Transcript for the new podcast episode is below…
Alan: Hello. And welcome to how to teach computer science, the podcast. This is episode nine, what’s the future of education. I’ll be answering that question and many more with the help of today’s special guest.
David: my teaching persona is very much, I have taken millions of stories from around the web and just turned them into anecdotes that involve me or my friends.
I don’t have many friends. It’s, I haven’t done that much in my life. but I’ve got all these little anecdotes to hook ideas into people’s brains. And I, that is what teaching is to me.
Alan: And, more on that in a moment. My name is Alan Harrison and I wrote the books how to teach computer science and how to learn computer science available in online bookstores. More details at the companion website HTTCS dot online.
That’s the initials of how to teach computer science. HTTCS dot online. We talk about AI today, artificial intelligence. So with that, as a theme, I asked chat GPT to make up a joke. Here we go. Why don’t scientists trust atoms. ’cause they make up everything.
AI AI is going into everything. Now I hear that McVities have even made an artificially intelligent hobnob. That’s gotta be one smart cookie.
Ikea’s home design product has AI in it now. So you can visualize it’s Billy bookcases in your living room. That’s right. It’s shelf-aware.
Alan: talking of awareness, would robots becoming self-aware really be a bad thing? I mean, look at that ASIMO robot made by Honda, if it was at all self-conscious would it really walk like an old man who hadn’t quite made it to the loo in time?
So I also mentioned threads in this episode, you can find me there as @mraharrison on threads and every Friday, Dr. Bill Wilkinson. Hosts a #FridayFive challenge, name, five tracks on a theme. And last week was crooners, now I don’t know many crooners, but I do like Sinatra and Crosby. Not Bing Crosby. I prefer his brother, and arch rival, Google Crosby, who nobody seems to talk about such is Microsoft’s influence in Hollywood. My computer keeps trying to replace Google Crosby with Bing Crosby, but I keep rejecting the change. And everyone out there. Particularly the Linux heads are all wondering if I’m going to mention. DuckDuckGo Crosby aren’t you. There you go. And you’re all listening. Thinking of search engines to put in front of the name, Crosby. , I’ll leave you doing that. And I will.
Alan: Quite right. I will get on with today’s episode and we can meet today’s guest known as the lesson hacker, or if you’re a fan of Craig and Dave’s YouTube channel, you may know him as Another Dave. We had a blast. Here’s all the goss. When I met David Morgan.
All right so I’m delighted to say on the podcast today I’ve got another Dave. Why is he another Dave? Well Last week we had Dave Hillyard of Craig and Dave and on their YouTube channel you will see a new series of videos from Another Dave. Another Dave, who are you, please, and what do you do?
David: Yeah, I’m David Morgan. I’m not the OG Dave from Craig and Dave, but I do some content on the channel. But no, I’m David Morgan. I’ve been a computer science teacher in the UK for the last 20 years which is my excuse for not having any hair, Alan, but I know that you have a beautiful head of hair, so I can’t use that much longer. I’m currently the head of learning and community at MindJoy, and we make AI platforms for AI tutorbots in the classroom, which is really exciting.
Alan: I don’t know if you’ve been listening to the podcast. I’ve been using. Yeah. You enjoying it?
David: Yeah. Yeah. I really am. Like it’s really nice to have a podcast from someone who knows what they’re talking about and he’s a computer scientist as well. Because I did a computer science degree, because I really spent a lot of time honing my teaching craft and making sure that it was entertaining.
Like I find a lot of those people that say things like, Oh, computer science is it’s for the very intelligent ones. Cause it’s very difficult. I’m like, Oh, jog on sunshine, jog on. And I hate all that stuff. Your podcast is just no, here’s the stuff you can learn. Here’s the cool things. I like, I’ve really been enjoying it, but then I enjoyed your books as well. So I didn’t expect anything else. I literally read your books for fun. So yeah, brilliant.
Alan: Brilliant. You’re the one, you’re the one that bought them. Singular. Yeah. Brilliant. Anyway. You touched on a topic close to my heart there, gatekeeping of computer science and I I won’t have it. I won’t have it in my classroom. So haha think
David: Anna Wake said in the last one I listened to, she was going on about like tokenism and that’s something I’m very worried about. . Oh yeah. It’s something that I like. I really like AI for solving that problem. But it’s not only tokenism, is it?
It’s it’s even like ableism. It’s oh yes, only the people that do maths can do this. I’ve had people like who absolutely were in bottom set maths, but were engaged. That’s far more of a superpower in my book.
Alan: There was a Facebook comment on one of the computer science groups a year ago. I won’t mention who said it, but name and shame. No . No. This is a safe space. This podcast the yeah, it’s, they described GCSE computer science as a bit like further maths with computers and I just completely disagree with that. I don’t think, I don’t think that person got very many agreements in the comments, to be honest, because it’s much more than that.
And if you’ve heard any of the, Discussions, it’s all about creativity. I haven’t published the one with Dave Hillyard the other Dave. Sorry, no, you’re another Dave. He’s OG Dave. So original Dave, OG Dave, OG Dave and I. Had a chat last week and we were all about creativity and the beauty of algorithms and stuff. And it’s not maths. There’s a bit of maths, but there’s a bit of maths in everything.
