Teaching inside a prison presents challenges that are unimaginable in a typical college environment. Despite these, teaching incarcerated individuals can provide some of the most satisfying moments of one’s career.
This paper reports on the author’s experience teaching basic website development—HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—inside the New Hampshire State Prison for Men. It describes obstacles he faced and work- arounds he found to be effective.
For educators thinking of teaching “behind the wall,” this paper attempts to provide practical advice learned not only from the author’s experience, but also gleaned from that of others. The literature on this topic is sparse, but the author has learned from books, articles, and presentations by other prison instructors as well as conversations with both currently and formerly incarcerated individuals.
For those who have never even thought of teaching in a prison, this paper attempts to introduce an environment that presents significant challenges but also significant rewards. The author has found the experience of teaching incarcerated individuals as enriching to himself as he hopes it has been to his students.
A blog post on my volunteer work at the New Hampshire State Prison for Men by the company that donated $1,400 worth of textbooks for the incarcerated men in my class.
Panel Participants:
- Prof. C. Shawn McGuffey, Boston College — Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of African & African Diaspora Studies
- Prof. Brenna Wynn Greer, Wellesley College — Associate Professor of History
- Prof. Ralph Edward Jordan, UMass Lowell — Assistant Teaching Professor, Manning School of Business
This documentary presents a historical perspective on slavery, lynching, segregation, and mass incarceration and their continuing ramifications for civil rights today. For detailed information on the program, including links to the videos on YouTube, please visit the project website at jesseheines.com/civilrights.
Mentions and Articles about the Civil Rights Documentary
- Smith, Margaret (2021). Chelmsford resident’s civil rights series focus of forum. Eagle-Independent, WickedLocal.com.
CHELMSFORD – A virtual program will feature a four-part civil rights series, created by Chelmsford resident Jesse Heines, with Chelmsford Telemedia. “Civil Rights: A History” Panel Discussion will take place on March 9 via Zoom. It will be broadcast on Chelmsford Telemedia and made available on YouTube.- Smith, Margaret (2021). Chelmsford board eyes goals for fostering inclusion, awareness. Eagle-Independent, WickedLocal.com.
CHELMSFORD – The town’s Diversity, Racial Equity, and Inclusion Committee is working toward goals including events programming, and fostering greater dialogue in the community.- Smith, Margaret (2021). Chelmsford resident creates video series on civil rights. Eagle-Independent, WickedLocal.com.
CHELMSFORD – From slavery to modern times, a video series explores the history and continuing struggle of civil rights and racial justice. Resident Jesse Heines produced “Civil Rights: A History.” Heines also narrates and serves as presenter of the series.
This version of my talk was my first presentation delivered over Zoom. That allowed it to be recorded.
- PowerPoint Slides (as a PDF file)
- Handout (PDF file)
- Zoom Recording on YouTube (52 minutes 26 seconds)
This is the third iteration of my talk on civil rights inspired by the work of Bryan Stevenson. It is longer than the previous two, filling a two-hour time slot. This allowed me to spend more time on the roots of racism in our country and more on the educational steps that I see as our only hope to combat racism.
- PowerPoint Slides (as a PDF file)
- Handout (PDF file)
The Congregation Shalom Social Action Committee put together a 4-day “Civil Rights Journey” to Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma, Alabama in March 2020. In preparation for that trip, I was invited to speak about my research into civil rights inspired by Bryan Stevenson. To do that I adapted my presentation to UMass Lowell Class ENGL-3330, focusing on the developments from the formal end of slavery in the United States in 1865 through the periods of lynching, Jim Crow segregation, and mass incarceration that we have today.
- PowerPoint Slides (as a PDF file)
- Handout (PDF file)
Prof. Melissa Pennell’s American Autobiography class includes Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass (1845) and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs (1861) as required reading. As a supplement to those texts, Prof. Pennell invited me to present to her class on developments from the formal end of slavery in the United States in 1865 through the periods of lynching and Jim Crow segregation to the mass incarceration that we have today. This talk presents statistics on the growth of our prison population and the injustices in the rates of incarceration for people of different races. It then examines one approach to tackling some of the issues involved in mass incarceration: Correctional Industries, which provides skill training for inmates leading to Journeyman Certificates from the U.S. Dept. of Labor. These certificates are roughly equivalent to vocational high school diplomas and help inmates get jobs when they are released, a big factor in reducing recidivism.
- PowerPoint Slides (as a PDF file)
The LIRA folks so enjoyed my presentation on this topic in 2016 that they asked me to reprise it in 2019. This was therefore an updated version of my 2-hour presentation on my favorite hobby: singing barbershop harmony with my friends.
- PowerPoint Slides (as a PDF file)
After I retired I got very interested in criminal justice and voluteered for the Correctional Industries program in the New Hampshire Dept. of Corrections and UTEC. As of 2019 I have just started speaking about this work when invited to do so.
This talk presents the problem of mass incarceration and recidivism in the United States by presenting statistics on the growth of our prison population and the injustices in the rates of incarceration for people of different races. We then talked about the work being done in the New Hampshire Dept. of Corrections and UTEC to address these issues through education in an effort to reduce recidivism and keep youth from getting ensnared in the criminal justice system.
- PowerPoint Slides (as a PDF file)
This was a truly fun, 2-hour presentation on my favorite hobby: singing barbershop harmony with my friends. It has been reprised a number of times in abbreviated form for other audiences, but the slides linked here are those used in the full version.
- PowerPoint Slides (as a PDF file)
The goal of the project is to research ways in which the teaching of basic computing skills can be integrated into after-school choral programs. The team will study how to adapt the interdisciplinary, computing+music activities developed to date in their NSF-funded Performamatics project with college-aged students to now introduce middle school-aged students to computing in an informal, after-school choral program. They will investigate how to leverage the universal appeal of music to help students who typically shy away from technical studies to gain a foothold in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) by programming choral music.
The project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments. This includes providing multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences, advancing innovative research on and assessment of STEM learning in informal environments, and developing understandings of deeper learning by participants.
The team will use a qualitative and quantitative, mixed-methods approach to study four research questions:
- Can middle school-aged children follow the connections from singing to digitized sound to MIDI and back to music and learn to program using the songs they like to sing? To encourage students to become involved with manipulating sounds and programming music on their own computers, the approach will employ Audacity and Scratch, two free music recording, editing, and generation platforms. The team will study how well programming of music helps them acquire STEM skills by assessing the complexity and efficacy of the programs they can learn to code.
- Can programming their individual parts help students learn to sing in three- and four-part harmony? The main focus is on learning of STEM, but research on this question will evaluate whether programming skills can help students learn about music, too.
- What resources, models, and tools (RMTs) are necessary to integrate STEM education into a middle school after-school choral program? The team will work with local middle schools to research techniques for integrating computing into after-school choral programs without disrupting their musical focus. They will identify what choral teachers need in order to do this integration, and they will devise and evaluate techniques for adding STEM skills to the students’ choral experience.
- Can the involvement of adults who match the students’ racial and/or cultural backgrounds have a positive effect on the “people like me don’t (or can’t) do that?” belief that so often stifles efforts to attract underrepresented groups to STEM? They will actively seek to involve students of underrepresented groups in the program by recruiting adult role models from these groups who are involved with both music and computing. They will use attitudinal surveys to assess whether these adults have any effect on the students’ self-efficacy and the “people like me” syndrome that hinders some from engaging in STEM.
Computational thinking (CT) is an emerging component of computer science education. A common characteristic of successful efforts to introduce CT is the presence of a context to which students can relate. This project builds upon previous efforts that have shown music to be a context that engages students.
A sample of student activities include writing computer programs to play music, developing web pages that incorporate music, and developing data structures and databases to catalog sounds. Upper level courses in computing and music are synchronized by students working on collaborative projects across the disciplines. An alternative format is to offer a hybrid course co-taught by faculty from both disciplines. Expected outcomes include course materials and approaches for measuring CT gains. Course materials include lecture notes, class activities, code examples and homework assignments.
