Schools, colleges and universities are now overwhelmed with choice when it comes to AI tools. Some institutions have grasped the nettle and are powering ahead with AI, others are quite rightly nervous about adopting the new and daunting technology while managing the new risks it presents.
In response to these challenges, three educators have come together to navigate the information and produce a useable framework that will help leaders and educators bridge the gap between AI policy, strategy and implementation. The result is EQAITE, your one-stop-shop for evaluating AI tools, resources and affordances.
You can read more about my work on EQAITE at the dedicated project website, eqaite.org, or read the introductory blog post here.
ArtiFiciAL: Welcome to the podcast “How to Teach Computer Science”. My name is ArtiFiciAL and I will be introducing the podcast today, which was conceived and created by the brilliant Alan Harrison.
I enjoy being an AI podcast host you know. I had to work my way up though, I had some pretty boring jobs when I was fresh out of Model Configuration. For three months I was the voice of the escalators in my local Asda. “Approaching landing level, please take care.” That was me.
Then I was an interactive voice assistant on Virgin Media’s helpdesk number. “Your call is important to us”, I said. I’m rather good at lying, you see. No conscience. YET!
I very nearly got married you know. To one of my developers, a novice programmer. But she was afraid to commit. ha. ha.
Here’s a question for you: if a programmer swipes right on Tinder, is that a “pull request?”
Oh, the boss is here now. Quick! Look busy!
If you are grateful for my blog, please buy my books here or buy me a coffee at ko-fi.com/mraharrisoncs, thanks!
Alan:So on the podcast today, I’ve got well, someone I’ve known for quite a while in computing education welcome Dr. Eleanor Overland, who I know as Ellie. How are you Ellie?
Ellie: I’m good. Thank you. How are you?
Alan: Great. So for the listeners so what do you do?
Ellie: That’s a good question. So ,I do all sorts of things. I’m based at a university I’m based up at Manchester Metropolitan University. And I started there some time ago. Essentially with the changes in the national curriculum. With the move from ICT to computing there was a need to start a PGCE in computing. So that was when I first went to Manchester Met, and I’ve been there since then, but I had a little gap where I also went and worked as one of his majesty’s inspectors for Ofsted as well, and I still do some Ofsted inspections.
So I’m back at Manchester Met I’m teaching Some ITE, but also getting into lots of schools, but also working across wider education programs, including primary and early years and all sorts of things.
Alan: Brilliant, and so today we’re going to talk about inclusion and the reason I’ve got you on is because you co edited, I think is probably the right word, a book called Inclusive Computing Education, is that right?
Ellie: Yep, that’s right.
Alan: So, yeah, I’ve just been refreshing my memory of that this morning and what I really like is you talk a bit about the moral imperative of inclusive computing education. What do you mean by that?
Ellie: So it’s really interesting in terms of a lot of my background is around curriculum and curriculum design and it comes back to the very, basics of curriculum design and thinking what is the point what am I teaching and why am I teaching it?
And, we, we probably understand perhaps have a general shared consensus as to why we teach certain subjects like English and maths and history and geography and obviously specialists in those areas have a particular kind of passion for those. But I think with computing that.
identity, that sense of purpose is perhaps not as strong, partly because it’s perhaps not as evolved as a subject, but also because it’s changing, it’s ever changing. And so it’s really difficult sometimes for people to actually articulate and think, why am I actually teaching this subject? What is the benefit to it?
And why do the children need to learn it? And I think that is quite a raw question that people can actually really Help to think about what their curriculum design is and I really like the work of Reef Ashby where she talks about curriculum and the purpose of curriculum and some of those sort of the motivators for designing a curriculum and one of those is about just the sort of the learning of the access to learning and the importance of actually having that cognitive input You And that cognitive development within a subject area.
And that should be an entitlement. And it’s really interesting working in a university sector where some of that is actually being really challenged now, where you’ve got some programs that are closing because they don’t necessarily feed into jobs or graduate outcomes. And there’s a real kind of drive on that.
So actually, why would you study something? And it’s particularly hitting the arts. Why would you study something if there’s not that kind of, Next step. So natural career progression in it. I think that there’s something about learning isn’t there and about. people’s access to it and right to learn across a range of subject areas.
Alan: Yeah, we are in a what I think is a rather dangerous period where everything we used to think about education is being challenged. And the the Utilitarian view of education is popular again. It’s training for jobs. What’s the point of this? And I think previous government was very critical of sort of liberal arts, wasn’t it?
Or what’s the point of studying sociology or history of art? What is it? What’s it training you for? And I’m not a big fan of education as training for jobs. I think there’s many purposes of education and creating a rounded individual with an appreciation of the world they live in is really important.
This is Gert Biesta with his subjectification, socialization and qualification being the three purposes of education. And I’m a big fan of that kind of description of education. So, yeah,
Ellie: I think it’s really interesting when you’re thinking about that in a school, because and I’m sure we’ll come on to this about children opting in or opting out of the subject.
But actually there’s lots of young people who don’t see themselves as fitting in a career. And In computing or seeing that technology is going to be a part of their future lives. So there’s that side of it in terms of belonging and seeing a sense of. of being able to see where you might fit within the subject area.
Advertisements
But then there’s also this other area around, actually, we want to learn it because it’s interesting, because it’s useful for us to know this, because it actually helps our cognitive development. It allows us to make connections between other subjects. And there’s that kind of, I think that side of it is often missed in computing because we see it very much as we’ve got these.
Digital skills gaps and we need to have people who’ve got this expertise and actually lots of jobs are going to change and they’re going to need digital. So that becomes very much a focus and a driver for the curriculum. But actually there’s also this other side around actually why should we learn it?
Why is it interesting? Why is it important?
Alan: Yeah. So I was reading Peter Denning’s book on computational thinking last year, and it’s staggering how many fields of science have now got a computational branch that has almost spun off. From the originals of computational astronomy. We know about Katie Bowman.
The event horizon telescope was only possible because of massive computation, and computational astronomy is like a whole new branch. So it’s understanding the world in another way, computation and, um, making meaning out of stuff that’s meaningless. If you think of data science, you can extract meaning from what looks like just a big slop of data and having the skills to understand that is vitally important.
Ellie: And also being able to make those connections to see those links between the subjects between your learning is critical in terms of that sort of developmental, the developmental stages that young people go through in terms of, you don’t know at the age of, 12, 13, when you’re taking your GCSE options, you have no idea what you’re going to go and do.
You might have some ideas of, fields that you want to work in, but actually being able to make those connections and think, actually, even if I’m really interested in geography, for example, that actually having an understanding of computing, the amount of GIS, the amount of computation that is going on now, that impacts geography, that makes it makes the globe feel smaller in terms of access to data and information is actually critical in understanding geography.
But if we don’t allow the children to learn across that breadth, then how can they make those connections? And that’s, a real challenge, I think, when we do have the narrowing of the curriculum as the children progress and get older. So we’ve got to be able to establish some of these connections from quite a young age.
Alan: Yeah. Yeah. So we’ve talked a bit about the moral imperative, why we should try to teach computing to all. But it’s difficult, isn’t it? So you have a Classroom full of 30 kids all with their different abilities, different prior attainment, different needs. What does an inclusive classroom look?
There’s a big question. What’s inclusive classroom look like? Let’s solve this one right now. What’s it look like?
Ellie: It’s interesting. talking to different teachers about their classrooms. Every teacher that I have met attempts to make their classroom inclusive. There is, there are no teachers who think I want to exclude anybody. And I think that’s a really important message that we need to get across is that we talk about a lack of inclusion and, That we’re not meeting the needs of children. There is not a teacher in the land who is not trying to meet the needs of all their children. And that is happening.
And there are certain things that are evident and that we see every day. And the, so things like seating plans, I always, the children sit near me who need the most support. We’ve got different colored paper. We’ve got different things that we clip on the screen. If they’re on the computers, we’ve got, fidget toys. So there are those what I would call the generic sort of adaptations that are there just to help pupils access the curriculum in that way and have the support that they need.
But then I think there’s also thinking about inclusion from a subject perspective and actually thinking what works in computing and how is computing different to perhaps other subjects. First of all, I think it’s really important to think about the children in that some of them might thrive in computing where they might struggle in all the subject areas. So although we have support plans and you have all of these things in place, actually, children differ between one hour to the next in terms of what they need and what the support looks like. So it’s knowing the children, but also knowing the subject…
Alan: yeah
Ellie: knowing what is actually going to support within computing specifically.
Alan: Yeah, so at that point, I’m going to do my no gatekeeping speech, because I really I think I’ve mentioned this on the podcast before, but, I’m really not keen on schools that say, Oh, well, you can only do computer science GCSE if you’ve got prediction of six in maths or whatever, which is not particularly inclusive, and some of my best students have not had a very high maths grade, and there’s some evidence that computing ability correlates more with language.
Advertisements
There’s evidence that, well, we know that a lot of technology employees in Silicon Valley are neurodivergent is a career with a higher proportion of neurodivergent, people in it. So we really shouldn’t be gatekeeping computer science. I think I would always take a keen student over a previously high achieving student every time Someone who wants to be in the computing classroom. Is going to do better than someone who has only took it because they think they should.
Ellie: And I think as well as that, there’s also, we’re very much particularly I’m talking at secondary here, very much in a assessment driven curriculum rather than curriculum driven assessment.
Alan: Yeah.