David: Mathematicians wish they were us, dude. They wish they were us. Applications of your subject, things you can show students, you can actually go and do as a living. And you can make money from things they can do in their spare time. They wish they were us with application of a fundamental subject into the real world.
Alan: They do. And when I was researching for my master’s, I have a master’s in education now. Don’t know why, but there you go. Me too, snap. Wow, cool. Oh, we have a computer science degree and a master’s in education.
David: Yeah, you have nicer hair though. You’ve got that one up on me, so don’t worry about it.
Alan: Why are we sat here chatting rubbish, on wednesday morning and not fixing the world’s problems. I’m sure if we put our minds together, we could do something more important. But hey, here we are. Um, What was I going to say?
Oh, yes, I was reading about computational, astronomy, as you do. Computational branches of all the sciences have now evolved so far that I think it was Peter Denning’s book that wrote about how one American university the computer science department thought that they could probably help the computational astronomers so they put together a seminar where they shared each other’s work and the computer scientists couldn’t understand the computational astronomy because it had gone so far from, Just ordinary computer science.
It had developed its own life and its own curriculum way beyond what the computer scientists could understand. So computational stuff, computational name, your subject is is out there and gone on a journey of its own in all the sciences now, it’s great. Someone said it, computation is the third pillar of science after theory and practice.
That’s why it’s fascinating. But what are we here to talk about? I wanted you to tell me some stuff about what you think the future will look like. The future of school and work, maybe. Our fertile question today is what does the future of school and work look like? Dave, what do you think?
David: We are here to talk a little bit about the future today, but I will sort of preface this by saying I’ve always been a software guy, so I think my leanings are very much towards how software changes things. I’ve always very much been like the hardware’s cool, especially as an educator. Who can afford the brand new stuff? Who can afford to buy a classroom of Apple Vision Pros for the 30 students in their state school? So I’m very much a person that is a realist with what the hardware can offer. But get very excited by what the software can do.
Alan: Just as an aside on the Apple Vision Pro, I’ve got a theory on that. I’ve got a theory that it’s just really a meta quest underneath, but they thought if they sold it for 400 quid, no one would buy it because they, that people want to believe that Apple have put Apple ness into everything. So They put a price tag of seven grand on it and just went, wow, see what happens. And of course the fanboys lapped it up. But,
David: Yeah, I will say I say I’m not a hardware guy, but like the specs on it, beautiful, like from what I’ve heard from people that have used it and the quest, it is a step up in terms of augmentation to reality. And I think that’s where we need to go.
I’m not. Personally, I’m not convinced that I want to strap an enormous thing onto the front of my head. I look enough like characters from Star Wars that it is being a bald gentleman wearing big headphones. So I don’t want big giant things sticking out of my face as well. When they get to the point where they’re eyeglasses and they’re just something we take for granted and it’s just an everyday like the phone is just a bit of metal we stick in our pocket.
And when it gets to that point, I think then we’ll reap the benefits of AR and who, who in this room? would not want to look at a group of students whilst on duty and have their names floating above them. So when they’re running down the corridor away from you, you can actually call after them and follow up without having to ask 20 people if they saw anything.
Alan: This is the Holy Grail. This was one of the problems I had when I was a teacher which is I never remembered names, particularly if I hadn’t taught them. And of course, computing teachers, we see 300 kids every year and then 300 new kids the next year because we only get one hour a fortnight or whatever. And loads of classes. And yeah.
David: I’m not sure if you noticed this as well though, but like it’s 300 kids, but you see the back of their heads most of the day. So it’s very good at naming students. If I saw the, sometimes on parents evenings, I’d have to be like, Just turn around for a second. Oh, yes, I know. Yeah,
Alan: I know the back of that head. Yes. Right. Okay. Um, Yeah you’ve touched on something I mentioned with Andy Colley on his podcast. Andy Colley does the Learning Dust podcast with Dave Leonard about ed tech and it’s brilliant. And he asked me what would I invent if I could invent anything to help teaching?
It would be, so like Google Glass, when you’re looking around the classrooms reading the brainwaves of the kids, so you can see confusion as red and understanding is green and all of that. So you could basically do a check for understanding by scanning the room.
David: It’s hilarious because we we literally do that with Mindjoy, the conversations they have and we color code them. So like at a glance, you can see. That’s amazing. That’s like simultaneous thought. I love that.
Alan: Well, it’s the future everyone’s got the mini whiteboards, so you ask the question, they hold up the mini whiteboards and you go, ah three quarters of them didn’t get it. If you could do that with technology instantly, then that, that would be great.
I’m sure that will come soon. But yes, just names. How many times I shout “Oi, you!”, and they give you fake names as well. That’s always hilarious. And the weird thing is you go on Sims or whatever your school system is and you look for these kids and I don’t know about you, but I think I’m, I think it’s called face blindness.
If I see just a mugshot of a child, I can’t say whether or not that was the child I saw running away from me down the corridor.
