Blair MacIntyre
Jul 24, 2017 · 1 min read

I’m probably more optimistic about teacher’s ability to leverage tools in their work; I’m not thinking “radical pedagogy overhaul” in this context, and I’m not thinking at all about CS education (honestly). Perhaps my view is overly clouded by my personal experiences with the teachers I work with at my kids schools (we’ve been lucky with the independent schools our kids have attended, and with the wide and varied use of technology throughout the curriculum at those schools).

I was specifically interested in the “many customized focused tools” part of your summary; so many classes use tools on mobile devices now, to make videos or do presentations or tell stories, and most of those tools do not yet support computational activities. But they could. Not full-blown programming, but simple state and interactivity. Here I’m thinking about analogies to Twine, where the ability to make interactive stories includes simple state manipulation and conditionals, and how that can be used by english teachers with little or no CS training. (Of course, I’m also interested the chemistry teacher who had the kids use Scratch to illustrate grade 8 chemistry ideas, and the grade 9 math teacher who had the kids explore ideas in Processing, but those do start pushing against your concerns and feel more like outliers to me).

If more and more of the tools teachers and kids use support “simple, goal directed computational capabilities”, everyone will get used to using them. Without “learning to program” or “learning to teach others to learn to program.”

    Blair MacIntyre

    Written by

    Researcher at Mozilla, Professor at Georgia Tech, Founder of MacMynatt Group. AR, VR, XR. Design, games, HCI. Canadian-American. Bagpiper-In-Training.