CT Cafe

Named among the top 5 most inspirational videos on the web by Mashable. It's a great example of immersion on a community scale. We should discuss this approach at length during our work in gap closing actions.

Geoffrey Canada on 60 Minutes: Closing The Achievement Gap through the Harlem Children's Zone.

Having seen the success of the Harlem Children's Zone, in 2009 US President Barack Obama announced plans to replicate the HCZ model in 20 other cities across the nation.

You can view a brief clip below or the full episode by 60 Minutes.

Designer Focuses on Marketing Adjustable Eyeglasses at $1 a Pair

At least 180 million children could use glasses to help with their schoolwork, according to a report from the Child Vision Conference in Oxford in 2007.

We've been seeking to identify potential examples of CT inspiring so that we can market and "pull" demand for CT subject matter.

First, we should note that CT skills have not yet been identified, and thus, any examples would have to be analogous at this stage. The point in those examples being that this is the type of potential CT holds.
Second, what may be inspirational to one segment, may not inspire all, so we should continue to seek out appropriate examples for the corresponding groups - k-12, college, employers.

That said, here is one that may fit the bill. "But then he started to think about what he'd learned as a tutor. That if he broke things down for students into small increments, if they had a chance to practice and learn, they could inevitably continue. He realized that the same thing was true for him, too. This was John's first "a-ha!" moment. A powerful enough realization that he went on to earn his PhD."

"How powerful is that? Eager to get his revolutionary approach to teaching math into the hands of teachers, John created a not-for-profit organization called JUMP (Junior Undiscovered Math Prodigies). Today, JUMP is getting spectacular results with all kinds of kids. For instance, after working with JUMP, an entire class of Grade 3 students, including so-called slow learners, scored over 90% on a Grade 6 math test. A group of British children who had been written off as too unruly responded so enthusiastically and had such impressive results that the school board adopted the program. I could go on and on."

This example could serve as one in the area of decomposition - taking complex problems and breaking them down for further understanding, practice, and study.

So what's so CT about that? Well, nothing really. Other than how commonly this technique is used in CS to solve complex problems - code modularization, and once modularized those modules need to interact, calls to libraries, iterations between modules, etc.

• Abstraction
• Algorithm
• Data
• Decomposition
• Iterations
• Query
• Sense & Feedback
  
• Systems

Often times it's more about making things simpler to understand, study, explain, practice, and use, as a means to working on complex problems. While it's one of the more basic concepts, it's often overlooked in problem solving.

Our marketing plan may be as important as our topical interests. I confess I am somewhat challenged by the difficulty of explaining the big computational thinking concepts to regular folks...people who have not invested themselves in the mission. How to get from where we've been to a more enlightened future is highly dependent on our ability to explain the mission and component concepts. So when Jeannette Wing asks with a straight face why we don't teach the concept "algorithm" in grade school, I immediately cringe and ask myself how many K-8 teachers does she actually know? I don't fault her, I just have reservations about the capacity of the educational pipeline to embrace and deliver new, and in particular, abstract curricular components. We need to concern ourselves with how to make our little cafe appealing. If we want SRO crowds, that menu posted by the door and the accompanying smells wafting out onto the street better be seductive.

It's not exactly as if we haven't been there before. When I was younger, the New Math initiative (interestingly, another NSF project) attempted to deploy widespread understanding of some of the more conceptual domains that academic mathematics employs. Great idea with mixed results. I happened to have New Math delivered by a real mathematics instructor (with a genuine math background...not a PE or History degree) and maybe I was predisposed to math, technology and the AV squad, so it worked for me. But the New Math program failed...in large part because the people in charge of delivery were ill-prepared to convey the subject matter, at least using the packages delivered by the visionaries. Whether teachers were excited, intimidated or ambivalent may not really matter, but the program was eventually reeled in after years of parental confusion and complaints. (Lesson: If the parents are not "getting it" through osmosis and fail to "see the point," resistance will be encountered). So, we need to think long and hard about how to go about this business of "getting the words right" or spicing up the menu as it were.

After listening to Jon Udell's interview of Joan Peckham, I reviewed the Computer Science Unplugged curriculum generated by a team in New Zealand. I like the way they've named their units and lessons. We would do well to learn from their example and, perhaps, use some of their ideas to build a strategy or help explain our quest. I recommend you take a look and start stewing on how we make our mission palatable, even delicious to the customers and the serving staff we will be trying to influence.

Excerpt from Table of Contents of the Computer Science Unplugged curriculum
Data: the raw material—Representing information

• Count the Dots—Binary Numbers
  
• Colour by Numbers—Image Representation
• etc.
  

Putting Computers to Work—Algorithms

• Battleships—Searching Algorithms
  
• Lightest and Heaviest—Sorting Algorithms
  
• etc
  

Telling Computers What To Do—Representing Procedures

• Treasure Hunt—Finite-State Automata
• Marching Orders—Programming Languages