Understanding Computer Programming as a Literacy

Since the 1960s, computer scientists and enthusiasts have paralleled computer programming to literacy, arguing it is a generalizable skill that should be more widely taught and held. Launching from that premise, this article leverages historical and social findings from literacy studies to frame computer programming as “computational literacy.” I argue that programming and writing have followed similar historical trajectories as material technologies and explain how they are intertwined in contemporary composition environments. A concept of “computational literacy” helps us to better understand the social, technical and cultural dynamics of programming, but it also enriches our vision of twenty-first century composition

Tinkering with Logo in an Elementary Mathematics Methods Course

With an increased push to integrate coding and computational literacy in K–12 learning environments, teacher educators will need to consider ways they might support preservice teachers (PSTs). This paper details a tinkering approach used to engage PSTs in thinking computationally as they worked with geometric concepts they will be expected to teach in K–5. Experiences programming in Logo to construct authentic artifacts in the form of two-dimensional geometric graphics not only supported PSTs’ understanding of core geometric and spatial concepts, but also helped them to make connections between mathematics and computational literacy. Artifacts and discourse are discussed as they relate to three core considerations: engaging learners to construct authentic artifacts, supporting a communitarian ethos, and supporting various types of rapid feedback

Creating Space: Building Digital Games

Studies of games, rhetoric, and pedagogy are increasingly common in our field, and indeed seem to grow each year. Nonetheless, composing and designing digital games, either as a mode of scholarship or as a classroom assignment, has not seen an equal groundswell. This selection first provides a brief overview of the existing scholarship in gaming and pedagogy, much of which currently focuses either on games as texts to analyze or as pedagogical models. While these approaches are certainly valuable, I advocate for an increased focus on game design and creation as valuable act of composition. Such a focus engages students and scholars in a deeply multimodal practice that incorporates critical design and computational thinking. I close with suggestions on tools for new and intrepid designers

Combining Terrier with Apache Spark to Create Agile Experimental Information Retrieval Pipelines

Experimentation using IR systems has traditionally been a procedural and laborious process. Queries must be run on an index, with any parameters of the retrieval models suitably tuned. With the advent of learning-to-rank, such experimental processes (including the appropriate folding of queries to achieve cross-fold validation) have resulted in complicated experimental designs and hence scripting. At the same time, machine learning platforms such as Scikit Learn and Apache Spark have pioneered the notion of an experimental pipeline , which naturally allows a supervised classification experiment to be expressed a series of stages, which can be learned or transformed. In this demonstration, we detail Terrier-Spark, a recent adaptation to the Terrier Information Retrieval platform which permits it to be used within the experimental pipelines of Spark. We argue that this (1) provides an agile experimental platform for information retrieval, comparable to that enjoyed by other branches of data science; (2) aids research reproducibility in information retrieval by facilitating easily-distributable notebooks containing conducted experiments; and (3) facilitates the teaching of information retrieval experiments in educational environments

Coding as a Literacy Practice in Adult Learning Communities

This study considered how computing courses for adult learners might be customized to effectively address their reasons for learning to read and write computer code. The view of coding as a literacy practice is the key theme in this study. Street’s (2006) ideological model of literacy along with the perspective of computational participation, are theoretical models used to explore coding as a literacy practice (Kafai & Burke, 2017). Through the vehicle of action research, this study focused on analyzing the delivery of an introductory web languages coding course for female immigrants. This study drew from both the student and teacher perspectives. The study used student feedback collected from online class survey questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. The study also incorporated the teacher’s field notes, a course summary report, and the Teaching Perspectives Inventory survey results (Collins & Pratt, 2011). Findings from this study include these areas of insights: 1) students’ views on the benefits of learning coding, 2) the language and communication challenges students faced, and 3) an overview of some effective teaching tools and approaches. Based on these findings, there is a discussion that considered possible issues related to student engagement in learning web language coding. Included are sections on implications for practice and future research