Motivating Students

Because of a session on remaking the Image of Computing, there were a bunch of famous people at the NCWIT meeting this week. Perhaps the one of most interest to me was Kate Starbird. Not as much because she is a retired WNBA player (though that's pretty cool!) but because she's really smart, really nice, and really articulate. She pointed out that she was the only person there to talk marketing who also had a background in CS.

Remind me to tell you about the argument she and J Strother Moore got into.

But first, I want to consider the question of inspiring students to learn about computing at a deep level. When I Googled Kate, one of thetop links is to a great blog post she wrote. Here's an excerpt:

Like many of my generation, I grew up on a computer with little or no content, and if I wanted it to play, I had to be creative. I had to make it do what I wanted it to do. I went on to study computer science in college and graduated with a BS from Stanford in 1997.

My youngest brother Michael followed me there, and majored in CS as well. He works for Microsoft now. By the time Michael was nine our family had a game console for our TV and fantasy adventure games with elegant graphics on our Apple IIgs. He grew up playing Nintendo and Bard's Tale. He had an email account before he was out of high school, and knew how to browse the Internet long before I did.

Unlike me, though, Michael didn't write a single line of code until college. Michael was an extremely creative kid, but he didn't bother spending that energy creating loops, routines, and functions.

This is in line with a thought I had last summer about learning curves vs. quality of output.

When we were kids, computers were pretty limited in what they could do. You could write a program in BASIC that was almost as good as the programs you could get on floppy at those game swap events on Saturdays. You could buy BYTE magazine and laboriously type in the programs, seeing exactly how the program was put together. It was reasonably straightforward to create programs that were engaging, that your friends would say, "oh cool!" (or the 1982 equivalent) if you told them or showed them.

The world has changed a lot. A kid in the basement couldn't have written World of Warcraft or the Sims. In some ways the tools we have make it easier than ever to create interesting content - Dreamweaver making HTML and PHP at the click of a button, drag-and-drop programming in Flash or Alice, image manipulation with iPhoto or Photoshop - those were all inconceivable back then.

But the increased complexity under the hood - the higher computational power in home computers, the embedded systems throughout our lives - have also abstracted away our ability to tinker. Imagine taking apart your iPod to see how it works. Similarly, kids are so used to interacting with fun! neat! systems, that the introductory programs they're cognitively ready for aren't impressive enough. Hello World just doesn't cut it in our in-your-face media-rich world.

My students struggle with some of the ideas of CS. That a variable contains a value is a new idea for them. They're smart, capable, and they figure it out, but there are developmental issues - their brains aren't ready for all the deep ideas. Yet they will get turned off if it seems like too much work for too little payoff, if they can't make things that make their friends say, "oh cool!" (or the 2008 equivalent).