Using Magic in Computing Education and Outreach

This special session explores the use of magic tricks based on computer science ideas; magic tricks help grab students\u27 attention and can motivate them to invest more deeply in underlying CS concepts. Error detection ideas long used by computer scientists provide a particularly rich basis for working such magic\u27\u27, with a CS Unplugged parity check activity being a notable example. Prior work has shown that one can perform much more sophisticated tricks than the relatively well-known CS Unplugged activity, and these tricks can motivate analyses across a wide variety of computer science concepts and are relevant to learning objectives across grade levels from 2nd grade through graduate school. These tricks have piqued the interest of past audiences and have been performed with the aid of online implementations; this conference session will demonstrate enhanced implementations used to illuminate the underlying concepts rather than just to perform the tricks. The audience will participate in puzzling out how to apply relevant concepts as we work through a scaffolded series of tricks centering on error detection and correction. The implementations also provide a useful model for incorporating greater interaction than is typically found in current innovative online interactive textbooks. In addition, they are samples for possible programming assignments that can motivate students using CS Unplugged activities to actively pursue deep programming experiences

Educational Magic Tricks Based on Error-Detection Schemes

Magic tricks based on computer science concepts help grab student attention and can motivate them to delve more deeply. Error detection ideas long used by computer scientists provide a rich basis for working magic; probably the most well known trick of this type is one included in the CS Unplugged activities. This paper shows that much more powerful variations of the trick can be performed, some in an unplugged environment and some with computer assistance. Some of the tricks also show off additional concepts in computer science and discrete mathematics

Conjuring cognition : A review of educational magic-based interventions

For hundreds of years, magic tricks have been employed within a variety of pedagogic contexts, including promoting science and mathematics, delivering educational messaging, enhancing scepticism about the paranormal, and boosting creative thinking for product design. This review examines this diverse body of work, focusing on studies that have assessed the impact of such interventions. Although the studies tended to yield positive outcomes, much of the work suffered from methodological shortcomings, including measuring the impact of interventions over a relatively short period of time, focusing on self-report measures and failing to employ control groups. The paper makes several recommendations for future study in the area, including assessing the longer-term impact of magic-based interventions, comparing these interventions to other types of pedagogic techniques, focussing on knowledge retention and behavioural outcomes, and collaborating with magicians to develop more impactful interventions.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

T-Shifting Identities and Practices: Interaction Designers in the Fourth Industrial Age

We report findings from our two-year research study to investigate the practices, processes and roles of professional creatives working on interaction design and wider digital design projects. The study contributes insights from interviews conducted to support the development of 13 high profile industry case studies involving 21 of their creators. Through thematic analysis of interview transcripts we constructed key themes of Project Scope, Design Stances, Skills Sets and Studio Practice. We discuss these as representative of the perpetual shifting of the cornerstones of how designers have traditionally understood and embodied their own and peers’ roles and combinations of competencies. This, we argue, is challenging perceptions and expectations around designers’ traditional ‘T-shape’ organisation of skills and knowledge. The article goes on to identify areas of emerging design practice brought about by rapid technological changes associated with the Fourth Industrial Age that warrant further research. These include anticipatory design and personalisation, branded interactions and magic technology. The article concludes by calling for wide sharing of designers’ stories as a pragmatic resource to demonstrate and communicate emerging practices that support the development of graduates and other designers entering this rapidly-changing field

Aproximació a la Supercomputació a Secundària

En aquest TFM es realitza un anàlisi de les oportunitats que planteja el currículum d'educació secundària per incorporar, de manera transversal, coneixements i conceptes vinculats a la Supercomputació per tal de reduir la "impedància d'entrada" en aquest camp. Es prenen com a base diferents iniciatives i activitats extra-curriculars en entorns o tecnologies similars, treballant en la translació d'aquells conceptes bàsics i metodologies de treball vinculades a la Supercomputació com a eina en un entorn multidisciplinari a les assignatures que conformen els citats currículums. A partir d'aquí, es plantegen actuacions en dues vessants: metodològiques/curriculars i d'eines de suport. L'objectiu final del TFM és, en resum, explorar alternatives per desmitificar la Supercomputació en els cicles d'educació secundària i avançar idees i conceptes que permetin tant una transició més suau a cursos o carreres d'especialització per aquell estudiantat interessat en aquest tema en concret com per la resta d'estudiantat que, en algun moment de la seva formació posterior i/o vida laboral, requerirà accedir a serveis i eines de Supercomputació per complementar els seus estudis o la seva feina

