Category: Kids and Learning

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A Testing Experience

I’m sitting in class at the moment with a group of Year 10 students as they do the NSW Board of Studies exam for computing skills. For those that don’t know, the Year 10 Computer Skills Test, or CST10, is a NSW government initiative to introduce standardised testing across the state to measure the ability of our 15 and 16 year old kids to confidently use computers. Every school in NSW has been required over the last few years to ensure that technology skills are integrated – or at least included – as part of the standard curriculum delivery. Our school (and I imagine most schools) have taken an approach where we have looked at the skills indicators (the specific list of computing skills that need to be assessed) and shared them out amongst the various key learning areas according to what we think are the most likely candidates to cover them in an integrated way. So, for example, our science classes try to include database use, maths integrates spreadsheets, word processing is obviously included in a number of subjects, HSIE do quite a bit with presentations, and so on. The basic idea is that by farming out the specific skills to various subjects and making their integration a mandatory requirement of curriculum delivery, that all students should get exposed to all the necessary skills by the time they get to this point in their school life. We also build in some redundancy, so that each skillset is covered by more than one key learning area.

It’s a good idea in theory. Trouble is, in theory, theory and reality are the same thing. In reality, they aren’t.

Since its inception in 2002 (I think?) the Board of Studies has been offering a “pen and paper” version of the test as well as an online version. This is designed to cater to those school who have bandwidth issues, are in rural areas, or for whatever reason decide they don’t want to do the online version. Of course, it should be obvious that a pen and paper test for computing skills is going to be pretty limited in scope. It’s all multiple guess questions, with screenshots of a generic computer GUI and fairly basic questions about how to interact with it. I was actually on the original writing committee for this test and found that we had to continually water things down – questions had to be platform agnostic (couldn’t be too Windows, Mac or Linux specific), application agnostic (couldn’t be too Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, Appleworks, or iWork specific), vague enough that they could be asked in a multiple choice format, and general enough that all kids could have a fair chance at answering them, not just the ones that did computing studies… In other words, the test had to cover all the basics but not really any of the specifics. As you can imagine, the questions that eventually emerge from that process are rather vanilla in nature. The fact that many schools still deliver the test on paper doesn’t really do much to improve the relevance of the testing process.

Mind you, the online version of the test is really no better in the sense that it is just an online version of the paper test… new bottle, same old wine. The online test has the same stimulating screen shots, same thrilling multiple choice question…  it’s nothing more than a whizzbang screen-based version of what is already available on paper, except it take a lot more effort, time and resources to administer. I’d love to see CST10 develop into an actual interactive test where kids could interact directly with simulated apps in a way that provides something close to a genuine user experience…  Don’t ask a kid how to put a border on a table by showing a static image and giving 4 choices about where you’d click to do it – give them a simulated version of a table app and ask them to SHOW YOU how they would do it.

Of course, this is hard to do. It would take huge resources to develop a test like this, and quite frankly I think it would raise all sorts of technical issues… as it was, we had some serious login issues this morning as 80,000 students across the state all tried banging on the Board of Studies servers at the same time. There needs to be a lot of further development to support this sort of load if we are ever to get online testing to work in a big way.

There are still technical issues to solve. But mainly, I’d like to see us solve some of the pedagogical issues of assessing this way. Whether we end up doing via paper or a screen, taking something as practical as computing skills and assessing them using a static, multiple choice method like this is, quite frankly, an insult to our kids.

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The Road Less Travelled

On one of the several mailing lists I subscribe to, I saw a question from a network manager in another school asking for advice in dealing with some mistreatment of computer equipment by students. His proposed solution was to install webcams in the computer rooms and to stream their output to a server where it could be recorder and monitored. This person was asking for suggestions or advice from anyone else who had gone down this path.

It’s not a path I particularly like…

I don’t mean for this reply to become a lengthy diatribe (or worse yet, a cranky rant), but I think this approach is totally going down the wrong path and it’s something I feel strongly about. I see many in school IT management who seem to be taking the path of constant surveillance and security over the harder-to-do but better-in-the-long-run approach of teaching students appropriate behaviour with technology in the first place. I see it happening with the way school lockdown their computers with complex security procedures, with the way some schools turn up their web filtering and proxy control to the point where it renders the simple act of foraging for information on the web a completely futile exercise. In the same vein of idealistic optimism, the idea of installing surveillance cameras into classrooms just doesn’t make sense to me.