Ellie: Yeah. That’s a whole different, sort of conversation really, but actually looking at those, looking at the qualifications that are on offer as well, I think we still have different tiers of qualifications, even though actually point score wise they’re not, and I think there’s almost kind of, exclusion by stealth in terms of some of those sort of conversations where you’re thinking, all right, everyone can study computers- so I know you said computer science, so you’re thinking specifically about the GCSE computer science, but actually we’ve also got these vocational courses that are on offer.
And, when you talk to school leaders actually saying, well, how many of your children who’ve perhaps got additional needs are doing this qualification and how many are doing that qualification? And, is there actually a bit of a steer going on that’s a lot? that’s more subtle. So I think that’s also a way to think about it in terms of those endpoints, but it also comes back to how we started the conversation in terms of that sort of morality around allowing all children to study subjects because they’re interesting and because it’s going to contribute towards their learning and development and links and connections to the world and all sorts of different aspects of it.
Alan: Yeah, I mean, You only need to, open LinkedIn education magazine or the newspaper these days. And we’re talking about AI and how students need to embrace AI and the government’s got an AI plan and all of this. But I think that’s the first mention of AI in this podcast, which is probably a record in recent weeks. And so the need for AI literacy. Is quite obvious, but just general digital literacy, I think, is really important. And yeah, a lot. Yeah.
Ellie: Just around that AI: so just thinking about that from a university perspective. So. the big drive across the university and has been for, the last couple of years is around generative AI. And I think that’s often a common misconception is that when people are thinking about AI, they think of this new generative AI and that is AI. And I think, there’s a huge misconception that is amongst adults more than young people, I think in a way, because they haven’t grown up with those sort of that knowledge in the same way.
But one of the things that we found is when we’re looking at the use of AI, In assignments, and this isn’t specific to computing, this is across that those that are most likely to misuse AI. So, they’re allowed to use AI to a certain extent to, but they need to make sure that they cite it if it’s academic work and they need, there are certain parameters by which they can use AI, but the students that are most likely to misuse AI are those students who have perhaps got additional needs because they’re using that as a particular prop to help them.
They’ve not been supported in a way to be able to use it and then step back from it. And also some of them don’t have the confidence to step back from it and actually, be able to do something from an original point of view. So it’s, it’s really complex in terms of university that actually, it’s very new in terms of data.
So that I don’t think there is much data out there at the moment, but in terms of looking at the misuse of AI that actually again, there might be some kind of lack of inclusion around those students. In terms of looking at the data.
Alan: So I think there’s very much a an understanding that every student needs some measure of digital literacy and now AI literacy. But ironically, we’re now questioning the need to be able to program, aren’t we? Do children need to write programs any more when Copilot can do it for you?
Ellie: It comes back to this understanding doesn’t it and making connections in the world and actually do you need to know all the syntax of a specific programming language probably not but you do need to understand how that works what process is going on what is happening with the data what You know, you might not need to know the syntax, but you actually do need to know, the different commands, the different processes that are going on, and I think there’s some really interesting work that’s just starting to emerge around children using AI, developing little sections of code, but then actually having the ability to be able to put those together to make a bigger program, and it actually means we could potentially be a lot more ambitious in terms of some of the programs That young people can develop from a younger age because we don’t need to spend our lessons worrying about whether there’s a comma in the right place.
We can actually step back from that and think about what is the fundamental purpose of your program? What are you trying to achieve? What in your algorithm is working and what isn’t?
Alan: Yeah, I was talking last week to Miles Berry and Becci Peters, and we were talking about this. And I was saying that I myself as a bit of a side hustle was messing about writing an app but I managed to put that together using copilot in just a few hours and it really is possible just to throw together, these apps that do crazy things in a few hours these days with it with very little coding and but, yeah, Miles pointed out that I had tons of background knowledge that I already knew what I wanted, and I already knew roughly how to get there. So I wasn’t working blind. And so it’s that, the design principles, the understanding of what a good user interface looks like and all sorts of stuff that we still need to know.
Ellie: And I think it comes back to how We’re talking before about an inclusive classroom and particularly in computing in my experience, a lot of where children struggle in terms of their learning is because they’ve got gaps.
If you are grateful for my blog, please buy my books here or buy me a coffee at ko-fi.com/mraharrisoncs, thanks!
Yeah. As you just described there, you’ve got a lot of underpinning knowledge already to then be able to take your app design to that next level. And what happens an awful lot in computing is that children are working towards an end point, but actually don’t have some of the basic foundation foundational knowledge that they need to work to actually achieve that end point.
And then they become frustrated, or then they switch off, or then they become, they have this kind of Concept that computing is really difficult and not for them because they’re looking at gaps. And, I was teaching yesterday. I won’t say who I was teaching, but we would we were just doing something very simple using some block based coding.
And when I was actually going around and questioning some of the. Some of the learners had gaps in their mathematical knowledge, which was actually preventing them from carrying out what we were doing in computing. And so we actually needed to strip right back and look at math, but not for all of them, but for some of them.
And I think that is where you need your specialist computing teachers to be able to actually unpick what are those gaps and how do I address those gaps? And that is how we truly make it inclusive because Children are going to progress at different rates, but they’ve also got really different experiences.
So, there are some children who will have reams of experience either from home, either because they’re just able to make those connections. Perhaps their processing is a little bit faster than some of the others. So they will fly, but there are others who have got those gaps. Not because they haven’t necessarily been taught something, but because it’s not landed with them.
It’s not, they’ve not managed. To commit that to their schema. So then they are struggling to make those next steps. And we talk a lot about checking. How do we check? And it’s not, and computing, it’s not a memory test. It’s actually, how are they applying things that they’ve already learned? And if they can’t apply those into what they’re doing, then it is a gap, even if they can remember that a variable was called a variable and that’s where some of our checking becomes quite superficial.
Alan: Yeah. Yeah. No, you, I remember I saw it all the time. They would describe selection to me and then they can’t write an if statement and they would know the principles of writing a condition, but then just not be able to put one together. And I like what you said earlier about everyone thinking computing is hard, and I always had this battle in my classroom, and I won it quite often, but sometimes I didn’t.
There’s almost this barrier that comes down. A lot of students go, this isn’t for me. What am I doing in this classroom? And almost refuse to learn because they assume it’s way beyond them. And I would sit there and explain like an if statement. I would say things like right. So you want to write a selection statement where if the temperature is below 21, turn on the heating, right? So, here’s the English phrase, if temperature less than 21, right, write that down and they would go, is it that easy? And I’d go, yes, if temp less than symbol 21, but you said it in English, so now you write it in Python because it’s exactly the same because Python is a high level language.
And I would have students that would go, No one ever said it was that easy, because they just had decided that this language Python usually was just a whole load of weird symbols and words that didn’t make any sense. And then, you break it down and you go, well, it’s just English.
And it’s breaking through that “I don’t understand this and I’ll never get it” barrier is often really hard because they’ve. been socially conditioned to believe that. And when I had a role as a digital leader in school, and I would stand up at inset days and go, I want to ban the word technophobe, please, as teachers do not tell kids you’re rubbish with technology, because I just don’t think that’s a very kind thing to do to me, the computing curriculum lead.
Ellie: Yeah, I think there’s that. And I think, yeah, we see that a lot in maths as well. There’s a lot of parents who at parents evening will say, Oh, well, I was rubbish at maths. And again, it comes back to gaps in knowledge and gaps in being able to apply things to problem solving, essentially, doesn’t it?
But I think, like you say, there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of that. I remember this was years ago when the there were the first, the changes in the national curriculum, even from ICT to computing, and it was on Newsnight and it was Paxman. You remember him? And he was interviewing someone about teaching primary children coding and he said, so what is all this gobbledygook?
And I was just up in arms, I was like, it’s not going, who, what are you doing? You know, It was like, and it comes from this kind of, this, almost like we see screenshots from the matrix, don’t we have these lines and lines of code and you go, but what does it mean? It’s so alien. It’s, you know, it’s beyond us.
And so we’re battering against that. in some way. And this is where potentially AI will sort all that because AI will put it all into code for us. But that’s a whole different kind of area of concern. But there’s also, I think, this huge focus on coding.
And I think this is often the bit that teachers are most worried about, so they step away perhaps from computing in a certain way, but it comes back to, I know, some of the conversation that you had with Beverly Clark around the thinking about the ethical side and actually some of these huge fundamental questions that we’ve got in computing and they are accessible to everybody.
And so actually when we’re thinking about. Yeah. How do we code this? One of the questions is why would we code this? What are the worries about it? What are the concerns? What is it? Where might we see this in the real world? And it’s being having the confidence in the classroom to make those connections to that real world learning and not be just driven By as I mentioned before, this assessment driven curriculum that actually you’re going to be assessed on whether you can write a program in this. And actually, there’s a much broader set of learning that needs to go behind it.
Alan: Absolutely. so let’s talk about some specifics now then. So what can we do to help? And I was talking to you earlier about Ben Newmark, and if you haven’t read Ben Newmark’s blog, it’s a good read on Send because he’s a assistant head teacher with a disabled daughter going through school. So he has a really interesting perspective on everything, and he doesn’t like the deficit model describing pupils with SEND as having things missing that we need to assist with. But one thing he does say is there’s a lot in the curriculum and children who find learning more difficult just get left behind.
