I've mentioned my volunteer work at Columbine Elementary the racial and economic tornado that surrounds the school. That tornado touched down again last Wednesday night.
Columbine is getting a new building. Last night was the first of four meetings where the community surrounding the school has been invited to define what we envision for the future. The racial and economic divisions in our community dominated this first conversation.
One man sadly lead into a question with "How many of families at Columbine are in this country illegally?" He was shouted down there. I don't know where he was going to go next with his question. One person I spoke with after the meeting thought he was trying to ask "Are all the Columbine families paying the property taxes which support the school?"
Where to begin with these questions?
Yes, all Columbine families are paying property taxes. The poorer families pay rent and their landlords pay property taxes. Families are paying their share of the school funding whether they're here legally or not.
The next obvious protest is that if they don't speak English, they put a financial burden on the school. To that I reply with a little Colorado history.
The name of our great state is Spanish: it means "red". East of the Continental Divide was originally claimed by France and part of the Louisiana Purchase. West of the Continental Divide was claimed by Spain, became the Mexican Empire with their independence, and later some of those lands became the country of Texas when it broke off from Mexico. See Texas Annexation and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican-American War.
Regardless of how the lands changed ownership among European powers, they were primarily home to natives with some small Spanish towns in the south.
Most people in this state have moved here only recently. I brag about being a third-generation native of Colorado. By contrast Senator Ken Salazar is a fifth-generation native. San Luis is the oldest town in the State. To belabor the point, please notice the Spanish names. This has been a Spanish speaking region for far longer than it has been English speaking. In Colorado you cannot assume that brown skin and speaking Spanish means immigrant, nor illegal.
So regardless of whether or not it is a financial burden, Spanish and Native American cultures are an inherent part of Colorado. You can't wish that away with English-only rhetoric.
So much more to say about this... so little time.
I volunteered in the summer program for OpenWorld Learning at Creekside Elementary. According to the OWL mission statement, "OpenWorld Learning supports children's school success by tapping the power of digital technology and peer teaching to ignite a love of learning and leadership." What they're actually doing is education reform through a compelling use of computers. I also think they're an outstanding organization.
As you read this next quote from their site, please know that this isn't just a marketing blurb. They're actually doing it.
Students ... learn advanced technology skills that include animation, Internet research, multi-media presentation and computer programming. They learn these skills by creating projects in MicroWorlds - a child-friendly, multimedia authoring tool and computer programming language developed at MIT. It is striking to see the creativity and ingenuity of our students as they use the MicroWorlds computer programming language to create personally meaningful projects in art, animation, multi-media presentation, interactive software and game design.
http://www.openworldlearning.org/program.htm
This is computational thinking. They're using MicroWorlds logo and teaching elementary-aged kids to program. If, like me, you were introduced to programming on an Apple II, logo is a lot more than turtle graphics. Here's an extended excerpt from an email I sent them in August:
I first learned about your program as a volunteer in a Challenge Math program at Columbine Elementary here in Boulder. In the Spring of 2007 they were considering your program which eventually opened up at Creekside instead.
In May 2007, I emailed Chris Meyers. He replied about 5 minutes later, copying Lysa who in turn replied again in less than an hour. It took me a week to email again, but Lysa replied again that same evening. I visited Western Hills Elementary a week after that. Only two weeks from my initial cold-call to my first introduction to your program and the two weeks of delay were entirely due to my schedule.
My next contact with your colleagues was at the 2008 Impact Awards dinner in April where I learned about the summer program scheduled at Creekside. In early June, I contacted Christi -- having lost track of my original emails with Lysa. Christi forwarded my email to Lysa about 30 minutes later and Lysa replied to me the same afternoon copying Kate. Within a few days I had an employee handbook and application forms in my hands. The background check took about a week. That Friday I joined you at Mi Casa for a MW Workshop where I was immediately able to help create a micro-lesson. The following week I worked my first day in the program at Creekside.
I've done a fair bit of volunteering and you folks are by far the most organized and responsive organization with which I've ever dealt. For that matter, you're way ahead of the commercial businesses I encounter too. I'm completely impressed just from an organizational standpoint. Your speedy communication demonstrates a genuine respect for my time and I sincerely thank you all for taking me seriously from the outset. It's pretty inviting to work with you. I also appreciate that even as a volunteer you gave me an employee handbook -- that set clear expectations, and also invited me in as a member of your staff. These are simple things, but they really made an impression on me. The way you brought me into the organization made me take my own role more seriously, too.
I very much enjoyed my time in the program this summer and look forward to finding a way to remain involved. Please share this applause with the rest of your organization if you think that's appropriate. I genuinely appreciate the work you're doing and the way you're doing it.
About a quarter-century ago I identified my three biggest passions as Environment, Education, and Computers. Aikido joined that list nineteen years ago. Family has always been like water for a fish -- vital, but not something on this list probably until Elliott was born. Anyway, the first three remain career goals. I did fairly well combining Education and Computers in my first three jobs: creating electronic illustrations and animations of the history of perspective, building an ISP for Clark County School District and writing software to facilitate school-to-career efforts around the nation. Since then my professional life has been consumed by business systems, but I've learned a ton more about programming along the way.
For the past three years I've been trying to figure out how to get started teaching computational thinking. I don't want to quit programming, but I miss working in education. My volunteer work fills that void to a degree, but I'm increasingly convinced that education (and the world in general) needs computational thinking, and that I need to be doing something about it. These are vital tools to help us change our impact on the environment among other things.
What is Computational Thinking?
"Thinking like a computer scientist means more than being able to program a computer."
Jeannette Wing -- Computational Thinking [via ACM]
"Computational thinking is a way of solving problems, designing systems, and understanding human behavior that draws on concepts fundamental to computer science. Computational thinking is thinking in terms of abstractions, invariably multiple layers of abstraction at once. Computational thinking is about the automation of these abstractions."
Center for Computational Thinking -- Carnegie Mellon
"Computational thinking is a fundamental skill for everyone, not just for computer scientists. To reading, writing, and arithmetic, we should add computational thinking to every child's analytical ability."
Jeannette Wing -- Computational Thinking [via CMU]
In June of 2007, Jon Udell interviewed Jeannette Wing who coined the term. [1] The thirty-minute interview nicely introduces the subject. Regrettably, the above quotes and the interview probably preach to the choir: computer geeks will get it, but others won't. Even so, they're a place to start.
Dr Wing begins by suggesting the fundamental parts are Abstraction and Automation, but much in the rest of the interview suggests it's all about the Automation. Computers force us to think rigorously about the problems we solve and they enable us to tackle otherwise impossible problems.
Happily, the interview leaves the most important questions as exercises for the listener:
Jon asks (at around 10:30) "How would you in a more formal way teach the kinds of strategies that you've outlined here? ... Things like naming disciplines, disciplines for structuring information, disciplines for working with hierarchy, disciplines for modeling interacting layers of abstraction, ways of understanding when and how to focus on one or more layers, ways of understanding how to refactor." Glaringly absent from that list are two disciplines I care most about: testing, and reuse (collecting, refining, and sharing a bag of software tools to solve increasingly difficult problems).
It's time to get working on these problems.
[1] I link here to an earlier reference to the phrase computational thinking in "An Exploration in the Space of Mathematics Educations" by Seymour Papert, International Journal of Computers for Mathematical Learning, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 95-123, 1996. Really not surprising that Papert would have covered this ground first. Perhaps Jeannette still deserves credit for promoting the phrase into a term and bringing another generation's attention to the subject.