Personally, I think if students are mishandling equipment there are two possible reasons for it… they either don’t know any better, or they just don’t care. The former is solvable through simple education – set up a plan that will teach the kids the appropriate ways to handle the gear and will encourage them to have respect for it. Maybe they are mishandling things because they just don’t know it’s supposed to be done any differently. So teach them what to do.

The second reason – that they are damaging equipment because they just don’t care – is a little more confronting, a little harder to solve, but I think it’s important that we do solve it. I think as educators we need to find out why they don’t care, and why they have so little regard for the equipment. I know this more pastoral approach is rather more difficult and time-consuming to implement and at times almost nebulous to be able to actually make happen, but in the long run is the only approach that makes sense. Locking equipment down or monitoring it with security cameras fails in the longer term and for many reasons … it only works while vigilance is kept high; it is rarely foolproof and often turns into a war between students and admins somewhat akin to a whack-a-mole game; and most importantly of all, it fails to treat the great majority of students with the respect they deserve. The underlying message is one of mistrust and ultimately does nothing to teach students to make good decisions for themselves.

In my experience, creating a low-trust environment with students rarely succeeds in the long term and only makes for a less-pleasant learning environment for everyone, even if you save a few dollars on damaged hardware in the short term. You can only win with intimidation for so long, and in the end everyone loses.

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We are the Robots

While trolling through some old files today I happened upon this video of some Lego robotics projects done by my Year 10 students about five years ago. I recall that their task was to build a sort of merry-go-round device that conformed to a few specific requirements. From memory it had to have provision for two “seats”, and when a start button was pressed it had to rotate around align the first of these seats with a loading platform, pause, and then rotate to align the second seat. Once both seats were “loaded”, it had to pause, then start rotating slowly, then get faster, until it reached top speed and did a specified number of rotations. Once these were complete if had to slow down again to a stop, aligning the first seat, then pausing again and finally aligning the second seat.

Here’s the video…[kml_flashembed movie=”http://www.youtube.com/v/eYUOfaFEJF8″ width=”425″ height=”350″ wmode=”transparent” /]

It was an interesting exercise. The girls (it was an all girls class) initially struggled with the idea of gears and motors, and it took them a while, and a bit of guidance, to figure out just how a motor would be able to make something turn like a merry-go-round. I had come from an all-boys school the year before and was really struck by just how much more easily the boys seemed to find the mechanical part of this task. I don’t mean to sound sexist, but there really does seem to be a huge difference in the innate mechanical abilities between boys and girls. The boys didn’t hesitate to grab the motors, gears and cogs, and within minutes, most of them had rudimentary vehicles constructed. The girls, on the other hand, seemed to vacillate for ages before even wanting to pick up the Lego, and when they did, they took quite a lot longer to build any sort of device, much less one that was at all mechanically “correct” or usable.

However, once the girls got started, I found they came up with a much more interesting and creative approach to problem solving than most of the boys I’d taught. Perhaps this comes from a naiveté and a less developed understanding of what was “right”. Whereas the boys seemed to know that certain combinations of blocks and gears would not work, the girls seemed to be more able to just try things whether they worked or not.

Thinking about this now, some years hence from when that video was made, it reminds me of a book I read called Paradigms, by Joel Arthur Barker. In this book, Barker contends that some of the best problem solvers are those who are outside the prevailing paradigm… outsiders who, to the experts, “don’t really understand the question”. But it’s this not really understanding the question that leads to some of the most creative solutions to many previously “unsolvable” problems.

If you think about it, many of the best thinkers, the most inspiring leaders, and the people changing the world the most, are those who least fit our conception of who we expect them to be. Look at the Albert Einsteins, the Pablo Picassos, the Steve Jobs’s, the Richard Bransons of the world… the square pegs in round holes. People who challenge the status quo because they don’t know that what they are proposing is completely unrealistic. Most of the innovation and creative flow in our society comes from those who don’t know that what they don’t know doesn’t matter. So they invent the future anyway.

As educators, we have to make sure we don’t educate the creativity out of kids. I’ll finish with a link to a TED Talk by Sir Ken Robinson, who expresses this notion far better than I could ever hope to. Every teacher – no, every person –  should watch this video…

[kml_flashembed movie=”http://youtube.com/v/ga2CYYCrtNE” width=”425″ height=”350″ wmode=”transparent” /]