Khan Academy

Help, I’m supposed to teach tech! What should they know?

Yesterday I got a message from a teacher on Twitter. She mostly teaches science but this year she’s supposed to teach a 9-week tech class. She said she was “not a techy but willing to learn” and asked me what I thought the kids should know by the time they are done. I was flattered to be asked, and it inspired me to write an answer I was happy with, especially the six things I think kids should learn in a tech class. Here’s a slightly modified version of what I wrote:

Thanks so much for asking this; it gives me a reason to re-think what I want my own students to learn. I started out thinking about specific concrete skills (using variables or understanding files, eDebuggingtc.), but realized that those aren’t the most important things.

The things that I think kids should learn from technology education are skills that all good programmers and engineers have, but aren’t specifically tech skills. Some of the main ones are:

  • Think algorithmically: learn to plan out a sequence of steps that can solve a problem
  • Break down a problem: separate it into smaller parts that are easier to solve than the original problem
  • Debug independently: when a solution you have isn’t working, start testing smaller parts of the solution to see which part isn’t giving you the result you were expecting so you can hunt down the problem
  • Modularize solutions: look for ways you can re-use parts of earlier solutions that worked in other problems
  • Open-source your solutions: put your solution in a form that your peers can understand them and use different parts as needed.
  • Import solutions into your own: when a peer has come up with a good way to solve a problem that’s part of the problem you’re working on, don’t re-invent the wheel. Use a modified version of their idea, while giving them credit of course.

Of course these are huge goals and not easy to impart to a student even if you have whole year with them, let alone 9 weeks. You didn’t say how many classes you have a week, but I’d focus on just a couple of them, maybe the first and second or first and third.

As for what specifically to do, this is challenging even if you are given clear goals, let alone if you don’t. I’m sure you already have, but the first thing I’d do is feel out the administration more to try to get a better idea of what they expect to come out of it.

Assuming they really don’t have a particular goal in mind, my advice is to be a little bit ambitious and aim for a target you might not achieve at least the first few times around. If you’re a Google Apps school, the students will learn how to use the apps in their other classes pretty quickly on their own. If this is the main focus of your class I predict they and you will be bored very soon.

Khan Academy ProgrammingOne of the things I highly recommend for this is the Khan Academy tech classes. It’s easy for the kids to log in with their Google Drive accounts and for you to create a class where you can monitor them. The classes are very self-directed, with videos accompanying an interactive programming window, so if students have headphones they can all proceed at a pace that works for them. As a teacher I’m sure you know that with any subject some students will take to it like a fish to water and others will have a great deal of difficulty. This is doubly true for programming.

Some things you might have them learn are:

If you continue to do this class and your school is willing to spend a little money (really very little) on some hardware, I’d recommend ordering some Arduinos from Adafruit. and teach kids to make some simple electronic devices such as these ones .

 

Teaching coding: The missing steps

It seems like every day someone is introducing a new tool to get kids into coding. Just recently Apple introduced their Swift Playground, with animations of kids making a weird pear-shaped blob thing move around a 3D world. We have the now-venerable Scratch, and Scratch Jr. for the really little kids, we have Hopscotch, we have the Hour of Code, we have Khan Academy coding and new tools that allow kids to program robots with Scratch-like code chunks. So that means that this generation should produce a huge new batch of computer-literate coders, right?

Missing Steps
Some steps are missing

Alas, probably not. I’m glad these first steps to coding are there, and they are essential. We also have plenty of steps higher up the mountain where adults, college-age kids or particularly motivated high-schoolers can learn more advanced coding: places like Udacity, Coursera, Pluralsight, Code School and so on. What we lack now is the tools, and maybe more importantly the teachers, to get people from these lower steps to the higher ones. It’s like staircase with the middle twenty steps replace by ropes and those wall-knob attachments from rock-climbing gyms. Some people will still get to the higher steps, but not many. Most will get to the top of the bottom row of steps, look around and say “that was fun, I made the robot move and turn; I wonder what we’re doing in art?”

But that’s fine, right? So most kids don’t go on and learn about networking. That’s advanced computer stuff! It’s not like every single computer is attached to some giant computer netw…oh.

Today we’re surrounded by computers, but unlike even ten or fifteen years ago, almost none of those computers does anything by itself!

Even applications that were once entirely local, like Microsoft Office or the Adobe Creative Cloud projects now depend on regular network connections. Remember the last time you were in a coffee shop and the WiFi didn’t work? I bet you didn’t get much done. You probably just put your computer away and got a book out or interacted with actual humans. Almost all computer work today involves having to download something from somewhere or look something up on Google. Even games are networked more often than not.

And it’s just going to get worse. More and more services are moving to the cloud; lots of organizations don’t even use Office anymore in exchange for Google Drive. More and more jobs involve getting complex data from a big cloud using APIs. And when the Internet of Things blows up, even your toaster will have an API.

Move the things around the little screen
Code can do ANYTHING!…in that window

But the programs the kids are learning to do, even a fairly advanced learning environment like Greenfoot that uses actual Java and begins to teach kids about objects and classes, all basically involve moving little shapes around a little screen on the side of the code. And sure sometimes you can blow the little screen up to your full screen, but it’s still a cozy little sandbox that has no contact with the rest of the world, unlike pretty much every other app they interact with.

I’m not saying there is anything wrong with these programs! I use many of them in my teaching. But there are very few places to go now when a kid is ready to get outside of that sandbox. Sure they can start learning Python, and if they’re patient they’ll stick with writing console apps for a month or two until they are able to start using PyGame and make some graphics. They can get into physical computing and start learning Arduino if they have the electronics gear and other hardware to make it possible. But as I mentioned, most Arduino programs (of the sorts most kids do) are actually very simple.

What is needed are tools that make it easy for kids to make simple network requests and access simple databases, tools that take some of the hard parts out (like making complicated database connection strings or working out complex network handshakes), while allowing kids to do the part that’s actually not that hard.

And the ideas aren’t that hard! SQL queries like “SELECT temperature FROM WeatherDatabase WHERE year>1990” or adding parameters to an http query like “?field=accidents&city=Omaha” are not that hard to to understand even for a middle schooler. But getting to the point where you can do that is. For now. It’s time for a tool to change that.