Dr. Gerald Ardito HS Programming Class

 This post will be the sixth in my Field Experience Reflections series; if you want to read the five others you can find them by clicking on the three vertical lines in the left-hand corner of your screen, and then clicking the page entitled Field Experience Reflections, or you can just click this link. In case you need a refresher on what exactly this series of post entails here is the required context:  I will be using these posts to reflect on my field experience by taking the concepts I learned about in special guest presentations and then thinking about how I might apply them to my own teaching. Alright, now that that little introduction is out of the way, let’s get to the reflecting portion of tonight’s entertainment.

For this post I will not be discussing a guest lecturer, ^[1] instead, I will reflect on an hour-long programming class of my professor’s that I observed and participated in! Most of you readers already know who my professor is, especially if you are my professor haha, but for those of you who don’t here is the big reveal: his name is Dr. Gerald Ardito, an educator for the past 20 years whose research currently focuses on autonomy supportive classrooms and the student learning social networks that arise within that structure; Dr. Ardito is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Computer science Education at Manhattanville College. ^[2] The computer programming class that I was observing is a class for high school boys; it is part of a Saturday Academy program put on by the White Plains Youth Bureau that is meant to act as support for young men color starting in the fourth grade and lasting until they graduate high school. ^[3] The academy goes for most of the day, but the computer programming class was only from 11:00 AM until 12:00 PM. ^[4]

I met up (virtually) with Dr. Ardito about a half an hour prior to the start of the class so that we could go over his plan for the lesson and get all of our ducks in a row. The plan that he devised is similar to what my class has been doing for the past two weeks: Dr. Ardito has a conversation with the class as a whole group to both check in with them as well as to lay out what the agenda for the day is, and then sends them on their merry way to do the work he just explained to them. For this lesson, the students were working on repl.it, a cloud-based IDE that allows you to work in a myriad of programming languages, on one of two projects. One project they could work on is called Python Turtle which works with Trinket, also an IDE, and works akin to TurtleBlocks in that you create a character and program it to move around, but with text instead of blocks. ^[5] The second project had students working with the tutorials I have been using with Python, this one where you create a Pypet and this one where you create data visualizations (e.g. graphs) and is meant for the students who have some prior experience with Python and/or want a bit of a challenge. Since I had experience working with those specific tutorials, the boys who wanted to work on them would be in a breakout room with me while Dr. Ardito worked with the other students on Python Turtle. We worked in our separate groups for maybe 40 to 45 minutes and then came back as a whole class to quickly debrief before the class ended. After Dr. Ardito and I left the class we then got back on a different call and chatted for a few about how the class went.

I have now realized that since I observed this class live I can, for once, actually answer the questions that Dr. Ardito originally listed as the prompts for these reflections! I know, so exciting.  Alright, so the questions are as follows: what is the teacher doing?  What are the students doing? What were the students learning? How do you know this is true?  Starting from the top, as I have already mentioned above, Dr. Ardito took time to speak to the students in the beginning to check in and explain what they were doing and then at the end spoke to them asking how the class went for them; as in, how did they find the tutorials, what did they struggle with, how far have they gotten, etc. However, for the time where I was in the breakout room with the boys, I guess I was the teacher, which is a strange concept for me since I felt more like a fellow programming student than a teacher. ^[6] Regardless, I was working on the data visualization tutorial because I have not yet finished going through it. I think I’ve completed about half of it by now. ^[7] Obviously, when any of the students had a question, I paused what I was doing and answered them but that only happened twice.

Moving on to the second question, I presume that the students were going through the tutorials, but as Dr. Ardito and I ended up discussing after the class, there’s no real way to know. If they had to submit something, we could see what, if anything, they accomplished but due to a technical issue they did not submit anything. I’m not even sure which tutorial the boys were completing, although I know that at least two people were doing the Pypet tutorial since I heard them mention that they were using the Pycat. Looking back, if I could re-do the lesson, I would ask the boys which tutorial they were doing and what they had been able to get done before we let the breakout room and entered back into the main room. During the after-class discussion with Dr. Ardito, I mentioned to him that I was surprised that the boys did not have more questions for me and he remarked that high school boys, in his experience, tend to be more reluctant to speak even if they know you and the boys had only just virtually met me, so even if I had managed to ask them, it is highly possible that no one would have responded. Having said that, I am hoping to go back to the class when they meet next on the 19^th so I might be able to try that out next time and see how it goes.  