Embodied approaches to learning programming

This thesis explores observable representations of embodied learning, such as physicality, gestures and the use of conceptual metaphors among students in primary computing education. To understand the influence of more physically interactive forms of interface, I compared the use of two user interfaces – a Tangible User Interface (TUI) and Graphical User Interface (GUI) – to foster programming skills in primary school students aged between six and seven. The first phase of this thesis, Studies 1 and 2, adopted a between-subjects design to examine the impact of interface type on several variables including enjoyment, attitudes, learning outcomes, and frequency of gestures, as well as the effect of gender on each variable. Both Study 1 and 2 examined the relationship between student gestures and learning outcomes. Study 1 examined the effect of physicality as an input by asking students to use a block-based programming environment to control a physical robot (PR) to solve six activities (two complex, four simple) where the students used either a TUI-PR or a GUI-PR. The use of a GUI-PR was associated with improved learning outcomes, but the TUI-PR led to a greater attitudinal improvement toward computing. No difference was identified in the number of gestures used by participants in the TUI-PR and GUI-PR groups, but a statistically significant difference was identified between the mean learning gains in programming of high-frequency gesturers and low-frequency gesturers, with the top quartile showing significantly greater learning gains. Study 2 further examined the effect of physicality as both an input and an output by comparing two block-based programming environments: first, a TUI-PR consisting of physical, hand-manipulated blocks to control a physical robot; and second, a GUI-SR, which involve using touchscreen-operable programming blocks to control an on-screen robot (SR) to solve four simple activities. No difference was observed between the TUI-PR and GUI-PR in terms of learning outcomes, but the GUI-PR was associated with attitudinal improvement toward computing. Additionally, no difference was observed in the number of gestures used by participants in the TUI-PR and GUI-SR groups and no relationship was identified between the frequency of gestures and learning gains. In both studies, no difference was found in terms of the level of enjoyment or by gender across all the measures. The results also demonstrated that children used a range of gestures to represent the concept of iteration including pointing, literal representational gestures and metaphorical representational gestures. In Study 3, we addressed a gap in the current theoretical understanding of computing education by drawing on embodied cognition theory. Using methodological tools from cognitive linguistics and gesture research, an analysis of how primary school students used spontaneous co-speech gestures when responding to interview questions and describing programming concepts was conducted. The findings show representational patterns in these gestures, thereby suggesting the potential of this methodological approach to provide a deeper understanding of the nature of learners’ cognition in the domain of computing education. This work that contributes to two main areas: first, the field of interaction design, particularly relating to the importance of physicality in programming environments for children; and second, current understandings of the importance of gestures and conceptual metaphors in CS education in primary school. This thesis presents an in-depth comparison of the use of a TUI and GUI to teach programming skills to primary school students. In particular, the findings indicate that a GUI-SR is suitable for children’s learning and is associated with greater attitudinal improvement than a TUI. This thesis also investigated the potential relationship between increased embodiment in the interface and output device (e.g., physicality) and increased use of embodied representations (e.g., gestures) that showed no relationship across Studies 1 and 2. This research describes children’s use of spontaneous gestures when solving programming problems and explaining programming concepts. Additionally, regarding the use of spontaneous gestures, this research demonstrates how investigating children’s gestures may help to characterise children’s conceptions in primary computing, possibly allowing the identification of misconceptions and assisting the identification of productive educational strategies. This research has also provided evidence indicating that children use spontaneous hand gestures to demonstrate abstract computational concepts, even in the absence of relevant stimuli (i.e., written code); this reflects how gestures may indicate the embodiment of the children’s computing notions. Furthermore, this research presents tentative evidence of cultural influences on embodied conceptualisations. The findings suggest that the direction of a culture’s written language (i.e., right-to-left or left-to-right) influences the direction and use of conceptual metaphors in CS. Finally, this research identified a positive relationship between the mean learning gains of high-frequency gesturers and low-frequency gesturers on tasks with varying problem difficulties. This work represents the first step toward understanding children’s embodied descriptions of programming and the potential role of gestures in supporting their learning. This was a worthwhile area of research because, although the analysis of children’s gestures has already proven valuable in illuminating knowledge acquisition and conceptual development in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields such as mathematics itself, the area of computing education is currently underexplored

Situated Analytics for Data Scientists

Much of Mark Weiser's vision of ``ubiquitous computing'' has come to fruition: We live in a world of interfaces that connect us with systems, devices, and people wherever we are. However, those of us in jobs that involve analyzing data and developing software find ourselves tied to environments that limit when and where we may conduct our work; it is ungainly and awkward to pull out a laptop during a stroll through a park, for example, but difficult to write a program on one's phone. In this dissertation, I discuss the current state of data visualization in data science and analysis workflows, the emerging domains of immersive and situated analytics, and how immersive and situated implementations and visualization techniques can be used to support data science. I will then describe the results of several years of my own empirical work with data scientists and other analytical professionals, particularly (though not exclusively) those employed with the U.S. Department of Commerce. These results, as they relate to visualization and visual analytics design based on user task performance, observations by the researcher and participants, and evaluation of observational data collected during user sessions, represent the first thread of research I will discuss in this dissertation. I will demonstrate how they might act as the guiding basis for my implementation of immersive and situated analytics systems and techniques. As a data scientist and economist myself, I am naturally inclined to want to use high-frequency observational data to the end of realizing a research goal; indeed, a large part of my research contributions---and a second ``thread'' of research to be presented in this dissertation---have been around interpreting user behavior using real-time data collected during user sessions. I argue that the relationship between immersive analytics and data science can and should be reciprocal: While immersive implementations can support data science work, methods borrowed from data science are particularly well-suited for supporting the evaluation of the embodied interactions common in immersive and situated environments. I make this argument based on both the ease and importance of collecting spatial data from user sessions from the sensors required for immersive systems to function that I have experienced during the course of my own empirical work with data scientists. As part of this thread of research working from this perspective, this dissertation will introduce a framework for interpreting user session data that I evaluate with user experience researchers working in the tech industry. Finally, this dissertation will present a synthesis of these two threads of research. I combine the design guidelines I derive from my empirical work with machine learning and signal processing techniques to interpret user behavior in real time in Wizualization, a mid-air gesture and speech-based augmented reality visual analytics system