For your entertainment, the CES 2009 keynote about Microsoft’s Kodu game development environment, featuring “Sparrow,” an “actual 12-year-old-girl.”
This video is the most important video you can watch today if you are a computer science educator. Why? Because Sparrow might show up in your classroom someday. She’s 12 now. In five years, she’ll be looking at or applying to colleges. Now, it’s possible that she’ll become an English major, or perhaps she’ll join the newly formed Nanobiotechnology major that all the kids are excited to get into. But, it’s also possible that she’ll double-major in English and Computing, because she is excited about the role of story-telling in this new media. (Nod to Geoff there.)
Now, she shows up in a typical first-semester course in computing. Here, she might be introduced to the Linux command line, the Java programming language (or Python, or Scheme, or C… I don’t really care). And, do you know what? Sparrow won’t care either. Just how many weeks is she going to show up to your classroom, listen to you lecture about variables and objects and their location in memory, and actually want to show up? She’s been writing games using tools like Kudu for the past five years. And now, you’re the poor sap whose job it is to stand in front of the room and motivate her to print rectangles on the screen using System.out.print and a for-loop in Java?
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That scene isn’t a hypothetical situation: it’s where we are today.No one really knows why students are less and less interested in computing as a major at the college level, but I’m prepared to claim that it has to do with the massive disconnect between (the vast majority of) the introductory course experience and what students see in the world of computing today. For example, we can pull one of the more popular computer science textbooks, Java Software Solutions by Lewis and Loftus, and find the problem I’ve just described in it. How popular is the text? It currently sits around 9000 in the Amazon sales rank (it was higher last week), meaning they sell around 10-20 copies per week right now. (This is probably a start-of-semester bloom, but still… it’s a popular text.) Not surprisingly, John Lewis has diversified his authoring portfolio, and along with colleague Peter DePasquale has written a book about programming in Alice. (All of these texts costs too much, but that’s another rant for another day.)
Environments like StarLogo:TNG and Alice, and now Kodu, are what our students will be familiar with. They’ll come to our classroom and expect to be able to do at least that much. When we throw them into introductory Java, or a first-year experience in Python, and it isn’t engaging in some way, they… well, they disengage. Why should they care? What motivation is there for deep learning, as opposed to doing enough to pass the course? My students today are accustomed to science-fiction-like technologies (the iPhone, iPod Touch, the PS3, Wii, and Nintendo DS, etc.), and we given them beige boxes with command lines?
This second video goes into a bit more detail regarding Kodu. When your students are accustomed to “writing” behavioral code for agents acting in a real-time, parallel environment… what do you teach them first when you get them in the classroom? All of the traditional assumptions—parallel is too hard, behavioral control is too hard, objects are too hard—go right out the window. If it is so hard, how come Microsoft turned it into a kids toy?
You tell me if this floats: “Hey kids, look at this triangle I just printed using a for loop and some asterisks! Isn’t that rad!?”
Er.
No.
Caution, meet wind. The times, they are a changin’.
Forgive my ignorance about programming, but wouldn’t programs like this actually help spur interest in computer science? It seems like once a student has some experience with a program like this they’d be more likely to want to continue in the field, rather than being frustrated at having to learn the written code.
Hi Mike,
I might edit the post a bit… that was my point exactly. Clearly, I didn’t make my point clearly.
No, don’t worry about it. I think it’s just because I was reading this late last night. Now that I read it again I see that it was your point after all =)
Is there a corollary to English lit in that most English majors in the country don’t ever study grammar or orthography on the college level? Because these student facility in those areas are assumed, you can jump right in to Shakespeare and Faulkner… yet that’s also a significant decision about what direction your deep learning will ultimately take.
Its a shame that you are not here at the Rebooting Computing Summit these next couple of days. We are talking about all the ways that computing has become stagnant and stale and trying to re-imagine what computer science, and introductory computer science might look like if we threw everything out the window and started over. That doesnt mean we wont walk down to the sidewalk and pick up some things to reintegrate into CS, but we are starting with no assumptions other than CS is magical and beautiful.
It was an interesting first day and there is promise of more to come. I’ll share your comments tomorrow if I get the chance.
I really wish I was there.
Sadly, the semester starts Wednesday, and I didn’t think I could justify missing the first few days of my second semester at Allegheny.
Keep me in the loop. It looked like fun.
Joe: Actually there are. Studying the arts is a little different than the sciences though as you don’t need to be a grammar maven in order to appreciate most great works of literature. In fact, I would say that someone interested in writing for artistic purposes (IE a novelist) would not need the same amount of grammar knowledge as someone who is writing for more practical purposes (IE a journalist or a textbook author).
I suppose the same would be true of gaming and programming. With Kodu it would be fully possible for someone with no coding skills to make a good game, since making a fun game has more to do with an understanding of design principles than it does with being an expert programmer.
@Joe also:
I think I agree with where Mike went w.r.t. literature/lit and gaming/programming. However, when we talk about “deeper learning” in both of these disciplines, I think your question becomes more important. A serious student of literature does not get away from grammar. And further, they must learn the grammar of their author’s place and time; Shakespeare, read at the PhD level, is a different beast.
So I’ll agree with Mike—when given a toolkit for game creation, I’m freed of the “low-level” detail required to produce a game. I can focus on story, interaction, character, and other elements of the game from the start. However, if I want to implement the game creation game—if I want to write Kodu—I must dedicate myself to a deeper study of languages, data structures, architecture, and the like, and invest many thousands of hours of practice.
But I suspect that is the story of “expertise” in any discipline.
Matt: Totally agree, especially the bit about expertise.
All of the traditional assumptions—parallel is too hard, behavioral control is too hard, objects are too hard—go right out the window. If it is so hard, how come Microsoft turned it into a kids toy?
Maybe it (computing or learning for that matter) always was a kids toy, i.e. algebra was (I believe) discovered to be easier to teach to “kids” than junior high students, so if we can make the jump from there… microsoft is doing what education did back in the sixties/seventies, they are a business staring their clientele straight in the mind’s eye so to speak and pandering to the willingness to learn, as long as no one tells them they are learning, it is in effect …fun aka
http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2009/01/learning_should_be_f.html
so, did microsoft build a gaming environment or a learning environment? Where are they (microsoft ) going? If they are on the edge, maybe you should watch them. A guess,maybe, the symbolic connection is stronger than we realize. end