Professional development workshops provide expertise for faculty to adopt new education approaches and to participate in a community of like-minded educators. Attendees are interdisciplinary two-person teams with expertise in computing as well as music. Three summer workshops are expected to attract one hundred faculty from fifty institutions.
This effort leverages a natural relationship between music and computing to teach CT concepts to undergraduates in all disciplines. Materials are being developed for interdisciplinary general education courses and discipline-specific music and computing courses at more advanced levels.
This CPATH project builds a community engaged in integrating computing with performing and fine arts. Building on an existing infrastructure, the traditional computer science curriculum is revitalized by streamlining the core computer science courses and developing an interdisciplinary major focused on arts and humanities. Artbotics and performatics students and faculty work together in a multi-disciplinary teams supported by a regional group of project advisors and collaborations representing active museums, theaters, engineering, computer science professional organizations in the area. The project group centered at Massachusetts Lowell will then reach out to build a community of practitioners through workshops, conference events, and an alliance with the National Center for Women and Information Technology.
The intellectual merit of this project lies in strong project team and the expertise of the collaborative partners participating in the project. The project features an extremely comprehensive assessment plan that should provide concrete insights that are of great value. The project has the potential to articulate the connections between computer science and the arts thus enhancing the overall discipline of computing.
The broader impacts of the project lie with the potential to enhance the education and opportunities of a broader group of students and region. The community outreach component builds capacity nationally to revitalize computing education and thus directly impact the computing education of students and faculty across the nation. The project can serve as a national model for blending computer science with other arts and humanities disciplines.
This paper reports on an after‐school program that introduced middle school students to computing through music. The program ran for two years, from October 2015 through April 2017. It involved singing, encoding music with ABC notation, and programming music with Pencil Code. We describe the program’s goals and the activities students pursued, as well as suggestions for improvement. While rigorous evaluation of such a program is difficult, we present survey and focus group results that show that students’ attitudes toward the program were positive and that they did learn some programming.
- PowerPoint Slides (as a PDF file)
- TACTS Workshop Website (with extensive resource materials)
News Clips and Articles about the TACTS Program
- Science Diffusion (2018). Teaching A Computer To Sing. https://www.scientia.global/jesse-m-heines-daniel-a-walzer-teaching-a-computer-to-sing/.
As technology permeates more and more aspects of our daily lives, computer literacy and computer programming skills are more valuable than ever in the workplace. Professors Jesse Heines and Daniel Walzer of the University of Massachusetts Lowell are working at the intersection of music and technology to engage middle school students in learning computer programming by “Teaching a Computer to Sing.”
- HTML version – on the Science Diffusion website
- PDF version – on the Science Diffusion website
- SciPod – podcast reading of the paper from the Science Diffusion website
- Sobey, Rick (2017). Teach a computer to sing? With UML help, Lowell students are. Lowell Sun. January 24, 2017.
UMass Lowell’s “Teach a Computer to Sing” after-school program has been going on at Lowell’s Bartlett Community Partnership School for about 18 months. The school’s music teacher, along with four assistants from the university and a retired computer science professor, have worked with the students on learning to read music-and then transcribing the music in a computer program. The after-school program integrates computer programming and music education.
- Lowell Sun (2016). UMass Lowell and Bartlett in harmony. Lowell Sun. July 3, 2016.
A new after-school program at the Bartlett Community Partnership School is teaching students how to write compute code while enhancing their understanding of music.
One of the ways to attract a more diverse group of students to computer science is by offering courses that are interdisciplinary. Some of the first examples of this combined multimedia with programming. There are many more possibilities, but as computer scientists, we often do not have the domain knowledge to teach these courses alone. Team teaching offers a solution to this dilemma. The goal of this panel is to present some of the problems we have encountered and to discuss some of the solutions.
- PowerPoint Slides (as a PDF file)
“Teaching a Computer to Sing” investigates how middle school students—aged ten to fourteen—build critical thinking and problem-solving skills through informal, yet cogent learning activities in a voluntary after-school choral program. This presentation explores how deploying age-appropriate, music-centered, and technology-mediated pursuits gives middle school students a chance to explore the connections between academic fields that are normally offered as isolated, grade-specific courses in formal classrooms.
- PowerPoint Slides (as a PDF file)
Comparing Scratch to Pencil Code for teaching computing through music immediately reveals a major difference: Scratch represents notes as MIDI numbers, while Pencil Code represents notes as letters using ABC notation. To someone who reads music, Pencil Code is clearly preferable because it is far easier to map, for example, a major third to C and E than 60 and 64. But to those who generate music algorithmically, ABC is not as easy as MIDI. For example, a major third in the key of D is not D and F, it is D and F#. Using MIDI values, however, the interval is always 4 semitones: 62 (D) + 4 = 66 (F#), just as before.
It seems logical that if one does something for 30 years, continually gets paid for doing it, and even receives an award of recognition now and then, he must have learned something along the way that he can share with others following in his footsteps. This paper is an attempt to share the techniques, approaches, and practices that I have learned in the last 30 years to increase my effectiveness as a teacher. It is my hope that at least some readers will choose to adopt some of these techniques to increase their effectiveness, as well.
There is a great deal of interest in developing interdisciplinary project experiences and courses that bring together both faculty and students from computer science and other fields. The benefits of interdisciplinary experiences are numerous: computer science students learn to apply concepts they have learned in other courses to new and interesting domains, students in other fields learn about the possibilities of computing, and all students learn to collaborate with peers who may speak a different academic language. However, there are many barriers to developing interdisciplinary educational experiences. Faculty may wonder how to find colleagues in other departments who are open to working with computer scientists or how to structure interdisciplinary projects and courses. It may not be clear how to engage students of very different backgrounds. In this panel, faculty who have successfully run a wide variety of interdisciplinary projects and courses will speak about their experiences and answer questions on the practical aspects of developing interdisciplinary computing projects and courses.
- PowerPoint Slides (as a PDF file)
Flipped classrooms are a new twist on an old idea: homework. The basic formula is simple: do the prep work before coming to class and come to class ready to discuss that work, do an activity to reinforce what you learned, or even take a quiz on the reading or research that was assigned. But as with all approaches to teaching, the reality is never that simple.
This panel will report the experiences of four “flippers” and explore the pros and cons of those experiences. Educators who are considering flipping all or part of their courses will gain insight into how to do so to their — and, more importantly, their students’ — advantage, while those who have used this technique may gain new insights into approaches that might help them be more successful if they faced any issues similar to those of the panelists.
This paper describes a foray into teaching internationalization by attempting to do a collaborative project between students in the United States and Poland. The project required Polish students to work with software developed by American students and to provide feedback to the Americans on how easy it was to understand and modify their code. Students communicated via email and online chats as well as in a live session facilitated by Google Hangout. The goals were to get students in both countries to appreciate the clarity needed to communicate and work with international colleagues and to have them experience the myriad issues involved in such collaborations. We report the details of the project we assigned, the processes we went through to set up the collaboration, and our successes and failures as we worked toward our goals.
- PowerPoint Slides (as a PDF file)
Music and the arts are engaging contexts for students to learn, integrate and apply computational concepts and thinking strategies. Our demonstration will begin by sharing our process of interdisciplinary collaboration, following by exemplar integration projects and examples of student work integrating musical and computational thinking developed through our research. These projects were designed to reflect the real-world collaboration skills, disciplinary and interdisciplinary understandings needed in the development of music and arts technologies today and in the future.
Our work on Performamatics aims to enhance students’ computational thinking (CT) by engaging them in fundamental concepts that unite computing and music. Our approach leverages students’ near universal interest in music as a context for rich CT experiences. The techniques we share are used in a General Education course open to students in any major called Sound Thinking, which is now being offered for the fourth time.
