as a Learning Resource. Rather, it is a tool you could use to great effect as part of a large resource. What is the information you are hoping to impart to the learner, and what experiences are you hoping they gain from having gone through the experience? All of the Quizlet sections mentioned in the Learning Resource are used after the user has some knowledge of the material in order to test them on it. What material are you planning on providing that will let the learner have enough knowledge on the topic that the Quizlet tools are useful to them?

Specific Feedback

• When listing the different sections of Quizlet, I would recommend bolding the names since (because the names are just words) that part of the draft is a bit confusing. For example, “These sections are Flashcards that offer a quick means of reviewing terms and definitions, Learn is a personalized study mode …”.
• A list of links is left in the resource. I believe it was the work in progress bibliography, but a complete bibliography is included at the end.
• Perhaps add some screenshots showing how Quizlet accommodates colourblind learners. I think that would be very helpful in showing the high-contrast options.
• I could not find a few parts of the Learning Resource in the outline. These are (as copied from the criteria):
  • A description and rationale for the learning design you chose (inquiry, project-based, direct instruction, etc)
  • A description of your learning context (K-12, higher ed, corporate, individual, etc)
  • Brief commentary about each topic and activity
  • One interactive activity for each learning outcome/topic based on a resource aligned with that topic (blog post, video, article, etc)
  • An overview of your assessment plan.
• Your sources and bibliography are quite good! Good job!
• I get the feeling that you are really passionate about providing education to families going through economic hardship, which is great!

This post is responding to the prompt: How will your interactive learning resource specifically ensure that the needs of all learners can be met?

Our interactivity learning resource is focused on explaining how different programming languages can be extremely different to use, and on how newer programming languages are in general easier than previous programming languages. This is an important topic to teach in many different ways for different learners since it is an alien topic for many people; that is, most people do not have any experience working with any programming language and thus don’t have any foundation to build on top of. Because of this, we will be providing several different avenues of explanation to help different types of learners learn through their preferred method. For example, the main resource we provide is simply a written explanation of how languages have changed over time, for learners who prefer simply reading and understanding a provided text. However, many learners (myself included) much prefer to learn by doing, through assignments or projects rather than textbooks. For these learners, we are currently planning on adding several different interactive resources that allow them to experiment with different programming languages, and hopefully conclude the same results as we did, that programming languages have become much easier to work with over time.

Another advantage our approach has is that we allow the learner to go through the material in their own time. This is especially useful when dealing with topics in computer science as some people tend to understand these concepts a lot faster than others, and so our format will allow those people to quickly advance through the material while slower learners can take their time to ensure they have a rock-solid understanding. Our interactive sections also benefit from this, as learners who quickly understand the material can simply run through our interactive sections once to confirm their understanding, while learners who are struggling with the material can go through the interactive sections many times over to build their understanding of our topic.

Inquiry-based learning is an approach to teaching a subject that focuses on the student’s curiosity rather than the teacher’s knowledge. In general, the teacher or facilitator will begin the session by presenting a question to the class. The students are then encouraged to brainstorm possible methods to answer the question. Computer Science classes use this method quite a lot, where the lecturer begins class by presenting a problem (i.e. “I have a list of N items in some random order. What is the fastest way to sort this list so that the smaller items are in front of the larger items”) and then spends the rest of the class going over possible solutions. Usually the session starts with the simplest solution and builds up to the optimal (and usually most complicated) solution. In the list sorting example given, this is usually done by starting with selection sort (Go through the list once to find the smallest element, move that element to the front of the list, repeat on the rest of the list until the list is sorted) and building up to quicksort (Choose a random element called a pivot, go through the list and move every smaller element to the left of the pivot and every larger element to the right of the pivot, then repeat on either half until the list is sorted).

This approach will be used in our Learning Blueprint since we are also explaining a computer science topic, but it will not be used as directly as it is in the example given. We will ask the user “What makes a programming language easier to use? What are the tradeoffs of this convenience?”, hopefully prompting them to formulate their own response, and then explain to them how languages have changed over time to be easier and slower in general. While it is not as directly inquiry-based as the example, the learning experience will still be driven by the user’s curiosity on how programming languages can be easier or harder to use, as well as their interest in how languages have built on top of each other.

Response to: Share a story about your best learning experience (could be a formal course or something more personal). Why did you enjoy it?

The best learning experience I have had in the last couple of years was a project I had to do for CSC350. It was a very open project where you could do whatever you like, as long as you could present it to the professor and it was relevant to the course material. I decided to do a tech demo of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, a game console that was released in 1991. I have very fond memories of playing on the SNES when I was a kid, so the project turned into much more of a passion project for me, and I found myself extremely motivated to read through long, 30 year old developer manuals to figure out how to show off all of the SNES’s features. I also was motivated by how familiar and alien the programming was to me – I have been programming for over 10 years now, but since the SNES is so old, it was using a much older programming language than I had ever used, so the work was both familiar and completely new. It was as though I was doing a project for a French class where I translated one of my favourite books into 11ths century Old French.

Another reason I enjoyed this project was because it was a challenge. A huge amount of the SNES was built around how to work around its very limited graphical capacities, which was another topic I greatly enjoyed. For example, all of the images the SNES used did not have colors included in them – rather, each pixel would be labelled ‘COLOR 1’, ‘COLOR 2’, etc. This allowed the developer to simply swap out the color palettes to draw different types of enemies, while saving space since the actual image data was only used once. The SNES used a huge amount of these optimizing techniques, and I found them extremely fascinating.

Overall this project was a lot of fun for me to work on because it was based on something I was familiar with, and involved a new type of programming which I enjoyed and was challenging to write.