Educational Technology DesignWhat’s at stake?

Challenges to low-income communities

• STEM education system that does not address low-income community needs

• Legacy of depredation: slavery, Jim Crow• Exploitation: environmental racism, decline laborpw

• Cycle of poverty:

Education challenges to low-income communities

• Small school budgets, drug addiction, health, etc.• Myths of genetic determinism: “Asians and whites

have the math gene”• Myths of cultural determinism: “High scores is

acting white”

•Questions of social relevance: “Computers might help wealthy folks but they can’t help my community”

Education challenges to low-income communities

Poor solution: the one-way bridge

The assumption that they have nothing is part of the problem, not the solution!

Better solution: the two-way bridge

Mainstream knowledge

systems and resources

Local cultural capitalEnviron. resources

creativitysocial justice

social awareness

Strategies to address these challenges

Ethnocomputing: a. computational knowledge in indigenous culture (beadwork, carving, etc.) challenges myths of genetic determinism

b. computational knowledge in vernacular culture (graffiti, breakdance, etc.) challenges myths of cultural determinism

Social justice computing: analysis and design contributing to under-served communities

Ethnocomputing with Culturally Situated Design Tools

(CSDTs)www.csdt.rpi.edu

1. Work with artisans, elders, others to ensure we have a basis for collaboration and “cultural permission” (not just a matter of copyright!)

2. Interview artisans and research cultural background to understand the knowledge system from their point of view (“emic” not “etic”).

3. Translate their practices and concepts into equivalents in CS (weaving algorithms, geometric transforms, power law scaling, anti-aliasing, context free grammars, etc.).

4. Embed these concepts in a “design tool” applet that allows students to simulate the original designs and create their own innovations

CSDTs: indigenous ethnocomputing

Virtual Beadloom Adinkra Grapher Precolumbian

African Fractals Anishinaabe Arcs Navajo Weaver

Pyramids

CSDTs: vernacular ethnocomputingCornrow curves Rhythm Wheels Skateboarder

Graffiti Grapher Breakdancer Animator

Dos and don’ts in teaching with CSDTs

1. Don’t make assumptions about which student will want to use which CSDT. Expose all students to all tools.

2. Don’t introduce the CSDTs as a crutch to give special help.

3. DO introduce the CSDTs as “tools” – for students’ investigation of culture, exploration of math, creative innovations in art, and any other activity they would like to pursue.

4. DO offer opportunities for deeper research: an investigation of the artifact they simulate can yield many new insights that make the computational thinking more meaningful.

For some students, their interest is because of a specific heritage connection.

However for many students, CSDTs are more about giving you a “license” to be creative with math and computing in ways you didn’t know you could. “If they are crazy enough to use math to make cornrows, I can do anything with it.”

Students have diverse ways of learning from CSDTs

1. We see statistically significant increases in math and computing scores, and interestsin computing-related careers, in controlled studies comparing students with and without

CSDTs.

2. For some students, this is because of a specific heritage connection.

3. However for many students, CSDTs are more about giving you a “license” to be creative with math and computing in ways you didn’t know you could. “If they are crazy enough to use math to make cornrows, I can do anything with it.”

From Jenni Rodin, math teacher at Oglala Lakota College:

“You might be interested to hear that one of the students, who is an IT major, an artist, a very traditional beadworker and fluent Lakota speaker, was so delighted with the software that he decided to go ahead and develop his own algorithms independently.  He was really inspired. He said it was the first time that math/graphing seemed to really make sense or "click" for him.  I haven't seen how far he got with computer algorithms, but his final project for our math class was full of linear models that described his most recent beadwork creations.”

Example of student responding to heritage connection

Example of student responding to nature connection

This is a model of a real snowflake. To make this I had to look at a real snowflake and see how many folds of symmetry it was six fold cemeteries. To make that I had to add 60 plus 60 six time to get six fold symmetry.

Example of student responding to math connection

For my inquiry, I decided to explore the possibilities of spirals using the Cornrow Curves Software. I attempted to explain the visual results of modifications to various input values, and decided to do this by isolating different value changes in different quadrants. Because of limited space on the graph and limited time, I tried to explain the more visually attractive spirals and shapes and was not able to isolate single variables in every instance.

Nested iteration as learning problem

“Nested loops are difficult for students and I believe need to be emphasized separately from simple loops, but I hadn’t realized how much harder the concept is for students with weak math skills.  These guys really struggled.” (http://www.helenemartin.com/scratch-materials/).

One problem may be that the examples commonly used are too abstract:http://cs.nyu.edu/~dejan/teaching/2012/CSCI-UA.0101/2012/09/19/loops/.

Nested iteration better visualized with cornrows

Cornrows provide a more concrete visualization of nested iteration: you can clearly see the inner loop does each braid, and the outer loop does the series of several braids.

Cornrows as deterministic chaos: pn+1 = r*pn(1-pn)

R=3.5: a 4-period limit cycle

R= 3.7: deterministic chaos

R =3: a point attractor

Cornrows as basin of attraction

Can you reverse-engineer thesealgorithms?

Fractal Simulations of African Design in Pre-College Computing Education

•10th grade computer science class, two sections. •About 75% minority, over 50% female.•Control class has 6 days on fractal instruction websites withjava applets.•Intervention class has 6 days on the African fractals website.

•Post-test shows higher scores in intervention group; •statistically significant at .001 level

ACM Transactions on Computing Education, Volume 11, Issue 3, Oct 2011

Social justice approach

1) Situate computational research in relation to community needs, without compromising the research dedication to exploring the unknown

2) Incorporate social science faculty and grads

3) Collaboration of “community mentors” from local social, health, and environmental organizations, to help find the intersections with STEM research domains

Software entrepreneurship in Ghana

STEM abolitionist project

CS grad fellowKathryn Bennetteducational software

STS grad fellowColin GarveyHistory of Evolution

GIS software for mapping local sites for abolitionist history

Game for discovering Darwin’s abolitionist connections

Professor Shayla Sawyer

1)Nanosensors usinginorganic molecules could detect Navajo uranium pollution but not for coal and oil (VOC) pollution

2)Sawyer paused – “come to think of it, no one has tried this—to use organic molecules in semiconductor photodetection”

3)This created a new research path: nano-bio materials in semiconductor photodetection

4)Later we brought in a grad Fellow whose faculty advisor Chris Bystroff was in biology; he “tunes” genetic sequences to detect specific biological molecules

Condom machine sends text when it needs to be refilled. Users can text to find locations