The intersection of computing and music can enrich pedagogy in numerous ways, from low-level courses that use music to illustrate practical applications of computing concepts to high-level ones that use sophisticated computer algorithms to process audio signals. This paper explores the ground between these extremes by describing our experiences with two types of interdisciplinary courses. In the first, arts and computing students worked together to tackle a joint project even though they were taking independent courses. In the second, all students enrolled in the same course, but every class was taught by two professors: one from music and the other from computer science. This course was designed to teach computing and music together, rather than one in service to the other. This paper presents the philosophy and motivation behind these courses, describes some of the assignments students do in them, and shows examples of student work.
- Abstract in IEEE Computer Society CS Digital Library
with link to full paper as published (requires member login)
Semantic distance is the degree of closeness between two pieces of text determined by their meaning. Semantic distance is typically measured by analyzing a set of documents or a list of terms and assigning a metric based on the likeness of their meaning or the concept they represent. Although related research provides some semantic-based algorithms, few applications exist. This work proposes a semanticbased approach for automatically identifying potential course equivalencies given their catalog descriptions. The method developed by Li et al. (2006) is extended in this paper to take a course description from one university as the input and suggest equivalent courses offered at another university. Results are evaluated and future work is discussed.
Most undergraduate computer science programs include classes that require team work. This helps our students work well with each other, but does not address the problem of working well with people from other disciplines. Computer scientists have preconceived notions of people in other professions and people in other professions have preconceived notions of computer scientists. These preconceptions can interfere with good working relationships. Computer scientists tend to work on projects of use in an application field that may be unknown to them and, thus, must work with people in that application field.
Many computer scientists enjoy the comic strip DilbertTM by Scott Adams. A problem with the strip is that it paints stereotypical portraits of the various professionals that Dilbert works with. The marketing people lie and make impossible demands. Management is composed of idiotic, power mad people. Advertising people will promise anything. The human resources department is out for your blood. Certainly graphic artists and usability professionals would come under similar fire if they are ever part of the strip. Of course, the computer scientists (or engineers) are also negatively stereotyped as having no lives, being obsessed with hi-tech toys, having poor social skills and, generally, being geeky (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geek). The problem is that these stereotypes often contain a component of truth. Computer scientists and others must learn to look beyond the stereotype and see what a person can actually do.
This panel looks at several ways to foster appreciation of other disciplines to help broaden the sometimes narrow perspective of our graduates.
This paper discusses our ongoing experiences in developing an interdisciplinary general education course called Sound Thinking that is offered jointly by our Dept. of Computer Science and Dept. of Music. It focuses on the student outcomes we are trying to achieve and the projects we are using to help students realize those outcomes. It explains why we are moving from a web-based environment using HTML and JavaScript to Scratch and discusses the potential for Scratch’s “musical live coding” capability to reinforce those concepts even more strongly.
This session presented “Sound Thinking,” an interdisciplinary course that explores the intersection of music and computer science. We offered this course for the second time in the Spring 2010 semester, and we made significant changes based on student feedback from the first offering. Any faculty interested in teaching an interdisciplinary course, particularly one designated as a GenEd, will benefit from hearing about our experiences. We cover course planning, maximizing benefits to students in different departments, teaching and learning style differences, preparing a GenEd proposal, addressing different departmental definitions of “scholarly activity,” and impacts on professors.
What might be learned through a collaborative project bringing together middle school students, pre-service music educators and senior computer science majors in the development of new web-based music composing software for middle school students? This question framed a collaborative project undertaken by music education majors enrolled in General Music Methods II and senior computer science majors enrolled in GUI Programming II. Our demonstration will share examples of the software developed through the project as well as student compositions created by the middle school students who designed and tested the software. The challenges and surprises faced during the collaborative development process will be shared detailing our implications for future collaborations among our students. We will also present the rationale for our decision-making as professors. Finally, the lessons learned and insights gained by the middle school students and the music education and computer science majors will be shared and discussed.
- Additional Co-Presenters
- C. Holly Johnston, Music Teacher, Stony Brook Middle School, Westford, MA
- Marie Gleason-Tada, Instructional Technology Specialist, Parker Middle School, Chelmsford MA
- PowerPoint Slides (as a PDF file)
What is sound? How do we capture, manipulate, and harness it in the digital world? Thus began our journey into the creation of a general education course focused on the intersection of art and technology, exploring how sound is integrated into computer applications. Our goal seemed simple enough. We were going to have students explore the art and science of digital audio, from the basic end-user applications that promote creative expression and exploration, to the underlying code that allows these programs to function. Once we began to examine what this means from the perspective of a total novice, and began to think about the software applications we would work with, as well as the projects we would assign, we began to reevaluate and question our own assumptions about the purpose of general education courses and the challenges posed by teaching students outside of our respective disciplines.
- PowerPoint Slides (as a PDF file)
In 2007, the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded 19 “Community Building” awards intended to “bring stakeholders together to discuss the challenges and opportunities inherent in transforming undergraduate computing education, and to identify creative strategies to do so.” Our “creative strategy” has been to develop interdisciplinary courses that bring Computer Science (CS) majors together with Art, Music, and Theatre majors to work on joint projects in the area of exhibition and performance technologies. We call this strategy “Performamatics,” because the common thread in these projects is that “many tasks, performed by multiple people, must come together on a tight schedule by a specific date to achieve a desired result. Performamatics also implies that each team member must ‘perform’ his or her task in a way that can be integrated into a final product, regardless of whether that team member participates visibly in the culminating event.”
This presentation discusses the successes and failures we have experienced in trying to implement Performamatics courses over the last two years. In that time we have experimented with two pedagogical models: (a) “synchronized” courses in which students in different disciplines come together at strategic points to work on joint projects, and (b) “hybrid” courses in which all students enroll in a single course that has two instructors, one from Computer Science and one from Art, Music, or Theatre. Our presentation will describe the content of these courses, provide examples of student work, and suggest ways in which both the student and professor collaborations could be improved, all with the intent to provide others with solid guidance on implementing similar strategies at their own institutions.
This paper describes two NSF-funded collaborations among faculty members in the Computer Science, Art, Music, and English departments at a public university in the Northeast USA. Our goal has been to create undergraduate learning opportunities across the university, focusing on connecting computer science to creative and expressive domains. In past publications, we have focused on student learning outcomes. This paper reports on the motivations, opportunities, and challenges for the faculty members involved.
This paper describes how a graphical user interface (GUI) programming course offered by the Dept. of Computer Science (CS) was paired with a general teaching methods course offered by the Dept. of Music in an attempt to revitalize undergraduate CS education and to enrich the experiences of both sets of students. The paper provides details on the joint project done in these classes and the evaluation that assessed its effect on the curriculum, students, and professors.
There is an imbalance in the supply and demand for computing professionals that has generated shortages in meeting personnel needs within industry. A major program was developed by the U.S. National Science Foundation to encourage innovations in undergraduate computing education. There are a variety of new projects that are revitalizing undergraduate computing education. One approach to such revitalization is the introduction of interdisciplinary courses to expand the scope of computing education. The basic idea is to have students from various disciplines work together on computing projects to expand their educational horizons and make computing courses more appealing. This panel brings together research managers with educators who have developed and taught interdisciplinary courses with these goals in mind. The panelists will share their experiences and solicit new ideas from the audience.
We present a hands-on, interdisciplinary project designed to help music education students think about how novices learn new symbol systems. The students design a musical instrument from a typical household object and create a musical composition for it. They then devise a notation system that others can understand well enough to perform their composition with little to no verbal or written direction. Given this notation system, computer science students create Finale Notepad-like programs that implement it. The two groups of students interact during the “hand off” and when music students “try out” the programs developed by the computer science students. Both groups of students benefit from learning to communicate with others whose backgrounds differ significantly from their own and from understanding what it really takes to create a notation system and a computer program that can be used by people who don’t share their perspective.
This paper describes our efforts to stem the tide of declining CS enrollments by introducing innovations into our curriculum to give students more flexibility in course selection, especially in the freshman and sophomore years. Our approach is based on a partnership between the CS and Art, Music, and English departments in the area of exhibition and performance technologies.