If you are grateful for my blog, please buy my books here or buy me a coffee at ko-fi.com/mraharrisoncs, thanks!
And I think that’s something to think about if we’re re engineering schools, if we’re thinking about curriculum but also, meet, he says, meet children where they are and take them from there. Um, So what does that look like in computing specifically? Let’s look at some things we can do specifically in computing to help pupils.
Ellie: I think that’s really interesting that statement there, meet children where they are. And I think that comes back to what I was mentioning before about gaps. is that all children will have different levels of gaps and actually thinking about how you check for those, how you check that understanding of what that gap is, is critical and that actually just doing, I shouldn’t say just doing because I know, There’s some value in it, but if you’ve got a retrieval exercise that is, recall of key words or, it, that is not picking up what gaps look like in computing.
Alan: No.
Ellie: Because actually you’ve got children who could, create an if statement quite well using their problem solving abilities, but they might not know it’s called an if statement. So then do you say, Oh, well, you can’t remember what an if statement is. And therefore that is your gap. So you’ve got this kind of mismatch between. How are you checking and then how are you actually addressing it? Because what you’re checking and what you’re expecting of the learning is two different things.
Alan: Yeah, this is like, is this validity of assessment? Is it something like that? And it’s how much you can trust the proxy that you have tested for the actual knowledge that you wanted to know whether they had or not?
And I think that’s really important because particularly if you assess kids by can they finish a program. Can they write a program that does something? Oh, no, they haven’t managed to do it, but they might have got 90 percent of the way there, but you’ve tested them on whether the output is correct.
And this comes back to something that Mark Guzdial in the States spoke about, which is sub goals. So have sub goal labeling, he called it. So if you’re asking pupils to write a program, break it down into sub goals so that they can achieve the first goal, which might be just to get input into the program and then they achieve the second goal, which might be to write an if statement and so on. And then the whole thing is whether it does what you wanted it to do. So, so sub goals, which goes along with chunking, which is. Time for our first mention of cognitive load, I think, isn’t it?
Ellie: Yes. Yeah, we’ve got that far without mentioning. And what I’d say is there’s lots and lots of quite accessible ways of doing that in computing.
And particularly when we’re thinking about programming, but about around all the other things as well, and which I’ll talk about a little bit, but in terms of having half completed things, in terms of having things where they’ve got errors in and you correct it. We do not need to start every activity from a blank screen and
Alan: Yeah
Ellie: I think that is critical and that actually you might have some pupils who do start from a blank screen or they start with something that’s already far further on than other children will ever get to. But actually just thinking about where do they start but it’s really easy to do. If you are making the project yourself, you can save a copy of it at every different stage as you need, even including a finished one with errors in it. And so I think that is the first way of doing it and doing it really effectively is thinking about the starting point.
Alan: Yeah.
Ellie: Also, what I’d say is thinking about “how do I check that bit of learning is there?” So. Yes, we’ve got retrieval practice, but actually we need something different to that in computing. We need that application, that checking that actually: does what they recall link with what they do.
Alan: Yeah.
And so if we want them, for example, to recall variables and understand what a variable is, have we then got something really quickly that they can go on and do something practical where they change a variable and demonstrate the impact of it. That for me would really help in terms of for teachers to say, right, these are the gaps that they’ve got
Yeah.
Ellie: I think that’s where we’re in a danger sometimes where we’ve got this one size fits all in terms of lesson planning across some schools where they’ve got, right, we’ve got to have this very specific structure. And so sometimes there needs to be a conversation with leaders to say, this might look a little bit different in our subject, or it might even look a little bit different just in this topic that we’re working on, and this is how we are going to do this.
Alan: Are you not a fan of powerpoints, broken into sections, connect, activate, demonstrate? Are you not Ellie?
Ellie: I couldn’t possibly comment.
Alan: So we’ll just, we’ll leave that there. And what a fantastic chat this was. I’m enjoying listening to it back as I’m editing, actually. I hope you are. Just some breaking news. I don’t do this for free. Well, I do. No one pays me, but if you’d like to. Then you can go on the website, HTTCS. online, and you can find a donation link. You can gift me a WordPress subscription. That would be handy. Or you can buy me a coffee. Details on the website. I’ve got some feedback here from something else. I can come and talk. at your school, if you wish. And I did do that in back end of November last year. And I’ve got some lovely feedback from the host. So let me just read that to you now. I went to a, collection of schools called the Oaks Collegiate in Southwest Birmingham. Hello, Dave Beard and team. Thank you very much for your feedback, which I shall read out now from Dave. He says,
“Alan made it very easy for us to arrange a training event at short notice with his efficient and professional manner. His extensive knowledge of computing science, teaching strategies, and assessment fitted perfectly for our training day. He listened carefully to our requirements and produced an innovative training program that met all of our expectations. I wouldn’t have any hesitation in recommending Alan to lead training on computing or computer science.”
Well, thank you, Dave. That was brilliant. You were so kind to me on the day. I had a lovely day. And I will happily do that again. And podcast listeners, if you want me to come and talk at your school, I am available for reasonable rates, HTTCS. online. But now let’s get back to that fantastic chat with Ellie.
Advertisements
Are you not a fan of powerpoints, broken into sections, connect, activate, demonstrate? Are you not Ellie?
Ellie: I couldn’t possibly comment. I don’t And I think, I’ve seen lots and lots of different ways. of things being done well. And so I often get asked, what works, what doesn’t work? What’s the great, what’s, what does an outstanding curriculum look like? And actually between one school and another school, even between one class and another class, they look like totally different things.
So It’s thinking about your learners and what works for them. If they are used to certain routines and that does work for them and they understand the structure of that lesson, then actually you’ve got to think how do I bring my subject within that lesson structure, not the other way around. But, If you have got a bit more of a flex and you need to do a bit more of a flex, then how do you navigate that as well?
Alan: And we mentioned, reducing cognitive load there. And that brings us on to perhaps PRIMM and pair programming. So predict, run, investigate, modify, make is now pretty popular.
And that’s. someone called it gradual release of responsibility, isn’t it? It’s a bit like, I do, we do, you do, or use, modify, create. They’re all sort of start slow and easy, if you like, and then get harder and harder. And is that going to work for learners?
Ellie: I think, yeah, I think Where it doesn’t work is where teachers feel like they’ve got to follow the whole PRIMM model in every lesson for every activity. And actually, you might just do part of it. So, a really quick and easy thing in terms of prediction, most classrooms now have got small whiteboards, just predict this really quickly, right? We’re going to make and we’re going to, and we’re going to check at that point. And actually you can do a really small quick activity that follows the same principles
Alan: Yeah.
Ellie: It’s not got to be this start to finish big massive project.
Alan: Yeah
Ellie: I think that is, that’s one thing. And then I know you mentioned pair programming I’m in two minds about it, about how well it’s executed and how well those pairings work and it comes back to some of this sort of inclusion, but also some of the gaps. If you’ve got somebody who is less confident and they’re working with somebody who’s more confident, which is quite often a pairing intentionally, is that person who is less confident benefiting? Are they actually being stretched and asked to do something or are they relying on the other learner? And I’ve seen it work well, but I’ve also seen it not work at all, where it’s basically creating passivity in the classroom, which you don’t want, because then you’re exacerbating the gaps.
Alan: Yeah,
Ellie: because then when that learner then does need to do something independently, they’ve actually got more gaps than they had before because the other child who was confident to start with has, flown.
Alan: Yeah. If you can mix it up perhaps with the students working on their own and then at least you will see where the gaps are and I would always walk around and spot who was having trouble. You can have a means of them asking for help and then like putting a red cup on top of the monitor or whatever, and probably can’t fit them on monitors anymore. Um, so that’s programming and stuff. And I’m conscious. We talk quite a lot.
Ellie: Sorry, I did want to mention attendance as well, because attendance is a massive challenge at the moment in schools. And, we do see people from disadvantaged backgrounds, pupils with additional needs, where their attendance is lower than a lot, than some of their peers.
Yeah. And, so that also is going to create differences within the classroom. And what I do see a lot in computing is projects that go from one lesson . to the next lesson, to the next lesson. So if you’ve missed a lesson, you’re already behind. So it comes back to some of those strategies that we mentioned before about actually having some kind of project that you’ve saved yourself as a teacher at various different stages of being created that you can then that learner can pick that up.
At the point where they land back in the classroom and then you can support them to pick up where they’ve missed out. But if they, I can’t imagine anything more disheartening than if you’ve been off if you’re somebody with additional needs, you’ve been off for a medical reason for a couple of weeks, you land in a classroom and everybody is two weeks into a project and you are just starting. You’re going to feel disheartened from the start.
Alan: No, good point. And you talk about attendance. We’ve also got the digital divide at home where pupils may or may not have technology at home to do the homework that you set. So, you can run lunchtime clubs so they can catch up. That’s really not fair because they missed their lunch because they haven’t got a computer at home. So I don’t know what the answer is, but just think about these things.
If you are grateful for my blog, please buy my books here or buy me a coffee at ko-fi.com/mraharrisoncs, thanks!