David: It’s a completely different context as well. If I spend the time putting my makeup on and smiling beautifully for the camera and sucking in my gut, I look a little bit different than I do just walking around the corridor, slouching and, I think it’s a real big difference. And one of the, one of the interesting things there’s been a lot in the news recently about schools and public institutions using facial recognition and being like rightly so being brought to the information commissioners purview and told off about it and fined in some cases, because like I’m sure you’re aware of this, but if you introduce any biometric sort of measures you do need to give people an option to opt out and a more old fashioned sort of pin number style version. And I remember when we introduced a fingerprint based sign in and payment system in one of our schools, part of the budgeting process was just like, how many students do we think are going to opt out? How many smart cards are we going to need? Because if it becomes a meme, it’s going to, it’s not going to be worth installing.
Alan: It hit the press, I don’t know, about 10 years ago when these fingerprint payment systems came in around schools and parents were outraged, apparently if you read the Daily Mail, but I think that’s par for the course. And they were going why do they need to fingerprint my child? And it’s just because they forget their lunch money or they forget a card, a payment card. That you give them or whatever. And we don’t want them to starve. It’s as simple as that. It wasn’t really because we’re evil and we want to collect all this data on children. It’s just this fear of technology though, isn’t it? And I guess we just need to make our communities understand it better, which is why we teach the subject of computing,
David: I think you’re right. I think like part of the thing for me was that the reason I got into teaching computer science was because, and this is the worst origin story for a teacher you’ll ever hear, right? But my computer science teacher in secondary school was god awful. And I won’t name him and shame him, but he was god awful. And I was the one in the classroom helping people out and getting people excited about it. And I was just like, oh, I love this subject. And I’ve just read about it myself. I can make people excited about this.
This is what people should be like. They should be fascinated with technology. Changing everything. And I did, when did my computer science degree and I trained to be a teacher because I wanted to achieve that. And I think, I think I did, I think I did a pretty good job, but it’s such an important thing that people understand what technology is, what the abstraction is, and what the impacts of it.
Like the big technology for me, the thing that I think is going to have the biggest impact on education full stop is AI. And I hadn’t really encountered this generation of AI until. I started working for Replit about two to three years ago, and at the time, OpenAI hadn’t released ChatGPT or anything like that. They didn’t have that big model in the works. What they had was an auto, like a fancy auto complete model. But we were looking at it internally and I was still teaching at the time and I remember going, oh my God, this is just, this is gonna blow people away. And I went into school and I was showing my sixth form. I was showing my GCSE students. I was like, look at this. I can, and it was very simplistic compared to what it is now, but I can give it a breakdown of what I want an essay to be and it’ll generate the text for it. And everyone was like, Oh my God, this is my homework for the next X years. And I’m there going, they’re not wrong. They’re not wrong. Why in the real world? Why would we, why would I not use a spell check in my day to day life? Why would I not use AI completion of things? And then, GPT came along and it was this. big thing. And everyone’s Oh God, there’s no jobs because AI does everything. I think it’s important that people know what AI is and what it’s good for.
And I think there’s a, there’s an issue with AI in the classroom because what people think is, Oh, I can do my worksheets and my reports. It’s ah, those things have existed forever. And let’s be honest. Who amongst us gets a worksheet from TES or whoever and just rolls it out into the classroom without looking at it or editing it ourselves? If you use third party resources without engaging in them and modifying them and going through that thought process, your teaching is going to be absolutely shocking.
This is why most computer science teachers Most computer science teachers, worth their salt, sticklers for, Oh, no, I made this and I like my resource because I’m comfortable with every aspect, every facet of it. And so AI for me, isn’t like this thing that will fix the admin issue, the time issue in schools. Because let’s be honest, if we get more time back, they’ll find a way to fill it. For me, what AI is is a way of reducing a bottleneck in the classroom, which has always been there, and it’s you as a teacher.
You as a teacher, you might have the best relationships, you might have spent 20 years honing your craft, you may have the most amazing, exciting stories to introduce the concept of, I don’t know binary arithmetic, you know, you might have fun anecdotes, but at some point in that lesson you go 30 students, Off you go! And then four people put their hand up and you have to split your time up. And what AI is to me is a way of augmenting your teaching and using things like AI tutor bots to be like, okay, we’re going to go. There’s an AI tutor bot I’ve put the effort into that I know will work the way I want it to.
And I want you guys to go and use that. And what that does is that removes that initial Oh, what do I need to do? I don’t quite understand X, Y, and Z. And it opens up a lot of opportunities. That’s just really the most simplistic way you could possibly use anything, right? And it, but it’s such an augmentative, such a saving. And what that frees you up to do as a teacher, is instead of running around like a crazy person for an hour, you can actually It lets you target those interventions and it lets you make sure the people that need the help really get the help. And I think AI is going to be such a boon for us in the classroom.
Once we get out of that mode we’re in now where we’re afraid to talk about it because the reality is that every student has used it to cheat on their homework and every teacher has used it to mark work or do a report and the twain do not talk about it because we feel like we’re cheating. And I think if we use the most appropriate use case, it’ll be much better.