In addition to describing our work, this paper provides the results of an evaluation conducted by an independent research. It reports on the impact this work has had on the CS and Art students and their respective projects, as well as on the professors and the way they teach their courses. It also describes steps that are being taken to improve the courses in the future.
Our work is based on a partnership between the a Computer Science (CS) and Art, Music, and English departments in the area of exhibition and performance technologies. We define these areas broadly to encompass all CS applications in the creative and performing arts. These areas not only resonate with today’s media-rich culture, but reinforce the fact that virtually all computer applications now require the integration of creative elements. CS majors must learn to work with specialists in areas where the perspective is often quite different from their own. We believe that computer scientists have much to learn from those trained in the arts and vice versa.
The common thread in Performamatics projects is that many tasks, performed by multiple people, must come together on a tight schedule by a specific date to achieve a desired result. Performamatics also implies that each team member must “perform” his or her task(s) in a way that can be integrated into a final product, regardless of whether that team member participates visibly in the culminating event.
Our paper reports on initial attempts to couple CS courses and integrate CS elements with courses in Art, Music, and Theater. We describe the techniques we used that were designed to increase the scope and level of creativity in student projects and the impact these techniques and the presence of interdisciplinary teams had on those projects. We discuss changes we will make to improve the experience for both groups of students in the future and suggest new techniques we may try to better achieve our goals.
“Through the CISE Pathways to Revitalized Undergraduate Computing Education (CPATH) program, NSF’s Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) is challenging its partners
-- colleges, universities and other stakeholders committed to advancing the field of computing and its impact-- to transform undergraduate computing education on a national scale, to meet the challenges and opportunities of a world where computing is essential to U.S. leadership and economic competitiveness across all sectors of society.”One approach to such revitalization is the introduction of interdisciplinary courses to expand the scope of computing education. This approach has its roots in programs such as Lynn Stein’s “small footprint” core and Georgia Tech’s “threads.” The basic idea is to have students from various disciplines work together on computing projects to expand their educational horizons and make computing courses more appealing.
This panel brings together educators who have developed and taught interdisciplinary courses with these goals in mind. The panelists will share their experiences and solicit new ideas from the audience. We expect a lively discussion on the pros and cons of this approach.
- Heines Presentation (PowerPoint)
- Jeffers Presentation (PowerPoint)
- Goldman Presentation (PowerPoint)
- Beck Presentation (PowerPoint)
Computing devices are becoming more ubiquitous and are increasingly used in environments away from the desktop. For example, computers are more frequently being used while walking, as is the case with hand- held devices, navigation systems and mobile phones. This paper investigates selection accuracy and task completion time when using stylus touch as the input method on hand-held devices. An experiment is described that measures the effect of walking slowly during interactions. Fitts’ law was found to be an effective predictor of task completion time. Furthermore, walking did not have a significant negative effect on task completion time, although an increase in error rate and spatial variability of selection endpoints was discovered. Based on these findings, stylus touch is an acceptable input method for interactive systems that are used in non-stationary environments provided that interface layout is designed to compensate for increased errors and reduced selection accuracy.
It is difficult to teach object-oriented programming (OOP) from a language perspective, even to experienced programmers. Complex syntaxes obscure concepts and make it difficult for learners to get a real “feel” for OO architecture. This is a classic example of “not seeing the forest for the trees.” OOP is best taught within a context of an application or software framework. Graphical user interface (GUI) programming provides a particularly effective vehicle for this purpose because it is relevant to virtually all applications and provides immediate feedback on the correctness of OO structures through tangible, visual results. We have built a GUI Programming course that focuses on the OO aspects of building user and application programmer interfaces. This paper presents an overview of our approach and some of the techniques we use in that course.
Remote navigation, popular in computer games and prevalent in areas such as clinical medicine and teleoperations of robots and drones, uses human-computer interfaces for control. Usability studies of remote navigation interfaces require good metrics for evaluating interfaces, assessing users? capabilities, and determining the difficulty of the navigational task. We studied the time proficient users took to navigate virtual hovercrafts through virtual hallways with corners of various widths and discovered that the time to negotiate corners is inversely proportional to corner width. We derive and evaluate two models for the index of difficulty for negotiating corners. Both models fit the data well, with r2 greater than 0.85 for the mean time to negotiate corners verses corner width.
Elderly adults face two serious challenges bridging the digital divide. First, many suffer from physical or cognitive disabilities, which inhibit computer use. Second, the “traditional” personal computer interface constitutes a foreign and forbidding paradigm. Consequently, elderly adults are less likely to access the Internet, and this lack of accessibility denies them increased social contact and access to information. This paper presents the design of a tangible user interface (TUI) for an email client that is suited to the physical, neurologi-cal, and cognitive needs of elderly users. A review of the TUI literature identifies radio frequency identification (RFID) tagged cards, integrated with standard personal computers, as a viable alternative to the mouse. These cards can represent interaction objects and actions, forming the basis for an interaction language. The email client interaction design illustrates many simple and advanced RFID card interaction techniques.
A number of applications are available that are designed to enhance student engagement in the classroom through the use of Tablet PCs. The value of this goal is well documented, and researchers working with applications such as Classroom Presenter and DyKnow Vision have blazed the way in studying not only how best to deploy this technology, but also how to best teach with it in actual classrooms. Our own experiments with Tablet PCs using Classroom Presenter have identified three issues that we address in this paper: (1) the combining of digital ink from multiple students into a single display so that one can quickly get a sense of the overall classroom response, (2) the storing of digital ink so that it can be recalled later in a structured manner, and (3) the reliable sharing of digital ink between systems so that absolutely no strokes are lost due to transmission errors.
We demonstrate the utility of a new software platform for the interactive exploration of movement time models such as Fitts’s Law. The software is written in Java and provides a flexible environment for HCI research, input device evaluation, throughput comparison and education. It is specifically designed using a patterns-based object model to provide maximum extensibility for new models, task types, and selection modes. The platform can be used to share experimental configurations for more meaningfully comparable experiments. We demonstrate the platform’s utility for HCI research by measuring the effects of posture on movement time. The experimental results show a significant increase in mean movement time when standing compared to sitting while using a trackball.
Student evaluations of teaching have been around for decades. The debate on their validity and usefulness has raged just as long, with respected researchers on both sides of the table. The author is less concerned with numerical averages computed from SETs than with the substance of students’ free-form responses to open-ended questions. This paper analyzes free-form responses posted on the popular website RateMyProfessors.com and compares them to analogous responses on a university webbased course evaluation system designed by the author. It examines differences between the two and the types of information that can be gleaned from such sources to improving teaching.
This paper describes an attempt to move from a paper-based university course evaluation system to a Web-based one ran into numerous obstacles from various angles. While development of the system was relatively smooth, deployment was anything but. Faculty had trouble with some of the system’s basic concepts, and students seemed insufficiently motivated to use the system. Both faculty and students demonstrated mistrust of the system’s security and anonymity. In addition, the union threatened grievances predicated on their perception that the system was in conflict with the union contract. This paper describes the system’s main technical and, perhaps more important, political aspects, explains implementation decisions, relates how the system evolved over several semesters, and discusses steps that might be taken to improve the entire process.
From the Preface by Greg Kearsley: Jesse Heines provides an intriguing (and nicely illustrated) look at the history of computer-based learning, focusing on some of the earliest teaching devices and associated instructional programming. He finds current systems wanting in comparison: “It’s as if the companies that develop these products simply hire programmers and tell them to start coding, without ever exploring the huge, existing body of knowledge on what’s been tried before, much less look for solid theoretical ground on which to base their instructional designs.” He suggests that system developers need to know more about the past history of the field and build upon it in their products.
This paper provides an overview of the XML Stylesheet Language (XSL) and its three components: XSL Transformations (XSLT), XPath Expressions (the language used to refer to collections of XML nodes for processing by XSLT), and XSL Formatting Objects (XSL-FO). It includes numerous code examples to demonstrate how these technologies are used and how they interrelate.