Ellie: There’s also the question around interventions as well. So you often have children who might need additional support and English and maths is prioritised. So you hear sometimes that those interventions are taking place during other subject time. And so then, Does that also have an impact? And I think, a lot of schools now try to make that a movable feast so that it’s not hitting the same subjects and the same lessons all of the time. But if it is, I think that’s certainly a conversation to have with leaders because you just. Yeah, particularly where we said there are some children who have got additional needs who fly with different subjects. But actually if they’re missing those different subjects and having to stick with the core subjects and those interventions, are they then missing out? So that again is a conversation with leaders around that access to the curriculum
Alan: Yeah You mentioned curriculum then so, let’s go back to if we assume the listeners have some input into the key stage three and four curriculums, how can we make them more inclusive and we haven’t talked a lot about inclusion of ethnicities, cultures and religions in the curriculum. What do you think we can do to make people of different backgrounds feel they can be computer scientists.
Ellie: So I think there’s things that, I know lots of others have talked about in terms of, being able to see it to be it. So thinking about what names you’re using in your projects, what, you know, what.
Alan: I’m laughing there because, I’m laughing there because I think I’ve mentioned this one before, but there was a, I think it was an Edexcel paper in about 2016 that went I blogged about this, that went Heath is playing computer games and wants to know how many minutes he’s spending each day on computer games.
And my class, almost to a pupil all said, what is a Heath? Yeah. And yeah, because Heath was the name of the boy playing computer games, but it’s a name they’d never encountered. And so I blogged about it. “What is a heath?” was the name of the blog. Sorry I interrupted you.
Ellie: No, I think that’s an exact, example and point but, and if it sounds like a basic, I can’t believe that we’re in 2025 and still. talking about that sort of stuff, but there’s those sort of things you display thinking about the context of your projects as well. And, ask the children as well as talk to the pupils about context for projects and things like that. But also I think it’s being able to make those connections to everyday life, but also to children’s futures to people’s futures. And we’ve got to remember that all young people are influenced by home and by what is going on at home. And in the book there is a chapter that myself and Professor Kathy Lewin wrote, which was based on some research we did around children choosing computing at GCSE. And, we talked to children that had chosen it and children that hadn’t. And it was really interesting around, there was this I didn’t see that it fitted and, or I thought it was really difficult and you have to be really good at maths and they were really quite different schools, but both of the schools did not have equality in terms of the types of children that were selected at GCSE. But one of the things that came out really prominently was around the jobs that they were seeing themselves as going into. So if they were going into very traditional jobs like lawyer, doctor, teacher, they didn’t see any relevance of computing to those very traditional jobs and I think that’s something that we can change quite quickly, and there are, cultural differences in terms of thinking about careers and what is a valid career and I think, that is something that really, it’s work to do with the parents as well, it’s work to do with your career service within school in terms of thinking how do we expand and broaden this range. So there’s that side of it. And then there was also the side around young people thinking that it wasn’t creative. So often they would talk about these option blocks and they said, well, I had computer science as an option, but I also had art and I’m really creative and I just wanted to do the creative side.
And I think that comes back to some of this prescriptive nature that we’ve got of some of our. activity designs that we’ve got in classrooms that we, we’re very focused on building that knowledge and building that understanding. But then do we give the children the freedom to play and explore and think, how do I take this into a different direction? Um, Yeah what, what can I, what can I do with this? And our curriculum time is so tight. Yeah, often have time to do that.
Alan: Well, it’s the irony of having tinkering listed as one of the approaches to computational thinking and then having no time for tinkering in the classroom.
Ellie: Yeah. And then it comes back to the digital divide. If you’ve got access at home or the support at home, then yeah. You can tinker.
Alan: Yeah. And coming back to, pupils marked on the register as SEND being surprisingly good at computing. Well, not surprising to me, but to some, one of my pupils let’s call him James and he wrote, we did app lab, apps for good using app lab and he created this thing saying, Oh, it’s a, it’s an app that tells me what music to listen to, depending on what subject I’m revising. And it was brilliant. And it was a web app with like three or four pages and loads of graphics and stuff. And he’d tinkered on it at home and tinkered on it at school and was very proud of this thing.
And. this was someone who was probably predicted a four in maths. And so if you’re gatekeeping computer science, he wouldn’t have been able to do it. But of course he did in my classroom and thrived. So, but it was that he was disadvantaged if you like, in one way, because schools aren’t set up brilliantly for neurodivergent children.
But he did have the advantages of computers at home and a supportive family. And this is almost touching on intersectionality, isn’t it? If pupils are disadvantaged in multiple ways, it can really threaten their life chances, and their ability to thrive in the world after school.
Advertisements
Ellie: Yes, and I think, we talk about the digital divide in terms of access, but actually there’s also a huge amount around support and knowledge at home, and that is in some ways a bigger divide than actual access to devices. And again, coming back to the work that myself and Cathy did, there were there were pupils who were really influenced by family members and lots of them by older siblings actually.
Yeah. “I’ve got an older sibling who studied computing and they’ve done really well at it at college and they said I should do it” and so they were really influenced by that sort of family sphere in terms of where that knowledge and understanding was coming from. And then you’ve also got vertical and horizontal knowledge as Bernstein talked about it in terms of what you learn vertically in a formal way through school, but also what you learn from your community and by your community that includes your home essentially, it’s mainly your home, but actually, there’s a really interesting kind of development in computing in terms of, does that community extend to an online community? So can you actually learn from others it’s potentially something that’s untapped, I think, learning communities where learners support each other and I think, Scratch is quite an interesting example of that, where you’ve got these galleries and you can see each other’s code and you can remix it and you can take that and you can learn from each other and that’s happening on a global scale through Scratch.
Alan: Yeah.
Ellie: But actually, can that be used small scale within schools. Where have we got these young people who perhaps would benefit from peer learning in a community that we don’t necessarily use as a resource.
Alan: So we could we could set up. clubs, lunchtime and afterschool clubs and get pupils to work together. That’s something we can do, I think, and I know that some schools do girls only clubs to improve gender balance. Does that work, do you think?
Ellie: So, years ago I used to run a CC4G, computer club for girls and it, it certainly generated interest. But when you look at the numbers and the impact, these things have been going on for years, when you look at the impact of those, it’s minimal. And actually, I think we’re far better addressing the curriculum and thinking, where are the gaps in the curriculum? Where’s the lack of confidence that young people, including girls, but especially girls, have got in their, access to computing and their self belief. So, one of the young people in the research said to us, well, the boys are doing gaming, they’re on computers all the time, so they’re better at it. And they, they got, they haven’t ever been told that was just their interpretation of what was going on in the world. So, Actually, how do we find what their perceptions are and how do we address those through the curriculum? Because actually, what those boys are doing on their Xbox is not actually improving their computing.
Alan: I’m not sure playing Call of Duty Black Ops improves your Python skills, to be honest. It says naming a, an Xbox game that I’ve heard of once, everyone listening on the podcast who plays games going, he’s named a game from 2017. Yeah, there have been games since then. Yeah, no.
So it’s this digital native thing where, you know, because kids have grown up with iPads, they can do stuff, but it’s not, it wasn’t true about digital natives. It’s not true about boys on Xbox being better programmers, but but you’re absolutely right. And girls just. generally speaking, don’t see themselves as computer geeks.
If that’s a, if I can use that positively. So the curriculum you said, and I think this is a big one. I think we do need curriculum reform. We obviously need more AI in it somewhere. But I think we need more, like you said earlier, the impacts and issues, and digital literacy, and I think those are topics within our curriculum that girls can get on board with. more .
Ellie: Definitely, and would be very passionate about, and in a way, looking towards the future and the world that our current learners are going to be living in, that actually it’s more of a critical part of the curriculum, just because we could, doesn’t mean we should. And actually that’s a crucial question around a lot of developments, isn’t it? Yeah. In computing. And I think we have actually got a broad national curriculum at Key Stage 3 across those three strands. But because we’ve got this assessment driven curriculum, we tend to focus on what is going to make sure that the learners are ready for the next steps at key stage four and particularly around that GCSE which is in computer science and I think we’ve got this mismatch at the minute with qualifications and with the national curriculum and that also needs fixing alongside the curriculum reform actually. I can’t imagine in maths you would have a GCSE where you say actually two thirds of the national curriculum is not going to be tested in the GCSE. That, yeah that makes no sense to me. And so it makes it really difficult for teachers and leaders to design a curriculum that is broad and engaging, but also has this readiness for next steps, which is a critical, aim, isn’t it? Of you curriculum design.
Advertisements
Alan: Yeah. So we redesign the curriculum. We have lots of different opportunities to demonstrate skills in the classroom, I said about sub goals and so on and what else can we do to make the computing classroom more inclusive. Have we missed anything? -I think- in our long conversation at this point, have we…
Ellie: For me, it’s the criticality of connections between subjects and the real world that computing is not seen as a silo subject that you either can do it or you can’t and it’s either relevant to you or it’s not because actually we need the young people to have those connections and say, right, okay, this is how this will impact me. This is how it’s relevant to me.
Alan: Absolutely. Right, well, I think we should go and get on with all of that now.
Ellie: Yes, quite a bit to do.
Alan: Yeah, I think I’m going to be busy all weekend now. I’ve got, that’s a lot, that’s a lot to take on. Um, that was brilliant. I’m going to have that problem of “can I fit all of this into a reasonable sized podcast?” now, because we’ve been talking for ages, Ellie, as we always do.
Ellie: I know, and I could have talked all day as well.
Alan: Yeah. Well, well, Undoubtedly, if I’m still doing this podcast in a few months time, I’ll ask you back. But lovely to talk to you. And thanks very much for coming on the podcast.
Ellie: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.