Sorry, I interrupted
Alan: you. Yeah, no, I absolutely, I love all that. And you said cheating then, and I wrote a blog on this six months ago or something, and I titled it, Stop Calling It Cheating. That was my blog title. And because I was so frustrated, if you want to be really frustrated Dave, you need to.
Join a Facebook group called ChatGPT4Teachers, and it’s mostly American teachers and they’re mostly trying to automate the worst pedagogical ideas ever, and of course, American schools, a lot of them are still stuck with the grade point average system. They do term papers and and mark them and give them a grade A to F and that becomes a grade point average and that decides whether you graduate or not.
And so right throughout their high school career, these kids are doing term papers and basically that’s how their understanding is judged, which is terrible. And even before AI, they were cheating by doing homework for each other and googling things and writing down what they found and all sorts.
And And suddenly there’s this, Oh my God, I can’t trust any of my kids term papers now. So how do I grade them? And what AI detectors are there so that I can check that they’re not cheating and all of this? And I’m in there trying to be the voice of reason going, if you’re setting a term paper, every term in all of 10, 11 subjects, then those poor kids are swamped with writing essays. All of their entire high school life to try and prove to you that they’ve remembered something that you taught badly in the first place. And they’re going to cheat. So stop doing that. And there is fortunately a movement in America called ungrading, which brings us back to more like what we do in this country, which is more formative assessment and far less graded papers.
David: I think one of the things that I think I’ve written a blog post, which should be out before this episode comes out, called The History of Cheating in Schools, where I sort of go through everything that I did as a student, because I like, I grew up at the transition from paper to computers to internet. So there was a significant difference in the way that I, I suppose, in quotes, cheated on my homework for the entire time that I was in school.
But if you examine every step, what happened is let’s take for instance a research homework in the days pre internet, pre computers. What did people do? They went to the library and they copied out of a book, right? Now, in the ideal world, that’s, I’ve got multiple sources, I’ve synthesized, I’ve done a good pedagogical strategy, but what the reality is for the vast majority of people is they literally copied it out.
And there’s research that suggests that actually is an element of pre learning and helps with mastery because you’ve got that sort of, it fires off the phonological loop and. What you end up with is it is a base layer understanding that when you cover it in lessons is enhanced. So the cheating, so to speak, was actually what was used and leveraged by teachers as pre learning. And I think that is if you go through every sort of, like I go through in the article Oh, then Microsoft Encarta, everyone literally copies and pastes the same text because there’s a limited supply. and what happened?
Alan: CD ROM encyclopedias. I miss them.
David: Exactly. If you were clever you bought one of the less popular ones and then you look like you knew what you were talking about, but everyone copied from Encarta. And it was like the, in every stage of this, and we’ve been stuck in the same sort of stage of this for 15 years with, we have Google for instance, good search, and we have Wikipedia, the repository of all human knowledge, but we’ve just hit a different milestone. And that is. That unique generative work can be created by anybody.
And in that situation, what you need to do is you need to stop making it a taboo. You need to stop being like, Oh God, we don’t talk about it. Please don’t use it. Because the reality is when these students end up in the world of work, AI tools are going to be like a spell check to them. They’re just going to use them. So we need to train them how to use it. So what you need to do is stop AI being this mystical, horrible thing that People feel like they’re cheating on and something you’re actually using your lesson. I say this a lot. I think if you think about what is the gold standard of academia? How, like what if you’re doing it, if you’re doing a a final thesis for your PhD, how do you get graded? You defend it orally.
Alan: Orally. Absolutely. Yeah.
David: Now, AI, can be used to simulate that entire thing. You can get a 10 year old, 11 year old to place in a piece of homework they’ve done and the AI can come back with. arguments with the opposite, and they have to defend it. And it’s a conversation. It’s not just I’ve programmed in four responses and it’s going to come through. It’s a genuine, generative conversation that makes the student more able to back up their thoughts and their feelings, which is a much better, and let’s be honest, if we say that’s the gold standard of academia, if we can bring that all the way down to the point at which we’re using it in like secondary education, gives the student a much more concrete awareness of.
the points they’re making and the arguments against them and why they think one thing. So for me, generative AI is this beautiful thing that coming into the classroom as a tutor, coming to the classroom as something to augment your teaching, really makes you more like the 10x teacher. I’m sorry, I use that phrase a lot. I don’t know if that’s very common in, it’s very common in Silicon Valley. So the idea of a 10x like engineer is that you start your career. You can do the work of one person. With tools, with experience, with automation, you can be, have 10x that impact. And the sort of the leading theory at the moment is that AI is the sort of thing that would drive you to, to be able to become the 100x engineer.
And this isn’t everyone, but this is the sort of things they give to people like Steve Wozniak and the types of people that can go on a weekend code bender and come out with a revolution. You know what I mean? We can all get to that stage with engineering and coding by leveraging these tools. But I genuinely think there’s a place for the 10x teacher in the classroom, because if you are an outstanding teacher, if you’re getting up there and smashing it every single day, then leveraging these tools, and I think importantly, not getting off the shelf stuff, not getting Oh, here’s a worksheet generator. Here’s something that will knock up my lesson objectives for me. Prompting those AIs yourself means that you’ve got control of it the same way you have control of that content. Sorry, go on.