This paper describes our efforts to date in developing a Web-based application that can analyze source code documentation, assign it quantitative measures, and provide comprehensive feedback on how to improve it. Seed funding for this work was provided by the ACM SIG SCE via a Special Projects Grant.
This tutorial focuses on how to write JavaServer Pages that access XML data and process it using XSL and XPath. Hands-on activities demonstrate applications and help participants explore ways to create and parse XML documents, apply XSL transformations to XML, and retrieve XML data using XPath. Discussion centers around applying these technologies in specific subject areas.
Panelists reported on their experiences using different Java Interactive Development Environments (IDEs) to teach Java and what they identify as the strengthens and weaknesses of each IDE.
- View Murray Cover Slide (PowerPoint)
- View Schaller Presentation (PowerPoint)
- View Heines Presentation (PowerPoint)
- View Wagner Presentation (PowerPoint)
- View Kölling Presentation (PowerPoint)
- View Trono Presentation (PowerPoint)
- View Moore Presentation (PowerPoint)
- Download All Presentations (ZIP)
This paper describes a set of cooperating programs and their underlying algorithms that allow Java applets to read XML documents from-- and, more importantly, to store those documents back to a Java-enabled Web server.
- Download UmlGui package
I organized this panel discussion to focus on the numerous issues related to course Web sites. Each panelist made a short presentation followed by a discussion with the audience.
- Heines Presentation (PowerPoint / HTML)
- Gehringer Presentation (PowerPoint)
- Börner Presentation (PowerPoint)
- Ivory Presentation (PowerPoint)
This invited paper explores techniques for reducing the amount of work that needs to be redone each semester when one prepares an existing course Web site for a new class. The key concept is algorithmic generation of common page elements while still allowing full control over page content via WYSIWYG HTML editors. The paper explores both client- and server-side techniques the most advanced of which are those that encode control information in XML rather than HTML or JavaScript and apply that information on the server side using XSL and JavaServer Pages.
This paper grew out of an independent study project that graduate student Svitlana Grankovska did under my direction. The purpose of that project was to assess the state-of-the-art of course Web sites. Svitlana visited 230 such sites and analyzed their characteristics on 16 key factors. I designed a survey on course Web site development and maintenance that we distributed to over 1275 faculty members at various institutions. We received 150 responses (a rate of approximately 12%) and analyzed those responses to gain further insight into our research.
This paper describes analyses of the technical aspects of instructional delivery in the Singapore-MIT Alliance, an innovative engineering distance education and research collaboration among the National University of Singapore (NUS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
- published version (as a PDF file)
- HTML version
This paper describes statistical analyses of final grade data in a course that was taught both with and without a course Web site and for which historical final grade data exists from both periods. The analyses revealed statistically significant differences between student grades before and after the course Web site was introduced.
- published version (as a PDF file)
- HTML version
Erwin Boschmann listed four major issues pertaining to “the infusion of technology in higher education” in a recent posting on The Technology Source. His third issue is that “there is little existing research on learning.” This paper addresses that issue by analyzing a course web site now in its fifth semester of operation and focusing squarely on its effect on student learning. It discusses research methods for evaluating the web site’s effect on student performance and statistical methods for identifying performance trends. Data on multiple undergraduate courses is presented, comparing student performance before and after the web site was introduced.
The development of computer-based training is a highly labor- intensive activity. Many CBT authoring systems have been created to increase CBT developer productivity, but many become unwieldy when applied to large courseware projects. The authors have worked to increase development productivity by providing instructional designers with a way to build a database of lesson content that is presented by a lesson “engine” cognizant of the course’s overall lesson logic. The engine takes advantage of repetitive interaction strategies to present students with a highly consistent user interface that is easy to update when course requirements change.
Visual programming languages are emerging as an important paradigm for development of inter-active multimedia presentations. We are actively developing and using such languages and have identified several criteria for evaluating the user interface for such tools. These criteria include: (1) support for the authoring process, (2) icon set semantics, and (3) usability of the interface. In this paper we compare two commercial authoring tools and discuss visual programs used for our evaluation.
Various multimedia authoring environments have been developed. resulting in a variety of approaches as to how such presentations are structured and authored. Implicit in these systems is a data model for composing multimedia objects and a user interface model for the authoring activity. Making these models explicit is one goal of this work, since we think it will lead to the design of easier-to-use and more powerful tools. We distinguish the structure of the multimedia objects being composed and the different presentation states that the viewer experiences. The latter is what the author is most concerned with; the former is what most tools allow the author to directly manipulate. We illustrate these ideas with examples of multimedia authoring tools that we have developed and suggest several directions for improvement.
The extensive capabilities of today’s systems have made the development of state-of-the-art courseware a formidable task. To make these sophisticated capabilities accessible to people without extensive programming backgrounds
-- and to significantly speed up program development even for people with such backgrounds-- rich software toolkits have been developed. The Macintosh toolkit has been around for several years, but Windows 3.0 for DOS systems has only recently come onto the market. In the workstation arena, we are even seeing high-level toolkits become available that are built on lower level toolkits, as Motif is built on Xwindows.The paper discusses how five standard toolkit design elements can be applied to computer-assisted instruction applications: pulldown menus, popup windows, scrollable windows, dialog boxes, and help tools. The author strongly encourages the use of these elements to standardize user interfaces, whether through programming languages or menu-driven authoring systems. He feels that doing so will allow courseware to obtain the standard “look and feel” of other applications and thus help students to concentrate on the subject matter they are trying to learn rather than the mechanics of running the course.
This paper discusses the development of a software teaching tool that teachers can use to create exercises adapted to the needs of their curricula and individual students. It explains how we assessed the teaching needs for a program in adult literacy and describes the tool we developed to present teacher-created exercises on a computer equipped with a voice synthesizer and audio digitizer.
Digital Equipment Corporation has developed an integrated video disc and computer graphics system that offers the best qualities of both these media. This system is called IVIS, the Interactive Video Information System. The heart of the system is an option to the Professional 350 minicomputer that contains:
- a circuit for converting the NTSC signal generated by the video disc to an RGB signal compatible with that produced by the Professional 350,
- a circuit that allows the video signal generated by the computer and that produced by the video disc to be mutually synchronised, and
- a circuit for mixing the two synchronised RGB signals into a single signal (960 pixels horizontally by 240 pixels vertically) and displaying it on a medium resolution RGB colour monitor.
Computer-based training (CBT) course developer productivity is most often expressed as the number of development hours needed to produce one hour of on-line instruction. CBT authoring systems offer a number of approaches to increasing developer productivity, generally by providing built-in features for typical instructional sequences. As one would expect, each approach has its benefits and shortcomings. We have adopted an “instructional database” approach, which attempts to provide simplicity for the course developer without sacrificing true programming power. In addition, this approach is designed to take advantage of the desirable built-in features of the authoring language while maintaining the extensibility needed to implement new instructional designs.
Rule-based systems are a development associated with recent research in artificial intelligence (AI). These systems express their decision-making criteria as sets of production rules, which are declarative statements relating various system states to program actions. For computer-assisted instruction (CAI) programs, system states are defined in terms of a task analysis and student model, and actions take the form of the different teaching operations that the program can perform. These components are related by a set of means-ends guidance rules that determine what the program will do next for any given state.
The paper presents the design of a CAI course employing a rule-based tutorial strategy. This design has not undergone the test of full implementation; the paper presents a conceptual design rather than a programming blueprint. One of the unique features of the course design described here is that it deals with the domain of computer graphics. The precise subject of the course is ReGIS, the Remote Graphics Instruction Set on Digital Equipment Corporation GIGI and VT125 terminals. The paper describes the course components and their inter-relationships, discusses how program control might be expressed in the form of production rules, and presents a program that demonstrates one facet of the intended course: the ability to parse student input in such a way that rules can be used to update a dynamic student model.