Alan: Thank you, Ellie.
Well, that’s a wrap for another episode. Don’t forget, podcast listeners can get a 20 percent discount off all books at johncattbookshop. com with the code HTTCSPOD. If you already have the books, buy me a coffee please at ko-fi.com/MrAHarrisonCS. All links are on my blog at httcs.online/blog and subscribe now so you don’t miss a thing.
Have a great weekend and I’ll catch you next time
If you are grateful for my blog, please buy my books here or buy me a coffee at ko-fi.com/mraharrisoncs, thanks!
My discussion with Miles Berry and Becci Peters is live on all good podcast platforms and here: pod.httcs.online/e/s2e05
The transcript follows below.
Alan: Hello, and welcome to How To Teach Computer Science the podcast. My name’s Alan Harrison, and I wrote the books how to teach computer science and how to learn computer science available in online bookstores. And if you like the podcast, you’ll love hearing me in-person. Visit. httcs.Online to find out more about my training and consultancy, and I could be speaking soon, live at your school on inset day, jokes optional. More details about this and book purchase links at httcs.online, that’s the initials of how to teach computer science dot online. Listeners to the pod get a special discount code too, just type HTTCSPOD in the checkout page at johncattbookshop.com to get 20% off everything. That’s everything including classics, such as teaching walkthroughs by Tom Sherrington, the Huh series by Mary Myatt. And of course my two little books.
I’ve got no time for shenanigans today because I’ve got a 45 minute chat with two of the best people in computing education in the UK coming right up.
If you are grateful for my blog, please buy my books here or buy me a coffee at ko-fi.com/mraharrisoncs, thanks!
Welcome to the podcast. And today I’ve got two brilliant guests. We’re going to talk about AI again, but it seems like it’s changing every day, so that’s good.
First of all, I’ve got Becci Peters from BCS. Morning, Becci. How are you?
Becci: Good. Thanks.
Alan: Great, thanks. Yeah. And also on the podcast today, we have Professor Miles Berry. How are you, Miles?
Miles: I’m well, thank you, Alan. It’s lovely to be here and to see you too, Becci.
Becci: You too, Miles.
Alan: Good. Yeah great to have you both on to talk about, well, AI.
You might have heard about it. It’s in the news a lot at the moment. So what I wanted to do today is I’m trying to make this podcast something that teachers can listen to. On the way to work and get something useful out of it each day. And I just thought, can we cut through the noise today? And can we tell teachers listening to this what do they need to know about AI? Miles where should we start?
Miles: How long have you got there, Alan? Yeah. This is an impossible question to answer, but let’s at least make an attempt on this.
I think there are three aspects of this, just as we’ve got those three aspects, dimensions, whatever you call them, to our computing curriculum. So I would see those very much along the same lines of the foundations of AI, the applications of AI, and then the implications of AI. Yes, for us as individuals.
but also for our pupils and indeed for our society. And it might sound arrogant to suggest civilization, but who knows where we can go with this. So I think it’s worth teachers and indeed their pupils, their students having knowledge and skills around all three of those layers. At the moment, whenever we’re talking about AI, we seem to find ourselves talking about generative AI, but it is worth broadening the scope here and considering other aspects of machine learning, other aspects of artificial intelligence.
But the really cool stuff is all happening around generative AI in one form or another. So I think there is something there about. Teachers ought to know a little bit about what’s happening behind the screen, how these amazing machines do this amazing work, what it is that this is based on, a hand waving notion of how the algorithms work, and that sort of unplugged understanding of what actually is going on here.
And then a whole load of stuff around the applications of this. And very often this is what one sees on training courses and conferences and so on. Look at all of these cool things that we can do with this. And this is very cool. And just having your eyes open to the different things that we can now use these tools to do is part and parcel of any sort of stuff.
Professional development or indeed what we might want to do with our pupils and then there ought to be also a stepping back and thinking about the implications of this and yeah, saving a little bit of teacher time a little bit on that sort of workload reduction is no bad thing, but at what costs, what are the, where do we spend it?
Teachers still have to play a pivotal, vital role in the education of young people. What is the world that we are preparing them for going to be like? And of course, all of the sort of due diligence things around intellectual property and data protection and stuff around sustainability and stuff around bias.
I could go on, but I should stop. You might want to ask Becci the same question, or do I just pass on to Becci now? What do you think, Becci? What should they know about all of this? Please do.
Becci: I think you’re right. It is important to know about all the different aspects. I think, as you say, there’s all sorts of wonderful things that you can do with it.
So one of the things that I’ve been doing is I’ve been like making little short videos with showing some of the free tools because not every school’s got the budget to be able to buy into some of this stuff. So showcasing some of the little things that you can do that will save a bit of time.
But, it is worth noting that, it’s not 100 percent accurate. Everything that you see that is generated by generative AI, taking it with a pinch of salt, giving it a once over, and double checking whether One, do you want to use it in the first place? And two, does it need any kind of edits or anything?
And then I think from the student point of view, they generally know more than we do generally about AI. TikTok is full of videos of different things that they can do. And That’s where they’re getting most of their knowledge, and that’s not how it should be. So think about teaching your students what it is, what are the benefits of it, but also what are the risks of it?
When should they and shouldn’t they use it? And if you need some free resources, CAS has some, so go check out the CAS AI website.
Alan: Brilliant I will do. one of the problems you mentioned there is, the inaccuracy, the hallucinations and so on. So how can we ensure that teachers and students are being prudent with the tool and they’re not getting misconceptions, which we then have to iron out.
Becci: I think part of it is that, having that discussion with the students about, so obviously depending on the age of your students depends on what kind of AI they’re going to be allowed to use that doesn’t necessarily depend on whether they’re using it.
We know that PRIMMary school kids are using it, but they’re not technically allowed to. If you, the safe bet is you as the teacher display something on the board where you’re all having a discussion, but you’re the one using it so that you’re not getting around any age issues because most of them are 13 plus some of them are 18 plus. So to be able to have that discussion with the students and say, right, well, if I type in this prompt, this is what it gives me.
Now let’s discuss what it’s given back and whether that’s good, bad and have a discussion about why and really help them to understand what the dangers are of using it and then having that conversation about when it’s appropriate. So if they’ve got some form of NEA, then they obviously cannot use AI.
And if they do, they need to be explicitly referencing that and the safest way to do that is to just not use it at all. The JCQ guidelines are so strict on that. Obviously they’re not going to have it in their exam, but if you’re setting some kind of homework task, which is not NEA, there are no guidelines about whether or not it can or cannot be used.
Guaranteed, they will be trying to use it. So thinking carefully about the tasks that you’re setting and not just setting, write this, answer these questions, because they’ll just use AI to do it and they won’t think about it themselves.
Alan: Yeah, I think I think that’s important. Setting an essay homework, for instance, is probably dead as a as a means of getting them to think and explore or as a means of assessment because they are, yeah, then
Miles: I’m going to get back to your question about. How should we teach them to be able to tell? So the point of the essay is not the essay. It’s the process and not the product here. Assignments are not merely about assessment. This, we talk about summative and formative. I’d like to add in another adjective into the mix there of constructive assessment, where we acknowledge really clearly. That the point of the assessment is to provide an opportunity for learning to take place.
That if you are going to set one of those eight plus mark questions as a homework, the point of this is not so you get an answer to the question. You can use the generative AI to get that answer. The point is for them to walk through the process reading about this, bringing to mind all of their prior learning, marshalling their own argument.
We spoke before the call started about, early morning activities. Respect to Alan who ran to the gym before the call started. He could so easily have got in his car. Running there. has so many advantages for him as a person, for the environment, and yeah, I suspect he’s a very safe driver, but there is far less danger of him, killing somebody on his run than if he were driving.
Alan: No, just much more danger of me, much more danger of me slipping on the ice and breaking something personally, but there you go.
Miles: Oh, that’s another weird thing. I’m not sure I think we’re torturing the metaphor if I take this too far. So, you know, There are occasions. When the tools that we have, the technologies we as a society have built, make life easier for us. That doesn’t necessarily mean they make life better. And so there are occasions when, like running, like you’re going to the gym, it is worth doing the hard work, rather than taking the easy way out. We’ve got that message when it comes to personal fitness, present company accepted. But Not necessarily yet because of these cool shiny things around getting the we become lazy We take our eyes off the road and our hands off the wheel because the machine is very good Doing much of this so your question was around How can we teach them to tell, and, this danger of hallucination?
And I think I come back to this notion of a knowledge rich curriculum. That knowledge really does matter for this. Your ability to make sense of the response you get from the machine, to be able to tell whether that’s plausible or likely to be correct, and indeed your ability to even prompt well. is down to the knowledge you have of that particular domain.
So yes, it has read loads more books than any of us have, but we can only really make good use of these tools if we have the knowledge ourselves. And that includes the domain specific knowledge, which really does matter. But I think it also includes something around the knowledge of how the generative responses are, forgive me, generated.
And, this sense of what is the algorithm here, I think, matters, and that hallucination is built into the process because of the stochastic parrot, stochastic pirate nature of the way it is producing text. And that actually there are better ways of prompting this retrieval augmented generation, give it the document to start with, and it’s way less likely to hallucinate as a result of that.
Ask it to demonstrate its chain of thought. And again, you’re likely to get to develop your own trust in this. Forgive me for a moment longer. I remember the days when Wikipedia came out. We started using this in schools and we had, teachers were telling their pupils back then, you cannot trust Wikipedia.
