by Ben Shapiro, as part of ATLAS’ Creativity Technology Today symposium
When: 11:30 – 11:55 PM, Thursday, March 19 2015
Where: Roser ATLAS Building, Cofrin Auditorium (ATLS 100)
Most American youth use a multitude of networked devices. Many youth make surprisingly nuanced decisions about how to use these technologies in order to protect their privacy, manage relationships, and explore alternative identities. Yet, while these technology platforms offer users some choice about how to enact social practices with them, none are plastic enough to offer youth the ability to easily construct new networked technologies of their own designs.
Simultaneously, concurrency, distributed systems, and tangible/embedded computing are key computer science topics for 21st Century students. New generations of programmers are increasingly under pressure to learn how to correctly implement concurrent algorithms and protocols, and to reason about complex, interconnected systems. CS education research has not kept pace with the need for learning about these topics in computing; we know little about how people learn these skills and concepts.
My lab has been developing constructionist approaches that allow diverse populations of students to learn about concurrency by designing and building new networked devices for communication and play. We use learning sciences theories and Design-based research methods to design new programmable toolkits for learning and to investigate the development of student thinking in computer science through the use of these tools.
I present one strand of this work: how building tangible computer music instruments for use in group performance can create a natural context for middle-school age youth to learn about synchronizing parallel processes. I will show how we can create new frameworks for learning about concurrency by combining programming environment design with analysis of student discourse, program code, and cognitive clinical interviews in order to understand students’ emergent thinking about computing concepts, and how that emergence is anchored in prior student interests and knowledge.
Ben Shapiro is the McDonnell Family Professor of Engineering Education at Tufts University, where he is an assistant professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Education, and faculty at the Center for Engineering Education & Outreach. His research group, the Laboratory for Playful Computation, investigates how to create learning environments that empower all youth to learn, express themselves, and improve their communities through playful, collaborative use of programmable technologies. Ben was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, where he was a member of the Games+Learning+Society and Computational Optimization research groups. He received his PhD in the Learning Sciences from Northwestern University.