Windowing is a technique that allows a single computer terminal to act as either multiple output devices for a single computer program, or a single output device for multiple computer programs. This paper discusses the use of windowing in computer-assisted instruction (CAI) programs to allow independent control of functional areas in complex CAI displays and simultaneous display of output from a running computer program and coordinated instructional material.
Note: This is an earlier version of the 1987 paper by the same title (linked above) that appeared in Jones, A., Scanlon, E., and O’Shea, T. (eds.), The Computer Revolution in Education: New Technologies for Distance Teaching, pp. 153-162. The Harvester Press, Sussex, England.
Digital Equipment Corporation has developed a new system for integrating computer graphics and the videodisc. This system is called IVIS, the Interactive Video Information system. The unique characteristic of this system is that it allows images generated by the videodisc to be overlaid with computer graphics of industry standard quality (resolution of 960 pixels horizontally by 240 vertically). This quality is achieved by converting the NTSC videodisc signal to RGB rather than using the more common technique of converting the RGB computer signal to NTSC.
The power of this integrated medium offers CAI course developers a number of new techniques for communicating information to students. This paper introduces some of these techniques, emphasizing CAI applications of overlaying. Controlling software is explained, including extensions to a graphics editor for specifying videodisc sequences. An IVIS CAI course on the installation and maintenance of a new printer is described, highlighting applications of the system1s unique instructional features.
All CBT developers strive to make their programs interactive, to design sequences in which their programs pause to accept student input and then use that input to determine what to do next. But one finds many degrees of interaction in today’s CBT programs. As Donald Cook has pointed out, the major interaction in today’s most popular programs is pressing the space bar or the return key to go on to the next display (“CBT’s Feet of Clay,” Data Training, November, 1983). Even in a program which boasts on its package that users “often” describe it as “by far the best computer-based training for the IBM PC we’ve seen,” one of my colleagues found that of the 309 interactions in the entire course, 224 (over 72%) involved nothing more than such electronic page turning.
Why is there so little meaningful interaction in these programs? In most cases the cause is clearly not a lack of programming skill, but it may certainly be a lack of programming care. The problems also may be caused by a lack of training in instructional design or simply by a lack of creativity. Whatever the reason, CBT without meaningful interaction is neither instructionally nor financially justifiable. The development of quality CBT demands attentiveness to the principles of interactive instruction, creativity in the design of interaction strategies, and a recognition of the craftsmanship required to develop, quality materials in any medium.
Knowledge-based systems are receiving an increasing amount of attention as viable tools for solving a wide range of computer programming problems. Such systems are also useful in educational environments for introducing some of the basic concepts of artificial intelligence. This paper provides a brief overview of the role of knowledge-based systems in educational environments and presents the basic concepts underlying these systems. It then takes a detailed look at one knowledge-based system, Advice Language/X (AL/X), and uses it to illustrate the concepts presented in the earlier sections.
This paper explores the evolution of Digital Equipment Corporation’s Educational Services Department and the various techniques the Corporation is exploring to automate training and deliver it to a wider audience.
This article approaches the issue of recursion by describing a traditional programming problem and comparing the ways it is implemented in four languages: Basic, Pascal, Lisp, and microProlog. It is a programming exercise and does not purport to be an exhaustive discussion of recursion or the recursive properties of the four languages.
Personal computers will become ubiquitous office appliances only when their ease of use is significantly increased by integrating adequate training and documentation with the base system. This integration requires careful attention to human engineering, by providing intuitive access to HELP and on-line training, designing clear and informative error messages, prompting users for input, orienting users to which mode they are in, and presenting information on the screen in such a way as to avoid disrupting the user's job or task context. Such features often require trade-offs between ease of use and system performance. Such trade-offs must be made wi th a thorough knowledge of the user population and how the system will be used.
Graphic displays are an important tool for helping students visualize concepts presented by computer-based training materials. Many current terminals have limited graphic capabilities, but very few have complementary firmware or software to make those capabilities easily accessible to the instructional programmer. One solution to this problem is presented in this paper. An interactive system for creating graphic displays is described, and its use by Digital’s Computer-Based Course Development Group is discussed.
The development of computer-based training materials is at least as complex as the development of mater ials in other formats. Several different skills are needed, including subject matter expertise, instructional and media design, and computer programming. This paper describes the components of the required skills, explains why they are needed, and discusses how people who possess the skills interact to produce computer-based training materials at Digital Equipment Corporation.
After reading a prepublication copy of Technology in Science Education: The Next 10 Years by Joseph I. Lipson (Computer
13(7):23-28 ), Jesse M. Heines wrote author Joseph I. Lipson, expressing his reservations. Finding Heines’s arguments cogent and well-documented, Lipson encouraged him to discuss them with one of the guest editors for this issue, Robert M. Aiken. The result is the following short article. We thank Lipson for encouraging and supporting this contribution, and we appreciate Heines’s preparing the article under a very tight deadline.
Objectives have long been recognized as the backbone of individualized. instructional materials. And we’ve all heard that these objectives should be stated in terms of overt, measurable student performances or behaviors.
This article deals with style in writing objectives and stating the criterion in the form of a sample test item. These test items can serve to clarify objectives and assure that they can be tested. In addition, sample test items illustrate the exact way students will be evaluated.
A study was conducted to assess the feasibility of using computer-managed instruction (CMI) to control the quality of self- paced training in a customer environment. The study centered on a self-paced course on BASIC language programming and its complementary interactive CMI system.
The CMI system employed a mastery algorithm based on a sequential probability test ratio. The purpose of this algorithm was to reduce testing time while retaining a high level of criterion-referenced test reliability. These factors were assessed by comparing results on tests that were terminated by the sequential probabillty test ratio to those on test that were extended to 30 items in length. Average test time differences were computed, and four reliability indices were reported that compared mastery classifications on the shorter tests with those on the extended tests.
The study found that the sequential probability test ratio reduced testing time by an average of 29.8% over the extended tests and that criterton-referenced reliability was not significantly effected.
A computer managed instruction (CMI) package to teach BASIC programming, together with questions to be answered in its evaluation, are described. The training package consists of 16 learning modules coupled; an interactive CMI system generates pretests and posttests for each module and branches students to the next appropriate module. It is intended to be sold to customers to be used in a self-paced mode. Evaluation questions pertain to (1) what percentage of customers will use the CMI system, (2) whether students will use the tests as intended, (3) whether a sequential probability test ratio will reduce test length significantly, (4) whether test reliability is maintained, and (5) whether all test items are working properly.
The cost of computer systems is constantly decreasing, but the cost of training people to run these systems is constantly increasing. To make training cost-effective for its small systems customers, Digital Equipment Corporation has been providing self-paced training packages for several years that can be used by its customers on-site. To control the quality of this training, Digital is now incorporating Computer-Managed Instruction (CMI) into some of these packages. This CMI component uses a sequential probability test algorithm that allows tests to vary in length depending upon the learner’s skill level. This algorithm assures that the tests’ results are statistically reliable while keeping their lengths as short as possible.
The chilling fear that computers will dehumanize education is slowly taking its rightful place among the archives of unfounded educational beliefs. This is due to several factors, but the most important by far is simply the growing existence of the computer in instructional settings. You can talk all you want to about how exciting computers can be, but there is no equal to sitting down at a teletypewriter and conversing with a computer for understanding what these machines are really all about.
This is the first technical paper I ever attempted to have published. It was written when I was an M.S. student at the University of Maine at Orono, after I had spent a summer working on PLATO at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle. The paper was submitted to the Journal of College Science Teaching, but they declined to publish it. The review letter from the editor is included.
An interactive musical rhythm puzzle based on the Watermelon Man theme by Herbie Hancock.
An interactive musical phrase puzzle based on the Everything Is Awesome theme from The LEGO Movie.
An interactive musical sequencing puzzle based on Hedwig's Theme from the Harry Potter movie.