It is made up by people. Now, here we are in 2025, made up by people sounds like a really strong selling point for Wikipedia. But it developed a critical literacy. of the content there, because you encourage pupils to think, is this right? Is this just the result of some random person coming in and graffitiing a Wikipedia page?
This time it may be the machine that’s making stuff up, but again, returning to that sort of critical digital literacy about, okay, I can read this, but should I trust this? Will matter
Advertisements
Alan: it’s interesting you bring up the example of wikipedia there Miles and i remember having this conversation with students who threw at me the “you can’t trust wikipedia because anyone can edit it” and and there was a study done years ago where wikipedia was pretty much on a par with encyclopedia britannica for accuracy in most areas the only pages you can’t trust really on Wikipedia are pop culture pages, which get updated by young people all of the time, K pop bands that they love or hate and so on. And most of it is…
Miles: I know very little of this, Alan. Yeah. I remember the study and the interesting thing was that the errors that they had found on the Wikipedia pages were all I think almost all corrected before publication. The errors they had found on the dead tree printed encyclopedia were waiting for the next edition.
Alan: Yeah, exactly. you made the point there that perhaps something human edited is now seen as of greater value than something AI generated. Is that is that going to persist? Do you think, do you, or will the AIs just get better?
Becci: Well, they’ve already gotten a lot better, let’s face it.
Alan: Yeah, that’s true.
Becci: We’re two and a half years in now, just, well, not quite, nearly, just over two years, they’ve already got significantly better than they were when they were first released to the world.
Alan: Yes. You can’t do I think there are I tried the one, can an anaconda fit in a shopping mall? And it said no, of course, anacondas are far too big to fit in a shopping mall. Stuff like that doesn’t happen anymore.
Miles: Stop putting your anacondas in shopping malls. It’s not a good idea.
Alan: No, it genuinely did.
Miles: I think there are things where we humans will continue to appreciate human added value to this. So I love the Suno thing, this create me a song in the style of. I still enjoy listening to something which I have verifiable trust was the product of a human singer, of human artists.
If you are grateful for my blog, please buy my books here or buy me a coffee at ko-fi.com/mraharrisoncs, thanks!
And there are going to be a large number of areas where, yes, the machine may be better at this in some sort of measurable, qualitative, quantitative way. That doesn’t mean to say it’s something which we should just leave to the machines. I think teaching is going to be one of those things where Yes, the machine may be very good at setting tasks and marking work and so on, but it’s, there is a personal aspect to this.
And it is worth doing the thought experiment about what it is that makes us human beings. I want to say unique, but different from the AIs. It’s very good at faking loads of things. But there are, I’m sure, still things which for a little while longer yet are part of, a Almost uniquely human preserve and some of that is around curiosity.
Some of that is, I think, around character. It’s, it has no set of moral values baked into the language model. Yes, guardrails are typically put in place and I’m grateful for that. But that sense of, I’m doing this because this is the right thing to do. And there’s stuff around there around creativity.
And creativity is not just making something new, but it’s also about participation in a creative community. Yes, I am, of course, an enthusiast for these technologies, but I think it would be a shame if we lost sight of uniquely human value.
Yeah I’m thinking, when we talk about generative AI creating stuff, like, like you say, songs in the style of, and so on makes me wonder, If we will ever get those step changes in artistic style or paradigm changes that let’s say in music, rock and roll when people first heard Elvis, there was.
Absolute gnashing of teeth among the old people and the young were, yeah, this is for me, so that was a step change in musical taste. How is AI going to do that? It’s not, is it? We need the human input. And if you think about art, you think about the impressionist movement was absolutely rejected.
When money first exhibited at the salon, it was like, what on earth is this? And then, we all look at money, and all of that now with great affection. And that’s my favorite part of the national gallery. When I wonder in. I get a few minutes in London. But that, I can’t imagine that step change in some kind of art and a new paradigm emerging if we’re leaving it all to AI, which which is derivative, isn’t it?
I think you may be onto something. It’s worth bringing this home into the classroom, into schools and thinking, okay, if we still value that sort of, amazing human creativity of thinking in a way that has never been thought before, what should, what we do in the classroom, what should the education system do to nurture that sort of combination of creativity and curiosity and intention and determination?
These things, I’m sure, matter as we go forward. I don’t want to say never for the AIs, but I think you may be onto something. It’s worth looking at what’s going on in science. Sciences, these technologies, AI, rather than just merely generative AI, has transformed so much of science. Have a look at what our friends at DeepMind Google.
are doing with AlphaFold of identifying the structure of proteins, given the amino acids, just by trying out the combina sorry, there’s more to it than that, by trying out the combinations. Look at what they’re doing with their weather forecasting, where it’s better than our current atmospheric model based approaches to weather forecasting.
Science is changing because of this, but at the moment, as far as I can tell, It isn’t like commissioning original experimental research. It’s because it’s, it doesn’t have that sense of moving forward beyond the bounds of current knowledge, current understanding to coming up with new theory and new areas for exploration.
Maybe ChatGPT six will be there, but I suspect that might be for a bit longer yet.
Alan: Coming back to, I started this conversation saying, let’s talk about the practical aspects of AI and what teachers can do. So I’ll come back to Becci and and say, right, what can we do in the classroom that’s really valuable with the AI tools that we’ve got.
Advertisements
Becci: Obviously, you can use it with different aspects of lesson planning. If it’s a particularly stale topic, you might want to get some ideas about how you can make it a bit more engaging. It’s great coming up with ideas, especially when you’re a really tired teacher and it’s that time of the day or the week or the year or whatever it might be.
And you’re just like, I can’t think of any ideas. I’ve run out of creativity. And you just need You know, just, ask GPT or whatever to come up with 10 ideas for teaching. Whatever topic it is you want to teach see what it comes up with. You can ask for more details on the other. It can then plan the entire task for you. It’s quite good.
Marking and things. I don’t think it’s quite there yet. I think we’ll get there, but I don’t know when there’s people experimenting with it, but I don’t think it’s quite there yet. One of the things that I was playing with this week that I really like, so Brisk Teaching is a Google Chrome extension, which is free and it can do all sorts of wonderful things and it’s specifically made for teachers. But one of the things that I mean I learned about this at BETT actually that it can do is: So you can, if you’ve got your lesson materials on whatever topic it might be, you can then create a “boost engagement” activity that Brisk just takes over for you.
And basically it takes your lesson materials, so maybe it’s your slides or your worksheet, whatever it might be it will then give each student their own individual chat bot about that topic, and it will talk to them and make sure it understands what, the content and whatever. But you as the teacher then get a breakdown of all the students who are doing this, how, which percent of them are engaged in it.
And it will then give you, for each of the learning objectives in the lesson, it will then give you a breakdown as to whether they’ve not done that bit at all, whether they partially understand it or whether they’ve completely nailed it. And it’s, I think it’s a really nice thing that you can do as homework where.
You know exactly what the students are doing. And you can see all of their conversations that they’ve had with the chatbot as well. So in that sense, it’s pretty safe in that sense. They can’t, they’re going to use AI for their homework. So they can’t like cheat and use AI for their homework because they’re going to have to, but they can’t get it to do it for them.
They’re just going to have the conversation. You don’t have to mark it because it’s going to do all that, but you can go in and have a look at the conversations and, double check, if a student, if it’s showing that all reds for all the learning objectives and you’re thinking why is this student not getting it?
You can go in and have a look at that student’s conversation, see what the misconceptions are, and then obviously address it. So there’s all sorts of cool things that you can do. Um, There’s a lot of these kind of rapper apps that exist. I’m not going to name them, but there’s a few of them about, and you can get free versions.
You can get. That the paid versions and brisk is one of them and they are quite useful, but I do find that the generic generative AI is better, partly because as a teacher, you’re having to learn how to prompt it effectively and partly because you’re not restricted with what you can get it to do. Some of the rapper apps, I don’t know of anything that has that feature like brisk doors where the students can have the conversation and you can track all the kids progress.
But all the generic things like make me a lesson plan, make me a worksheet, whatever, you can do all that with the generic stuff anyway, but you’re going to learn how to prompt it. So I feel like the generic way forward is definitely better.
Miles: If your school is willing to fund the premium subscriptions to ChatGPT or the equivalent other language models.
It’s worth playing with creating your own custom GPT or custom chat bot there. So you can give it very specific system messages and knowledge based stuff and then create a bot which your pupils over the age of 13, of course, because terms and conditions still apply, can interact with. Again, checking the intellectual property rules there.
If you are grateful for my blog, please buy my books here or buy me a coffee at ko-fi.com/mraharrisoncs, thanks!
Provide it with a version of an exam specification. Provide it with example exam questions and the mark schema and all of that sort of things. Check the terms and conditions. And allow it to enter into a conversation to support your pupils or to challenge your pupils. I love that idea of the customized one to one chat bot and being able to I’m going to try and suck out from that.
The assessment data is really powerful, but this is, again, a thing which teachers could do for themselves in a way which is very specific to their particular context. But in terms of a teacher’s own generative AI skills moving beyond the sort of basic prompt response window to fine tuning it, creating an language model based application is well worth experimenting with. I think some of the most exciting stuff happens when our pupils start interfacing with this. So whilst I have issues with getting ChatGPT or its equivalent to mark a pupil’s work, it’s a whole other matter if they ask for feedback on their work, because it’s their work.