Alan: It’s alright, just on worksheet generator, that made me shiver. You know, Just the phrase worksheet actually makes me a little go cold. I think there’s been a Very obvious shift towards PowerPoints and worksheets in the last 10 15 years or so. And so again, going back to my blog I wrote a blog a couple of years ago about Nevermind, it’s called Nevermind the PowerPoint. And because I would, again, on Facebook teachers would go, has anyone got a PowerPoint on this? And it’s Boolean logic for year nine or something. And I realized that they were equating a PowerPoint with a lesson, and believing that the PowerPoint would magically deposit the knowledge into the kids heads and stuff. And it comes back to Andy Colley’s podcast, learning dust doesn’t fall out of the bottom of an iPad.
It equally doesn’t transmit itself from the whiteboard to the children’s heads through a PowerPoint. And the worksheet as the lesson or the worksheet as the product of the lesson, completely forgetting what we’re actually trying to do, which is make a change in children’s long term memories. They need to know more and be able to do more. And the, we’ve encouraged in a lot of classrooms, we’ve encouraged The children, the pupils, to believe that completing a worksheet is the goal of the lesson. And so they will have spaces on the worksheet and they will point to them and go, look, there’s something in each space. Therefore, I have achieved what you wanted me to achieve, sir, or miss or whatever. And teachers will be happy with this and they’ll say things like on Adam Boxer’s podcast, he was very scathing about a result on the TeacherTap app, which is this survey app that teachers can fill in that said do you mind children chatting in lessons as long as they’re getting their work done?
And 50 percent of teachers said, yeah, that’s fine. And he was furious about that because it’s all about the concentration. But I think what we’ve What we’ve come to understand as teachers, a lot of teachers have come to understand that completing the worksheet is the lesson. Going through the PowerPoint and transmitting the stuff followed by completing a worksheet is the lesson. And I think the art of teaching is being lost in all of this in order to, I don’t know, to perform, to show that you’re doing something, to have something to mark. And I think we need to get back to, telling stories, encouraging children to love the subject for itself and to love the journey of learning rather than produce, producing an end product on a piece of paper.
David: Absolutely. I think, I think I’ve said at the start of this podcast, big fan of your books read them for fun. I am not a very popular slash employable teacher slash head of department slash deputy head as I was in schools, because I am very opinionated. And I do not believe in following. Don’t say. Shockingly, shocking no one. I don’t believe in following the the breadcrumb trail left by people that are trying to commoditize and standardize things into a worksheet. Let’s look at the present, not even the future, the present. The present is I generate a worksheet or a PowerPoint with AI.
I give it to my students. They answer it with AI. I mark it with AI. Who does any work in that? It’s just busy work. It is dancing around this concept of what education is from God knows the 19th century. I agree with you completely. What education is, is telling stories, hooking into those young person’s brains and encoding the information in their brains in the most useful way.
I had a brilliant lecturer at university. I did a module which. was about communication ostensibly, but he was a like a film director a local one. And after the initial, two weeks of here’s how we format communication, it was, let’s make a film, shall we? And his teaching was brilliant because he always, he said to me just one day, he’s like, Oh, I seem to have lost the room.
I’ll tell you an anecdote now. And I was like, That works. So my entire teaching career, my entire teaching persona, and I say persona because I do believe it’s, there’s an element of it’s an exaggerated form of yourself a lot of the time to be comfortable. But like my teaching persona is very much, I have taken millions of stories from around the web and just turned them into anecdotes that involve me or my friends. I don’t have many friends. It’s, I haven’t done that much in my life. but I’ve got all these little anecdotes to hook ideas into people’s brains. And I, that is what teaching is to me. It is not marking. I was always like, for the first five years of my career, I had this existential guilt. People would be going home with bags of books and tick and tick.
And I would mark two or three things, a term which are meaningful. And I don’t like, why would I, The worst thing for me was when this idea of differentiated work became very popular and what, what, what the conceptualization was. I agree with, I am very much a scaffolding guy. So like the project, the idea, the thing we’re building is the same for everyone. We’d like you to get to this same place. But what I’m going to do as a teacher is I’m going to give. Scaffolding, so that if you need more help to get there, there is more things in place to help you get there. But what this idea of differentiated work turned into was, look at this perfect example. Here is, I don’t know, modern foreign language X.
Here’s a worksheet with lots of gaps, Here’s a worksheet with less gaps. Here’s a worksheet with less gaps in the words written in the bottom. And I’m like how is, this is not differentiation. This is three different worksheets that, that’s complete the box. I don’t understand the pedagogy behind it. And maybe that’s why I’m such a big Pedagogy Nerd. That’s why that’s why, to be honest working at Mindjoy has been amazing for me because everything in the company is pedagogy focused. Everyone’s teachers, everyone’s very much we understand the science of learning, we want it to happen.