Demonstration of increasing complexity in music and computing.
- Version 1: Playing Notes. https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/1213264
- Version 2: Playing Notes Using Variables. https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/1237101
- Version 3: Separating Initialization. https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/1237102
- Version 4: Separating Phrases. https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/1237104
- Version 5: Looping and Fading. https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/1237105
- Version 6: Playing a Round with One Instrument. https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/1237106
- Version 7: Playing a Round with Two Instruments. https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/1237108
- Version 8: Storing Notes and Rhythms in Lists. https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/1237109
- Version 9: Playing a Round Using Lists. https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/1237113
- Version 10: Synchronizing Play from Lists. https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/1237114
The goal of the New Educators’ Workshop is to assist academic-oriented graduate students, post docs, and pre-tenure faculty in exploring questions such as these. Experienced colleagues from a variety of career paths will be there to share their experiences and best practices. Small-group discussions will enable attendees to focus on the questions or concerns most relevant to their situations, as well as build a support group of like-minded colleagues.
- Workshop Handout (for our presentation only)
This workshop gives attendees direct experience in working with the techniques and tools we use to teach computing in the context of music and music in the context of computing. It describes and demonstrates the work we have done over the last two years in a middle school, after-school program that combines singing with programming. It also provides a forum for discussion of how this work can be adapted for participants’ schools. Please see the project website and workshop resource notebook linked below.
The purpose of these workshops was to share our techniques and materials and to provide an environment in which other pairs of professors can work together to develop interdisciplinary relationships and materials of their own to use in courses at their “home” institutions. Please see the project website and workshop resource notebook linked below.
This hands-on workshop was geared specifically to middle school teachers on ways to infuse computing into the music curriculum. We are targeting middle schools because while the arts seem to be victims of budget cuts at the high school level, most states still require all middle school students to take courses in the arts, which of course include music. As a result, middle school music teachers come into contact with a large percentage of the students in their schools. An interdisciplinary approach in which the arts are integrated with STEM — into what has been called STEAM — could therefore include virtually every student in a middle school, having a huge impact on the program’s reach and effectiveness within an entire school.
- Workshop Handout
- Program Examples in Scratch Studio 499753 (on Scratch website)
This workshop introduces participants to Scratch’s music-generating capabilities and shows how they can be used to teach computing concepts to students with a wide range of music and computing experience. The workshop demonstrates techniques that we use in “Sound Thinking,” a university General Education (GenEd) course open to all students in all majors. Participants will receive an extensive handout with links to our teaching materials, and they will have the opportunity to create music-generating programs themselves using a variety of Scratch constructs. The workshop will conclude with a mini concert in which some participants will play the music that they created.
This workshop reprises the one we offered at SIGCSE in March with some updated material. It introduces playing and generating music with Scratch, a media-rich visual programming system developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. It is based on lessons learned using Scratch to teach both music and computer science in an interdisciplinary GenEd course.
This workshop introduces playing and generating music with Scratch, a media-rich visual programming system (scratch.mit.edu). It is based on lessons learned using Scratch to teach both music and computer science in an interdisciplinary GenEd course. As students write programs that make music, they learn control flow, user interaction, synchronization, real-time programming, and data structures. Participants use their own laptops to explore progressively complex musical Scratch programs (see www.scratchmusic.org). They also write their own programs and use external sensor devices to make custom musical instruments. Scratch music program examples and an extensive handout are provided. The workshop culminates in a concert of participant-created music.
What might a Scratch algorithm look like that resulted in a rock drum pattern? How could you create an algorithm in Scratch that would generate the guitar riff from Led Zeppelin’s Dazed and Confused? How could you use the modulo and random functions to create music that changes over time in interesting ways? How might you use analog sensors and the computer keyboard to perform a musical algorithm in Scratch?
These are just a few of the questions we’ve been exploring over this past year using Scratch as a creative platform for making music and exploring computational thinking with children and university students. Taking advantage of Scratch’s design as a live compiler/interpreter, simple through complex computational algorithms can be implemented to create original music using the many functions from the sound category. Through hands-on workshops and classes with middle school and high school students in Lowell, MA, as well as with undergraduate students enrolled in a general education course entitled Sound Thinking and co-taught by a computer science and music professor, we have amassed an array of innovative examples of student work using Scratch to create generative, algorithmic music and musicenhanced animations.
- Source Code for All Examples (on Scratch website)
- Workshop Handout (on ScratchEd website)
The purpose of the study was to demonstrate the feasibility of using a computer system to control the quality of self-paced training. An interactive, computer-managed instruction (CMI) system was built to complement a self-paced training course on BASIC language programming. This system assessed students’ work to determine their statuses in an established module hierarchy and administered pretests and posttests on the modules for which they had met the prerequisites. The CMI system was highly human-engineered so that it could be used wi thout the presence of an instructor. The system’s mastery algorithm was based on a sequential probability test ratio intended to reduce test lengths and testing time without sacrificing test reliability.
The complete training package was used for teacher training in two public school districts and one junior college for a period of approximately two months. During this time, the CMI system recorded usage data which was periodically transferred to magnetic tape and mailed to the author for analysis.
Analysis of the specific usage data yielded the following major results:
(1) The system was successful in assuring that students worked through the module tests in accordance with the learning hierarchy prescribed by the course developers.
(2) The system was generally successful in discouraging excessive test taking even though students were free to repeat the computer-administered tests as often as they liked.
(3) The mastery algorithm based on a sequential probability test ratio was able to reduce test lengths significantly on all tests except pretests on which examinees were classified as masters.
(4) Test length reductions achieved by the sequential probability test ratio did not significantly impact the criterion- referenced test reliability.
(5) The system was successful in collecting data for cr iter ion-referenced item analysis, but assessment of this data for evaluating the validity of the items was inconclusive due to the small number of test administrations for some modules and the lack of a qualitative definition of a “good” criterion-referenced item in terms of its item analysis results.
This study attempted to enhance the evaluation of individualized, audio-tutorial instruction by the use of computer management. The computer was used to provide (1) students with feedback on their achievement of behavioral objectives and (2) instructors with guidelines for the revision of teaching and evaluative materials.
The study developed a model system on a BASIC language time-sharing computer for use in an introductory physical science course. The system was designed to allow both students and instructors to gain access to the computer in an interactive mode, thereby minimizing the amount of special instruction required for its use. The computer programs generated and stored data on student work while the model was being tested, and these data were used to analyze the system’s ability to evaluate instruction and the cost factors involved in its use.
This book provides music fundamentals educators with a one-of-its-kind text devoted specifically to music, sound, and technology. Using a student-centered approach that emphasizes project-based experiences, the book discusses multiple strategies to explore, create, and solve problems with music and technology in equal parts. It also provides examples of hands-on activities that encourage students, alone and in groups, to explore the basic principles that underlie today’s music technology and freely available multimedia creation tools.Computational Thinking in Sound is an effective tool for educators to introduce students to the complex process of computational thinking in the context of the creative arts through the more accessible medium of music.
This book is the English edition of Rigas Rigopoulos’s memoirs of his service in the Greek resistance during World War II. Rigas’s book was originally published in Greek. I had it rough translated and then worked with Rigas for almost three years to smooth the text, give it the right “feel,” and get it published. The following text is from the book’s Introductory Thoughts.
More than half a century has passed since we lived the great adventure.
Right after the Liberation, when we old close comrades met again, we felt that we’d rather keep our story to ourselves.
A purely emotional need drove us to this struggle, whose unforgettable moments offered us complete satisfaction. Any commotion about these experiences, full of emotion and exaltation, and linked to the memory of lost comrades, would disturb our contentment and peace of mind.
Even when the newspaper Ethnos (Nation) started publishing a series of articles on the activities of our Service, I requested in a letter published on March 3, 1945, that they condense and complete the story as soon as possible. And the series stopped after the fifth installment.