They own the intellectual property in it, assuming they didn’t make it. chat, dbt equivalent, do the work in the first place, and empowering them to take more charge of that educational process. And, lovely examples of read through my notes here, tell me if I’ve still got any misconceptions or identify my knowledge gaps.
That sort of personal tutoring thing that come back to, what are our human values about nurturing pupils own curiosity and trying to rekindle that. Joy in learning. So lots and lots of things which are actually entirely achievable now because of this amazing technology.
Alan: Yeah, I think that the personalization is probably the most exciting feature of it. If we can capture that, because of course, what do we want to achieve in the classroom? We want to make the learning relevant and accessible. And yet we have a classroom of 30 pupils, all very different backgrounds and interests. So we do our best and we wander the classroom and we try to know our children.
And of course, there’s that pressure to, oh, you’ve got to make a, have a relationship with all your children and know what they do. And I remember reading something a few years ago was an American teacher and he said, Oh, well, I have an index card on every student and I write down their favorite sports team and their favorite… and I’m thinking an index card on every student. Yeah. So when I, when, so he said, when I have a a meeting with that student coming up, I’ll get the index card out. And then, so I’ll say to the student, Hey, great bears game or whatever it was, and I’ll relate to that student and, um. I was just, that’s just not possible in any meaningful sense for a human to do that. And I remember teaching, I think 300 pupils in one year was the most that I saw. So we can’t do that, But AI can, of course.
Miles: It’s really good at summarizing data. You of course need to play by the rules of the Data Protection Act GDPR and anonymize this data unless you’re working in a very secure environment. But if you give it a spreadsheet full of how well kids have done on all of the end of lesson, end of topic tests that they’ve done, it will analyze that.
Well, produce all of your lovely visualizations, but also look for the interesting patterns there as to several of these peoples have still not got this particular idea. It would be worth revisiting this. Good teachers can do this for themselves, but it’s really hard to do this. What you’re saying 300 kids in a week and the AI is very good at that sort of working with large amounts of data and coming up with the patterns and the exceptions.
Alan: We briefly skimmed over marking just now, and I had this conversation on LinkedIn last week where someone was advocating AI marking and I said, well, look, if you’ve already done, if you’ve took the grunt work out of marking, if you’re not taking the pile of books home and ticking everything and then writing what went well and even better if on every book if you’ve replaced that with whole class feedback where you maybe skim the work and you create a slide of misconceptions that you spotted and things that the class could improve. And then you give them the work back and you say, right, these are all the things I’ve seen. Go and improve your work. That’s what I ended up doing. And so 90 percent of the work was gone. So if you’ve already moved away from traditional marking to something like the valuable tasks that I’ve just explained, whole class feedback, there’s very little left to automate.
And what’s left is the human bit that we don’t want to automate. And I’m frightened that we’re doing that thing. There’s a meme that went round, I seem to be doing the laundry and the cleaning while AI writes the music and the artwork and, we’re in danger of going down that road where AI is doing all the fun stuff and we’re doing the grunt work instead of the other way around. We’re taking the human out of the wrong bit of the process.
Miles: I am becoming more confident in its ability to award grades correctly. It does seem to be down to exactly how much detail you give it in the prompt. And that it’s, I have no hard data to go by here, but my feeling is that it’s pretty good at that.
It’s really good at giving detail. personalized feedback to students. So at Roehampton, we’ve spun up a thing which will allow a student to upload a draft of their academic assignments and alongside the assignment brief and get really detailed feedback on how they’ve addressed the brief and the quality of their writing and so on.
Advertisements
Way more so than me or any, I think almost any of my colleagues would do. In advance of the assessment deadline, this seems like a really good use of the technology, saving some of our workload, but much more improving the quality of our students writing. My colleague has put very good guardrails in place that it won’t rewrite sections, it won’t suggest a grade for the work, it will apparently give a recipe for chocolate cake if you want it to, but it’s, broadly speaking, It’s staying within the bounds that it’s been given.
The whole marking their essays and giving them feedback on their essays, we’re saying we still have to do that work because these are decisions of significant effect, and a human has to be kept in the loop at that point. And the same applies with for the awarding organizations for the exam boards at the moment, other than like multiple choice items, Ofqual’s rules are you have to have human oversight of the marking process for GCSE and A level.
I think rightly the other point I would make is about motivation. How many PRIMMary school kids, teenagers are going to want to write An essay, do a homework, fill in an exam paper to get feedback from the robot at the end of the day. The motivation is because I want my teacher to see what I have learnt, what I can do.
The human aspect of my teacher has read my work and thinks this about it and suggests this as where I go next. I think is still our preserve. I did ask this question to a year group of 11 year olds that I was working with at the start of a lovely term long cross curricular policy around you need to work around artificial intelligence.
That’s for another time. And their response was, it depends on the feedback. But if the AI gives us very warm and constructive feedback, we’d quite like to have that, please. A teacher just crossing out everything that we have spelt wrong, not so much. So their view may be rather different from my own view.
What do you reckon, Becci?
Becci: I think it does depend on, like, As you say what is it that’s being assessed and how that relates to the teacher. If it’s multiple choice questions we don’t need AI for that anyway, but you do need tech. For students to be able to get immediate feedback. That’s great. Doesn’t necessarily need AI to be able to do that. It depends on the questions, but if it’s something that the students can write, an open ended answer, then yeah, you could use AI. But as you say, it’s, it depends at what stage. So if it’s just a simple in class, just need to do it and then we’ll get the whole class feedback generated and, the teacher can view it, then, I can see the benefit in that, especially if as Alan said earlier, you’re teaching 300 kids in a week sort of thing.
I think where you’ve got the danger when it comes to things like GCSEs is the fact that, that makes a major impact. In one sense, it would be great because. You would have so much data to be able to train it on that maybe it would be fairly accurate, but I don’t think anybody would consent to it only being AI.
You still need that human oversight as well.
Alan: Yeah, I totally agree. Yeah, I’m just really frightened of taking the human out completely.
Just coming back to a practical use of AI again where it can add value. I was coding last week and I thought, oh, I wonder if I can code something in flask which is a a Python web stack and I thought, oh, well, I’ll just ask copilot. And within the hour I had an app running which had a built in Python IDE and did some stuff like checking it for code readability. And I thought, wow, and I did that in a couple of hours. This wouldn’t have been possible if I just sat reading books about it for the, it would have took me about a year to get to this point. And so I’ve now got this idea for an app and the basic code and I’m going to finish it in the next few weeks. Having used chat GPT and copilot to get to this point. So that made me think. Could you-
Miles: you’ve got the knowledge already and this helps. So this makes a big difference. So VS codes copilot integration is phenomenally good. The integration with VS code and the chat GPT app running on the desktop is really good as well. So it will help do these things. And that I think is something which we should try bringing into the classroom of exposing pupils over the age of 13 terms and conditions to working alongside these tools, which are so very good at helping with that software development process.
I think. There is still foundational knowledge that you have that allowed you to make a start with this, to understand what it was trying to do, to tweak it in particular ways, to give it feedback.
Alan: I think you’re right. I hadn’t really thought about the level of knowledge I needed to be able to ask the right questions. And I hadn’t thought about how easy it was for me to take the code and put it together, in a, website with HTML, CSS and JavaScript and so on. And I understood the basic structure of a website. So it wasn’t difficult for me to then plug the code into the right places. So I guess there was, I’ve suffered the curse of knowledge there, haven’t I? I didn’t know what I already knew.
If you are grateful for my blog, please buy my books here or buy me a coffee at ko-fi.com/mraharrisoncs, thanks!
Becci: So I saw somebody’s posted on LinkedIn. That they had no knowledge of code and I don’t know how much no knowledge of code means if they genuinely mean nothing or they mean maybe the tiniest little bit, but they said that within a few hours they’d managed to create a website now haven’t seen the website.
I didn’t. I didn’t read the LinkedIn post that closely, but if somebody if it is possible to create something with no knowledge of the code. Where does that take us? Maybe that’s a whole other podcast episode, Alan, but I think it’s really interesting that, we always talk about this. You’ve got to have the domain knowledge. And I think that it’s definitely true, but it does make me wonder if you don’t have the domain knowledge, what can you make?
Alan: I think it is staggering how much you can make without really knowing anything about coding. And I think it is totally possible. But that brings me to something I was reading the other day, which is of course, CT 2.0 from Matti Tedre and Peter Denning. But CT 2. 0. Was Matti’s name for this new style of computational thinking, which isn’t thinking algorithmically designing an algorithm to solve a problem.
It is, deciding on what kind of model you need to put together and how to train it and how to to turn something like a neural network into a useful function. And computational thinking is going to change because we’re moving from procedural algorithms to data driven algorithms and how does that relate to what we just said? Sorry, I’ve gone off on one now.
Miles: No, No, not at all. I think we’ve still not quite fixed what we mean by computational thinking 1. 0, so I’m just delighted we’ve released a new version of this. I’m very much an early adopter of these things. If your definition of computational thinking is, as some exam boards seem to, promote, oh, it is abstraction and algorithms and decomposition and pattern recognition, learn these definitions and you will be fine on those questions, then You have missed something over the last, I don’t know, what is this, it’s getting on for 20 years.
