Jennifer S. Kay

Calico: a multi-programming-language, multi-context framework designed for computer science education

The Calico project is a multi-language, multi-context programming framework and learning environment for computing education. This environment is designed to support several interoperable programming languages (including Python, Scheme, and a visual programming language), a variety of pedagogical contexts (including scientific visualization, robotics, and art), and an assortment of physical devices (including different educational robotics platforms and a variety of physical sensors). In addition, the environment is designed to support collaboration and modern, interactive learning. In this paper we describe the Calico project, its design and goals, our prototype system, and its current use.

Using robots to teach programming to K-12 teachers

We present the results of a pilot study in which twenty K-12 teachers were introduced to LEGO NXT-G robot programming through a three-day summer workshop. Our aim was to give teachers the confidence and skills to start after-school robotics programs with their students. We present details on the workshop, including the approach we used to recruit teachers and an overview of the three-day course. We discuss the data gathered from the teachers following the workshop and also give our own recommendations for others who may wish to run a similar program. Participants ranged from elementary school general classroom teachers to high school math, science, and even computer science teachers. Prior to attending our workshop, 89% of the teachers had little or no programming experience and generally were not very confident in their own ability to be able to learn how to program a robot. After completing the workshop, their confidence increased dramatically and they had a strong expectation that they would use the material with their students. A follow-up survey nine months later indicated that hundreds of students and many colleagues were impacted in the first year alone.

CS professional development MOOCs

CS4HS (Computer Science for High School) is an initiative sponsored by Google to promote Computer Science and Computational Thinking in high school and middle school curricula. In the past, workshops were offered in a face-to-face format; however, this left many K-12 computer science teachers unable to attend a workshop in their geographical region. During the 2013 round of funding, Google funded the creation of 4 workshops to be delivered in an online format, open to teachers across the United States and beyond. The panelists will share their experiences with development and deployment of large scale workshops that aim to fill the gap in professional development for K-12 computer science teachers.

The challenges of using a MOOC to introduce "absolute beginners" to programming on specialized hardware

Educational Robotics for Absolute Beginners is a MOOC designed to introduce K-12 teachers with no prior computer science or robotics experience to the basics of LEGO NXT Robot programming. The course was developed following several successful in-person workshops on the same topic. This paper introduces some of the issues that arose as we transitioned the material to a MOOC, describes some of the unique challenges we faced by incorporating specialized hardware into a MOOC, and presents some preliminary data evaluating the success of our approach.

Robotics in computer science education

Robots would not be robots without computer science. Leave out computer science and what remains are fancy mechanisms and remotely controlled machines. It is no surprise then that robots appear in numerous computer science courses. The papers in this special issue, like the title of the issue itself, represent two distinct topics. The first two papers investigate the use of robots in teaching computer science concepts to a general audience. The final three papers study how to best teach concepts in robotics to upper-level computer science students. Taken together, these papers show the use of robotics in education with 11-year-old school children all the way up to students pursuing graduate studies in computer science. Robots have been used for education since 1971 (Feurzeg, 2006) when the Logo “floor turtle” (Papert, 1980) was introduced to teach logic and computing concepts to children. Using Logo, children could program the hemispherical floor robot “turtle,” to move a specified distance, turn, beep, and draw shapes on paper using a small pen placed under the turtle’s body. Roughly, a year later, the same team introduced the “screen turtle” simulator (Feurzeg, 2006) that was widely used by children in the 1980s. The 1990s saw several major developments that accelerated the use of robots in education: the creation of the first low-cost microcontrollers, such as the BASIC Stamp (Edwards, 1998) and the Handy Board (Martin, 2001), provided students with the ability to create robots around programmable devices. The founding and explosive growth of robotics competitions, notably FIRST (http://www.usfirst.org/) and Botball (http://botball.org/), raised awareness of robotics among high-school teachers. Finally, the development and mass-market sale of a reconfigurable robotics kit, the Lego RCX (Cliburn, 2006), allowed even elementary school students to build and program a robot in just a few hours. By 2000, computer science educators at the college level were beginning to explore using robots as tools in introductory computer science classes. Early results were not always promising. In an impressive study, Fagin and Merkle (2002) evaluated the performance of 938 students taking a core computing course required of all students at the US Air Force Academy. Roughly, one-quarter of these students were in special robotics sections of the class in which students used Lego Mindstorms Robots in four out of the

Work in progress — Programming in a confined space — A case study in porting modern robot software to an antique platform

In a typical introductory AI class, the topic of reinforcement learning may be allocated only a few hours of class time. One engaging example of reinforcement learning uses a crawling robot that learns to use its two-degree-of-freedom arm to drag itself forward. Unfortunately, the cost of the required hardware is prohibitively expensive for many departments for what is typically a once-a-semester demonstration. So we decided to port the algorithm to a platform that many departments may already have on hand: the LEGO Mindstorms RCX 2.0. Initially the task seemed relatively straightforward: build a robot base out of LEGO parts and implement the algorithm in the Not Quite C language. However the challenges of designing a robot arm without servos and attempting to trim code down to a size that would fit on the RCX has proven to be as educational to the undergraduates working on the project as we hope the final product will be to students in AI classes. This paper describes the challenges we have faced and the solutions we have implemented, as well as the work that remains to be completed.

Public school students left behind: Contrasting the trends in public and private school computer science advanced placement participation

Across the United States, interest in computer science as a major is down, as are the number of Bachelors degrees in computer science. While there are obvious factors like the dot com bust that may explain much of our communal enrollment crash over the last few years, anecdotal reports also suggest that the No Child Left Behind act of 2001 (NCLB), and specifically the fact that computer science is not an area that students are tested on, may be a factor in the decreased presence of computer science at the high school level. But how can we empirically separate the effect of the dot com bust from that of NCLB given the proximity in time of the two events? This paper presents a first attempt to do so: recognizing the fact that private schools are exempt from NCLB, it seems appropriate to compare public school students with their private school counterparts. We present some initial results of our investigation focusing on our home state of New Jersey. This paper discusses these results and further directions of study.

Windows on the world: expanding the view from the nursing home

About 5% of the US elderly population are institutionalized. Many of these individuals have limited mobility and feel very isolated from the outside world. They often have an acute sense of their loss of independence. While not being a panacea, we believe that the ability to access the Internet community can help to foster a feeling of self-worth and connection to the world around them.