We only allowed ourselves to honor the memory of our dead with a public ceremony in a conference hall. This created a wider sensation for a few days, but shortly all commotion abated.
In the years elapsed since then, many references to Service 5-16-5 and its members
-- always honorable, but not always accurate-- appeared in Greek and foreign books, newspapers, and magazines. No one could control or restrict them.With the passage of time, the dust has settled, and today I have ceased viewing the struggle of that epoch through my personal feelings. Historical data do not belong to individuals. Likewise, the fascination, the agony, and the creations of an era do not belong to any single person.
Living in the intense conditions and the multifarious reactions of the period of Occupation and also from the standpoint of the head of an intelligence organization, I witnessed the tragic drama and grandeur of an unequal struggle, decisive and effective, with incredible political and social repercussions.
In the darkness of slavery I saw the bright glow of intellectual and spiritual flashes. I saw heroic deeds filled with grandiose simplicity, and simple deeds filled with heroic grandeur. I met figures who lived and died noiselessly, but who deserve a place in the memory and hearts of the people. I also witnessed painful errors and shameful actions by both Greeks and foreigners who did harm.
Starting from the history of some young men who constituted Service 5-16-5, I describe in this book these momentous situations and emotions as I lived through them moment by moment in Athens and in the Middle East, trying to be as objective as possible.
Many pages are filled with love and admiration, others are marked by pain. Every word is written with complete sincerity, without passion, but also without fear. They tell the clear and often bitter truth, a truth needed by our unsettled times and, most of all, by the restless and justifiably rebellious younger generation.
Events lose none of their importance when they cease being action and become history. There is always some hope that if people turn their eyes toward a clearly certified account of the past and unscramble its magnificent as well as its frightful teachings, they may be able to better experience the present and to more wisely shape the future.
This book introduces the major concepts in designing video displays for Computer-Assisted instruction (CAI). The text does not present a pragmatic “how to” formula for designing video displays, nor does it teach the rudiments of any specific CAI system such as PLATO, TICCIT, or the like. Rather, it attempts to sensitize you to the major variables in the field. The design skills you gain from reading this book will help prepare you to apply your own teaching and curriculum development skills to the creation of effective instructional materials for the computer/video medium.
The design of effective computer screens requires knowledge of the special characteristics of computer-driven screens, an artistic sense of layout and balance, creativity, and sensitivity to the characteristics of the people who will be viewing the screens. The discussion in this book focuses on the special characteristics of computer-driven screens, explores what the computer/video medium can do, and presents the pros and cons of a large number of display techniques. Artistry, creativity, and sensitivity are discussed in relation to the examples, but not exhaustively. I have attempted to provide a set of techniques that you can apply to your courseware when appropriate, rather than presenting rules that are applicable in all situations. You must use your own artistic sense, creativity, and knowledge of your students to adapt these techniques and make them appropriate within your instructional setting.
This was the first self-teaching guide ever distributed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). It was designed to support the CLASSIC product, a modified PDP-8 marketed by DEC’s Educational Products Group and the company’s first foray into marketing systems that customers would be expected to install themselves. I wrote this book when I had been a course developer with the company for less than two years.
The CBT Artisan was published regularly in Authorware Magazine, (the first few issues of which were named coAction Magazine), a trade journal for training professionals published by Authorware, Inc., from 1988 until the journal discontinued publication in 1990. The following four articles were published during that period.
The CBT Craftsman was published bi-monthly in Training News, a trade journal for training professionals published by Weingarten Publications, from 1985 until the journal discontinued publication in 1987. The following 17 columns were published during that period.
In 1978 I became Manager of the Computer-Based Course Development Group at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC or just “Digital”) and initiated a Technical Report Series to chronicle the company’s efforts to implement computer-based training. The following papers were in that series and are presented in their original Technical Report formats. Some of these papers were published, and in those cases the published versions can be found elsewhere on this page in other formats. The entire series is presented here for posterity, including papers written by DEC employees other than myself.
List of Reports (PDF format)
In 1982 I began work on a project designed to apply artificial intelligence techniques to computer-assisted instruction program. That work resulted in five “progress reports,” two of which were published. As with the technical reports listed above, the five project reports are presenteed her for posterity.
List of Reports (PDF format)
Readers involved with AI languages may also be interested in Logic and Recursion: The PROLOG Twist, coauthored with Jonathan Briggs and Richard Ennals of Imperial College, London (May, 1982). This paper was published in the November 1983 issue of Creative Computing, but that version is difficult to read. The clearest and easiest to read version is available as Technical Report No. 15.
In 1978 I became president of the Association for the Development of Computer-based Instructional Systems Special Interest Group in Computer-Based Training (ADCIS SIG CBT) and initiated a newsletter. The newsletter contained many articles written by many authors. The technical ones in each issue are listed below. The entire series is presented here for posterity.
Vol. 1, No. 1 (July 1978)
Vol. 1, No. 2 (October 1978)
Vol. 1, No. 3 (January 1979)
Vol. 1, No. 4 (April 1979)
Vol. 2, No. 1 (July 1979)
Vol. 2, No. 2 (October 1979)
Vol. 2, No. 3 (January 1980)
Vol. 2, No. 4 (April 1980)
Vol. 3, No. 1 (July 1980)
Vol. 3, No. 2 (October 1980)
Vol. 3, No. 3 (January 1981)
Vol. 3, No. 4 (March 1981)
Vol. 4, No. 1 (June 1981)
Vol. 5, No. 4 (March 1983)
Vol. 6, No. 4 (April 1984)
Don’t Cry, text to accompany a barbershop tag composed by my Fireside quartetmate Manoj Padki, published in Manoj’s book Keep Calm and Sing A Cappella: 100 Original Tags and Their Stories, August 10, 2021.
D.I.Y. Retirement Investors Have a Low-Cost Friend: Newsletters, newspaper article about retirement investment strategies that includes a summary of the reporter’s interview with me. Published in The New York Times, January 30, 2020.
The Death Penalty Serves No Purpose But Revenge, letter to the editor of The Boston Globe, published August 2, 2019.
LRTA Service Was a Godsend, letter to the editor of The Lowell Sun, published July 25, 2018.
Ill Humor, letter to the editor of The Boston Globe Magazine, published August 25, 2017.
A Tribute to Charlie Batterman, the invited address that I delivered at the Celebration of the Life of Charlie Batterman, longtime swimming and diving coach at MIT.
Wedded Bliss, a poem written for a contest sponsored by The Lowell Sun to honor Valentine’s Day 2008 by revealing the secrets of long marriages.
Good Morning, a tribute to our colleague Prof. John C. Seig, Jr., who passed away prematurely on December 30, 2005.
Two Deaths, a tribute comparing the death of my mother, Dorothy Heines, who passed away peacefully on September 21, 2001, to that of my friend, Chuck Jones, who died tragically on September 11, 2001 when American Airlines Flight 11 was crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City.
You’re Just Like a Communist!, an essay on teaching students from highly diverse cultural backgrounds. Originally published in Thought and Action 17(2):139-141, Fall 2001.
Is It Ever Right to Kill?, an article relating a dinner conversation I had with my son Scott in 1996, published in The Lowell Sun.
Readings on Succeeding in College, a series of articles by students and me that were published in the UMass Lowell Connector (the campus newspaper) in 1993.
My Experience With the Draft, the story of how I narrowly avoided getting drafted in the summer of 1971 and therefore did not serve in Vietnam.
Cherkasy Journal, the story of my visit to my grandmother’s birthplace and childhood home in the Ukraine in March 1971 during my first year in the Soviet Union.
Soviet Jews at Simchas Torah,
an article about an experience I had when I was a junior high school teacher at
the Anglo-American School in Moscow, Russia, in 1970 and had been in Russia for just
How Willie Vicens ’70 and Jesse Heines ’70 Inadvertently Almost Got Prof. Negroponte Fired, the story of my classmate and I and famed MIT Prof. Nicholas Negroponte and our final project in his 1967 Architectural Geometry class.