And you used this beautiful phrase just a few minutes ago, which was, I think that the art of teaching is being lost. I think there is an artistry to the best teaching, but I think the vast majority of teaching is learnable and science. And I think the differentiating factor between a solidly good lesson and an outstanding lesson is the little bit of spark and joy that you can bring with our artistry as a teacher. And that, think about your favorite teachers as a child or as an adult, who made the biggest marks on you? For me, it was the weird and wacky ones. It was the ones with the best stories. It was the ones that weren’t absolute fascists. And I think that if you are going into a classroom to teach young people, you’ve got to go in with the idea that the only thing you can change in that classroom to influence them is you.
No amount of worksheets, no amount of content that you buy that you get from elsewhere. is going to influence how they engage with your lesson. That’s you. That’s your behavior. That’s the way you act. That’s the things you present them with. That’s your idea of pedagogy and what you like to do. And it is stuff that you can learn. And your book very rightly covers a lot of that. And your podcast with Andy Colley, was absolutely exciting. Like I was geeking out when you mentioned my favorite theory, which is semantic waves, which when I read that, I was like, Oh my God, there’s a word for what I’ve been doing. Wow. And I think so much of pedagogy and research is giving people a shared vocabulary to talk about.
And what I love about the future we’re heading towards is we’re heading towards a future where I can model a singular pedagogical style inside an AI, and I can push that AI to a student who can experience that, but they can experience it from a system that’s, That hasn’t had a bad night staying up with the baby. That hasn’t got 7B next, who are going to be screaming. There’s a bunch of things that AI has, which is which if you program it, you prompt it well, and that’s a skill we need to get as teachers as well. I think that’s worth saying. As a teacher, you need to go and learn how to prompt AIs because you don’t want to be someone who buys things off the shelf and has to use what’s there.
You want to be somebody that goes, actually I want to change this lesson in this way because I think this would be better for my learners. Again, the only thing you can change in the classroom is you. And the only thing you can change with AI is if you can adapt the prompt, learn how to do it. Come along to my workshops. That’s what we do there. We talk about those things. It’s a skill for the future. It is something you need because if you’ve got the skills to tell these bots how to interact with these students, how to bring these pedagogical strategies. I spent the weekend building a semantic waves bot because I was like, I need to turn this into something that I can push because I’m a massive nerd.
Like what else are the people at the football on Saturday? I’m there. with my notes out and my research and tapping away at a prompt and being like, can this work? Is this for me? And
Alan: I think that one, I think that one sentence Dave probably sums up this podcast. I’m going to cut that out and I’m going to, I’m going to post it on social media. Um, “I spent the weekend making a semantic waves bot” said Dave, the lesson hacker.
David: I like that idea, just the nerdiest quotes.
Alan: This has become a very niche podcast now. Very niche podcast.
David: Computer scientists who spend their Saturdays doing work. The thing is, there are hardware people, right? There are hardware people that spend their weekends with their Raspberry Pis and their soldering irons doing amazing projects.
I’d love to be one of those people. But My brain works with software. My brain is I’ve got this hardware in front of me, which is super capable. What can I do with it? And I think the reason that, again, we had a list of topics to talk about today. We had VR. I think I’ve covered that very quickly. I’m like too expensive, but cool.
Alan: We had, we had robotics. We can maybe rattle through a few other topics before we wind up, but
David: yeah, go on. I think like I can sum up robotics in a sentence for you. I’m like, Cool, but too expensive. Software is the only thing that we have in school that we can actually make an investment in a reasonable way. And especially if you’re on a departmental level budget. Now, I I was, I, as I said, most of my career is like a head of departments. I did a little bit of like senior leadership stuff. And then you’re talking about Big money, but you’re talking about big money that has to tick all the boxes across a school.
When you’re in a departmental level and you’re looking at software, you’re looking at things that are going to improve and enhance what you’re doing, but the money’s not a lot. So you can’t, again, I’m talking from a state school point of view here, but you can’t go out and you can’t go out and say, Yes, I’ve bought 30 Raspberry Pis and a bunch of kits and all these little bits, and we’re going to have a three week project doing hardware because, it’s just not affordable, is it?
And especially the rate at which those things end up getting destroyed because students make mistakes, as they should. I, the most costly lesson I ever had was when I brought in a processor that I was going to reuse in a different PC and was showing the students it, and they were having a look at it. And one of the students bent all the pins on it accidentally.
And in that moment, I was like, that was a couple of hundred pounds down the drain because I was excited about showing them something. That happens all the time. With software, what you end up with is something that can push along the pedagogy, can push along the teaching and learning, can give you tools that isn’t going to cost the earth and that will run on pretty much anything.
And I taught a lot in one to one schools or schools where devices were like a thing that they could have, because I very that’s me. I very much think that if I can whip out my phone at any minute and look something up, students should be able to too, because I’ve taught in schools where the rules for teachers and rules for students were very different and I find it very hard to enforce rules on students that I don’t have to follow myself.
I’m like, I am a person that I like, I have lots of piercings, right? You probably don’t notice it on my videos a lot because they’re not very flashy, but whenever anybody meets me in real life, they go, Have you always had those piercings? And I genuinely remember having to crack down on, and this is in the last couple of years, crack down on piercings in students.
And I’m sat there with two fresh ear studs at the top of my ear. And I’m like how does that work? And it’s the same with phones. I think if there’s an expect, with any sort of device. We have, we as a culture now rely on this ability to pull out information at the drop of a hat to look things up.