As for what the students are learning, I think that the boys are learning how to problem solve, they are gaining skills in the computational thinking concept of algorithmic thinking as well as abstraction, and they are, most obviously, learning how to write in the programming language of Python. The keywords being “I think,” because, similar to the answer above, I cannot know for sure what they are learning. The next question points to why that’s the case. In asking “how do you know that” Dr. Ardito is having us question what learning “looks” like and how, if at all, we can be certain that it occurs. While it would be hard enough, in my opinion, to do this in person, in a virtual classroom where you are not talking or sharing your screens, it becomes near impossible. Or rather, I’m not sure how you would so without one or both of the previously mentioned factors. Overall, I think I would say that the lesson was a cool and interactive way to get students started with Python.

Briefly going back to what I normally discuss, how I might use this in the future, I think that the structure of Dr. Ardito’s lesson is one I would want to implement because it utilizes pedagogical theories that I too think are effective and engaging. The students are learning through experience, but they also have agency and control over which and what kind of experience they are learning through. At the same time, the students also have guidance (re: my presence and Dr. Ardito’s for his group) and some structure (re: meeting, work, debrief, rinse and repeat next week) which helps students not feel as if they are hung out to dry. ^[8] Thus, I would definitely like to incorporate this method of teaching in my future classroom.

That’s a wrap folks! As always, thank you for reading.

 

 

 ^[1] In fact, from now on I will be basing my reflections on videos that I have watched. Although, one of those videos is a recording of a presenter in one of my professor’s other classes so in that sense I will be doing one more post of a guest lecturer.

 ^[2] If you would like to look at the Manhattanville College’s official bio for him that I found, you can do so here. I feel that I should also mention that he co-wrote a book with Tom Liam Lynch and Pam Amendola entitled Integrating Computer Science Across the Core: Strategies for K-12 Districts, because that’s pretty cool in my opinion.

 ^[3] Dr. Ardito had mentioned that there was a girl’s version of the coding class so perhaps there is also a girl’s version of the whole academy, but it was unclear.

 ^[4] In a slightly embarrassing and amusing side note, after Dr. Ardito and I had finished our little mini planning session, I had thought we were going straight to the Zoom room where the class took place, completely forgetting that they were doing other things until 11:00AM. For context, unless I am prepared ahead of time, I am generally timid and awkward in first meetings. So there I was, suddenly (and unexpectedly) faced with the two men who ran the program, Anthony and Marty, as well as the blank screens of the boys’ computers, with no Dr. Ardito in sight because he was smart and came exactly on time instead of early haha. Even though Anthony and Marty were nice, especially Anthony who gave trying to bring me into the conversation a solid college try, I was silent except when I was asked a specific question. What felt particularly funny was when Anthony attempted to talk to me about coding and CRMs and a book entitled Headfirst SQL as if I had any idea what any of those acronyms meant. I just nodded along and hoped I didn’t look too silly haha. The only thing I slightly regret is the possibility that I came across as rude since they were kind enough to (indirectly) invite me.

 ^[5] I am honestly not sure how exactly it works with two different IDEs, but it certainly looks cool.

 ^[6] Honestly though I wasn’t teaching anything, I was just there to answer any questions they had about the tutorials and it was the tutorial that was their teacher haha.

 ^[7] Yes, I do realize I am quite behind in what I wanted to do with my coding project. I got a bunch done with my Pypet game, but I think I need to change a lot of it and I had wanted to finish the R tutorial I started. However, before I can do any of that, I need to finish writing these field experience reflections which are taking me longer than they should to be honest. I don’t know why but writing them is a bit like that Greek dude who has to continually roll a boulder up a hill everyday for eternity: I just have to keep going through the motions and hope that I’ll get somewhere even though I know that I’ll have to start from the beginning again tomorrow.  

 ^[8] I say as I side-eye another professor of mine who gave us a textbook, once a month meetings, and a hearty good luck.