And I do that all the time. If I’m in a conversation with a student and that they say, Oh, what about this? And I’m like, Oh, I’m not quite sure. Let’s have a look. If I’ve got my laptop there, I’ll look it up. But if I haven’t, the phone comes out because I’m like, Yeah, this, the conversation improves, the learning improves. Students should be able to do those same things.
Alan: I can see that, but I can also even I struggle with the discipline of, getting your device out to look up the one thing and not go, Oh, I’ll scroll Twitter or threads these days rather than Twitter or whatever it’s called.
David: Is threads still alive? I haven’t been on it in a while.
Alan: Oh, it’s great now. Yeah. No, jump, jump back into threads.
David: I have to jump in because one of the questions, one of the questions I had is I was big into EduTwitter when it was like a big thing with 10, 15 years ago. And recently, people don’t even argue during the holidays anymore.
What’s happened to EduTwitter? What’s going on? So where have people gone?
Alan: I wrote a blog six months ago now saying, I’ve quit X, you should too. Because I just documented the fall of Twitter and how it’s been taken over by a white supremacist. I’m not joking. It is a dangerous place now for academics because if you believe in equality or diversity, you will get attacked.
If you, even if you talk about climate change, you will get attacked. If you say anything, what they call woke, you’ll get attacked. And those attacks,
David: I’ve got the trans flag in my bio. I get attacked all the time.
Alan: Exactly. But that’s the thing, but we know that these these attacks can spill over into the real world as in people get physically attacked and there have been the owner of Twitter or the owner of X himself has amplified Right wing attacks on vocal students and so on and force people into hiding. It is a horrible place. So anyway, that’s my little rant about it.
David: I don’t think it’s a rant. I don’t think, I don’t think it’s unnecessary. I think the important thing as teachers is that we’re all very aware. We need to model the behaviors we want to see in the real world to our students.
And unfortunately the sort of interactions that you have on X and Twitter with the extreme. Minority. Yeah. And not the sort of things you want to model. So I can completely understand why so many educators have fell away. But I really miss that community of practice, that sort of critical friend, that, that group of educators that would just go, I’m trying this, what do you think? And then it would be a great conversation about those one things. Now I found those practice, I found smaller versions of those communities of practice on LinkedIn, certainly. Which is, at least it’s. At least it’s unblocked in most schools because it’s like a business y thing.
And there’s private Facebook groups which replicate it, but I think I still miss the ability for me, I finished my dinner. There’s nothing really on TV. I’ve got no mini projects to do. What can, what conversations are going on about education? Things I actually care about?
Alan: No, absolutely. So in an ideal world, I’d love the kids to be able to whip out their devices and look things up. I just, I feel that the temptation to do other things and the possibility of distraction, which there’s a lot of evidence for, means that that’s a really difficult thing to to, to manage.
David: I do agree. And I think in the same breath. I agree. And I think that I have no beef with schools that ban phones or ban devices at all. I don’t, they’re just not for me. They’re not my sort of school because I think this is important with the way that teachers, we’re going off, off topic a little bit here, but I think it’s important for how teachers apply for schools as well.
I used to apply for schools with a CV. Which was very colorful, which was very graphic design y, which had jokes in it, which had a silly picture of me pulling a face. And I would do that because I know that teachers where everyone’s poo faced and are very serious about things aren’t schools for me. So teach, like anybody that would get that CV in a bundle of an application and go, Bring this guy in, let’s see what we want to talk to him about. That’s a school for me and that did me very well in my career.
Alan: It’s a good message. To be honest, as a computer science teacher, we are in a privileged position in which we are much in demand and we can probably work anywhere. So that’s going to work for us, where it might not work for an art teacher, ironically. Because the art teacher is often more likely to have the piercings and nail polish and so on. But um, but yeah, use your privilege computing teachers. You are much in demand and if you’re not enjoying where you are and you can’t be yourself in the classroom, have a look around.
David: Yeah.
Alan: Absolutely.
Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later when I get talking to someone fascinating and we bounce ideas around, we can’t stop. David and I talked for nearly 90 minutes and I ended up with far too much content for one episode. So I’m splitting this bumper recording over two episodes of the pod. You can look forward to the second half. Where Dave and I really get into AI next week on how to teach computer science.
However, towards the end of our chat, Dave issued me a challenge. Let’s hear what happened as I skip to what became the mind joy chatbot challenge.
Alan: My favorite. Chatbot at the minute really is probably cs50. ai from Harvard because it’s, it’s got guardrails so it doesn’t hallucinate quite as much about um, some stuff and, and it’s better.
David: I’m putting faces at you, but I’ll tell you why in a minute.
Alan: Yeah, so Dave’s making a funny face for those listening about the word guardrails. So it’s about the CS50 bot in particular. CS50 bot. Um, Yeah, so you can ask it questions about programming and it’ll uh, it’ll guide you towards the answer rather than just, here’s the code. It’ll have a Socratic conversation, as you mentioned earlier. What are your, What are your issues with CS50 then?
David: So the reason I sort of sucked my teeth and did the, the um, ooo emoji, is because that is a commoditization of very simple prompting. And I have an issue with commoditization of, again, we talked about this, worksheet generators. In my mind, the CS50 bot is the same as a worksheet generator. It is a closed system. It is something that I can’t impact as a teacher. It is something that I can’t edit the bot is great, but it’s a general purpose teaching bot. And there’s so much more we can do with AI if we make AI part of the lesson and we build the lesson around, I’ll get the, I’ll get the bot to do this, that will help the students do this.
And therefore, the lesson can be different. It can be more exciting. It can be, like you can build a bot to help the student with PRIMM, to help them work through how they should do it. Let them have those questions. I think it will do this. And the AI can come back and say actually, let’s have a look at how that would work. And the conversations that you would have, they are what I want from an AI, not this generic tool. So that’s why I was sucking my teeth.
Alan: No, absolutely. I think that. The situation is that probably you could build a better bot than cs50. ai, but not all the teachers listening to this.
David: I would say anyone listening to this podcast can build a better bot than cs50 have got at the moment. And I’m no shade on cs50, they’ve done a great job, it’s a beautiful bot, but I guarantee you if everyone listening to this podcast sign up for one of my workshops and I give them half an hour on prompt engineering, right? We will all be building bots that are suitable for our classrooms, suitable for our learners, who we know better. I promise you if you want, I’ll send you a code and we can send out an invite to all the audience. I promise you every person in this, listening to this podcast can do a better job than CS50 with 30 minutes of training and a bit of time twiddling around with it.
Alan: I, challenge accepted, Dave. What I’ll do is I’ll get on a call with you after this, I will take you up on your offer and we’ll build a bot together. And have some fun. Um, Talking of fun.
David: What I will say is in May, we are having a computer science themed month at Mindjoy. workshops will be all based on computer science. Like what we’re pushing out will be based around computer science, which is great because I know computer scientists, so that’s a bit of fun. But like.
Alan: Where can we find out, where can we find out more about those workshops, Dave?
David: This is actually set up well, mindjoy. com, MINDJOY. COM is where you’ll find all the workshops and all the stuff we’re doing with AI. But genuinely, like I, I know that I’ve gone on about AI a lot this episode, and we have gone very long, my friend, which I, because we’ve been enjoying ourselves, I think.
Alan: I think that is probably a good point to start wrapping up. It seems we started talking about wrapping up about an hour ago. I think probably we should.
David: I’m off to start prompting AI in the random bits of pedagogy to see what I can do.
Alan: Dave, it’s been brilliant I will take you up on your offer. Thanks for coming on.
David: No worries, buddy. I appreciate it. And long may this podcast keep going. Cause I have a great time listening to it.
Alan: Thank you very much. Thanks for your kind words about the podcast and the books.
David: If you’ve not bought the books, please do. Learn, how to learn computer science is my favorite of the two.
Alan: Alright then Dave, have a nice day. I’ll catch up with you again soon. Cheers. Thank you. Bye then.
So it’s happening. David Morgan and I are hosting a live event on Thursday, 9th of May, 2024. at, 5:00 PM. See mind joy.com. And scroll down to upcoming events or see my blog . httcs.online/blog, or check the podcast, show notes for more details. David and I will create a coding companion live on air. I have no idea what’s going to happen, but I’m sure it will be lit as the kids apparently don’t say anymore. So it’s nearly time to wrap up. I’m going to play beat saber on my Meta quest. I was thinking about VR after our chat. And I, I wear glasses and it’s a bit of a hassle getting the headset on. And the other issue is no one else can see what I’m doing unless I cast to the TV. And that’s a bit of a faff as well. And while I’m using it, nobody else in the family can. So I thought. Wouldn’t it be good if we all had a headset each, but that’s expensive and we still couldn’t see each other or share popcorn and stuff like that. So maybe. What we need is one big VR headset we can all use maybe a big room sized one we walk into with a big screen at the end. And. And comfy seats. So you can enjoy a movie together and share popcorn and maybe a hot dog. That would be amazing.
So that was a fun episode to make our attempt to answer the question. What is the future of work and school. Part two is coming next week. Hope you enjoyed our ramblings. Let me know in the comments or on the socials. This has been how to teach computer science, the podcast I’m Alan Harrison, please do visit my website. HTTCS dot online and buy my books. Don’t forget. You heard David tell you how much he enjoyed the books today. And don’t forget last week, Dave Hillyard of Craig and Dave said this.
Dave: I think the final thing I would say is that your book is great. How to teach computer science, I think, is excellent for teachers. How to learn computer science, I think, is essential reading for all students, and my recommendation would be get a class set, and I’m not just saying this because you’re the author, I genuinely mean it. Get a class set of these books, hand them out, that is your background reading.
So buy the books, if you already have the books, buy me a coffee, please at ko-fi.com/mraharrisoncs all links on my blog at HTTCS dot online slash blog. And subscribe now. So you don’t miss a thing. Check out mindjoy.com or my blog for the live event on the 9th of May. So have a great weekend and I’ll catch you next week.
How to Teach Computer Science 