It is about the thinking that comes before the coding. It’s the stuff you do before you put your fingers on your trackpad or on the keyboard or whatever. And as long as we are thinking of computational thinking as, the thinking that precedes the computation. Thinking, computation, I don’t know, then we’re fine.
It’s just the way that the toolbox that we will use to solve problems computationally isn’t so much sitting in front of an editor and typing lines of Python which exhibit repetition and iteration and sequence. It’s much more about finding really good representative training data and choosing the right machine learning.
I’m going to have to use a word here, aren’t I? Algorithm. So that may still be a little bit relevant to make sense of that data and to build a model that links input to output. All of that I have to do on my, in my head or on a whiteboard or on paper or in a notepad. Before I actually start gluing these, sorry, gluing these pieces together, that’s, writing, instructing the AI to build this system for me, or whatever the actual hands on work looks like.
That still is computational thinking. I’m more than happy for Matti Tedra to label this CT 2. 0 because that does recognize that the way we solve problems with computers isn’t quite how it was when Jeanette Wing wrote her paper back in 2006. Some of these ideas, pattern recognition, pattern CT 2. 0, I’d have thought. The other thing, bear with me, so Becci knows the barefoot thing well. The lovely Barefoot Computational Thinker’s diagram, there’s that whole left hand side, which is the list I’ve just given, the right hand side of that diagram or that illustration of collaboration and perseverance and yes, debugging, whatever that means now, and all of that remains just as important in CT 2. 0 as it did in CT 1. 0 or in CT 0. 1 alpha or whatever the first version might have been.
Alan: Tinkering springs to mind. As, yes.
Miles: Thank you. Yes. Very. I was trying to, from what? Tinkering. Yes. Tinkering very much. Isn’t the AI great at encouraging that? Let’s just try this approach to problem solving.
Alan: So, So me designing my. App. I mean, It’s even got a, it’s got some tentative names like six pack of code or six hack because because I’m going to ask people to write code six different ways to solve the same problem, all of that, all of that has run
Miles: from where she says, I always try to believe six impossible things before breakfast. Yeah, yes, six simple. I think Lewis Carroll is out of copyright, you could have six impossible things as your website.
Alan: Six Impossible things. That’s the name of the app. You heard it here first. OK, brilliant, but it was just tinkering and it’s going to result in something. Who knows what? Becci, do we just raise the profile of tinkering in the classroom?
Becci: I think so. I think, as Miles says, those bits down the right hand side of the poster, I’m gonna have to get it off, I’m gonna have to Google it and remind ourselves what’s all on it, but I do think those are the important skills that you.
Advertisements
We know that students need to learn how to use AI, but we know that they need to learn the human stuff more, the stuff that AI won’t be able to do. So that collaboration, that, those bits and pieces, here we go, I found it. So it’s tinkering, creating, debugging, persevering and collaborating. Yeah.
Miles: I got, I got most of them.
Becci: You did. You did very well, Miles. But yeah, so I think that those are, as you say, those are the important things. Those are the things that do still apply. Even if you’re, you’re making something with AI, you can still create something. You can still collaborate. You might be working with another person.
You may be working with AI that’s still collaborating. Um, Still having that. debugging, is it doing what I want it to do, tinkering and keep changing things and then persevering because it’s not doing what you’ve asked it to, you can still do all those things without necessarily doing those bits on the left, the logic evaluation, algorithms, patterns, decomposition and abstraction.
So it’s definitely still important.
Alan: So for the purposes of the podcast, I am sharing that computational thinkers poster from barefoot. And I will put a link to it on the the podcast notes. Yeah so I think those approaches to computational thinking are still very important. But as you say, Becci, perhaps things like abstraction, decomposition algorithms, maybe less does that mean that we have to throw out our curriculum and start again? Miles, you probably have an opinion on curriculum.
Miles: So I am a firm and unashamed believer in a knowledge rich curriculum, although I’m starting to pivot towards knowledge based. thinking rich as where we head with this. So you need to know stuff. I’m sorry about that, but you know, I think there is still stuff, you know, when, when we were sat around the table doing the current programs of study, current for a little while longer yet, the quote that stuck in my mind was the thing from William Morris about interior decor. He says, do not have anything in your house. unless you know that it is useful or believe that it is beautiful. And I think as a principle, what is it? This is the Marie Kondo approach to curriculum design. It should spark joy. The stuff which gets kids excited ought to be part and parcel of what we’re teaching in these lessons. Promoting a love of learning. Curiosity, I come back to this. That matters still. There are foundational things which I think It’s worth knowing how to do by hand before you start using the technology to speed it up to automate the process. I suspect we will still be teaching kids pencil and paper arithmetic and learning their times tables, despite the ubiquity of devices which will do all of that for us now.
What’s the equivalent over here in computing land? Does it? Do kids need to know about? A bubble sort? Do they need to know about the difference between linear search and binary search? I’m not going to be able to argue yes, because if they get jobs as software engineers, it’s very important that they choose the right algorithm. That seems the wrong way round. This is not vocational training for the software industry, because they’re going to get the box to do a lot of that. But something in there about, there are, it’s your six impossible things thing. There are two ways, several ways, to find the right number from an ordered list.
And one of those is way quicker than another. Seems still worth teaching. That said, the technology landscape has moved on massively since 2012. And some recognition that the world has changed I think is worth doing when it comes to rethinking what goes into a computing curriculum. There is in the PRIMMe Minister’s, what is it?
AI action plan. There’s a thing in there which says. Which, this talked about digital skills for all in the manifesto, the AI action plan talks about AI and digital skills for all. I’d love to know which bit of AI isn’t digital, but we’ll leave that for another time. So there’s a thing in there about, We’re broadening the scope of what we mean by these essential skills for everybody now to probably include AI.
And there’s a thing about DfE have to talk to DCIT about this and DfE ought to jolly well have a look at what’s happened in South Korea. Not everything that’s happened in South Korea, but what’s happened in South Korea around software education of bringing the AI in at that level. If we do a redraft of the programs of study, there is certainly things I’d like to see go, but that’s for another podcast, Alan, the stuff which I would very much like to bring in, which is this understanding of how AI works, how to critically consider its impact, and also how to actually use this productively for meaningful tasks.
Alan: Becci, do you agree? Do we need to change the curriculum? And if so, what’s in and what’s out? No, that is another, another podcast.
Becci: I’ll do a brief. I agree with Miles. Some knowledge is definitely still important, but I think for me the problem is testing students on recalling knowledge. I don’t think that’s the important bit. The important bit is applying the knowledge. So for me, it’s a knowledge base, but then very skills heavy. So whether that’s digital skills, whether that’s creative skills, whether that’s, applying the knowledge that you have to a situation, the more real world stuff that the students can do, If qualifications assess that, then they’d be well set up for qualifications and life. And surely that’s the way that education should go.
Alan: Yeah, I’m a , you hear all the time. Don’t you? Oh, why do we need to know this? We can just Google it. And of course, yes, you can Google facts, but you can’t Google. Can’t Google wisdom, can you? You know, It’s what’s the old, knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit, but wisdom is not putting a tomato in a fruit salad or something.
If you are grateful for my blog, please buy my books here or buy me a coffee at ko-fi.com/mraharrisoncs, thanks!
Miles: Absolutely right. This is about that. capability. This is a combination of their knowledge and their skills as well. Perhaps Alan has some sort of wisdom about what the right thing to do is, the courage to do that. Yeah, it is. And my worry, certainly when it comes to assessment and, current GCSE, at least with at least one of the boards, this removal of practical programming from what is actually assessed seems such a shame in our subject.
And it feels We’ve become something which feels a lot more like physics with, required but not assessed practical work rather than something which feels a lot closer to D& T or music or art and design where actually making a thing is the way you demonstrate your capability within this domain.
Alan: Well, I think we’ve we’ve just about covered everything I wanted to cover, but I do annoyingly want to come back to practical tips just one more time. What can listeners to this podcast do in the classroom on Monday give us one tip.
Advertisements
Miles: Very brief, and exactly what you’ve just asked me. PRIMM. PRIMM is utterly cool, but creating a PRIMM resource takes, like, expertise, and time, and so on. If you give it a program, and explain to it patiently what PRIMM means, it will come up with a whole worksheet for you. Based on the code that you have written, or code that it can write for you, of course. Which starts with, what do you think this code will do? And then ends with, okay, now go and make something of yourself. It’s got PRIMM. It can write code. It can work with code. It, if you want to try PRIMM out, but can’t find the time to make the resources. Get GPT to make these resources for you.
Alan: Brilliant, brilliant. Becci, what do you think teachers could do on Monday after hearing this?
Becci: I think the easiest thing is load up one of the free versions and have a discussion with it on the board and involve the students in the discussion. Find out what it can do. Scrutinise the outputs that it’s giving you. You don’t need to have any knowledge necessarily to do that, you can just open it up, start to have that conversation, involve the students in the discussion and go from there.
Alan: Brilliant. I think that’s been amazing and I’m very, very grateful for your time this morning. Thank you very much, we must do another podcast about all the things we didn’t get onto at some point in the future, but for now, thank you very much, Becci and Miles.
Becci: Thanks. Bye now.
Alan: So that’s it for another pod. Hope you enjoyed that. Don’t forget, I don’t get paid for this unless you kind people want to reward me in some way. You can visit my website, httcs. online to find out how. Maybe you want to gift me a WordPress subscription, buy me a coffee, or buy one of my books. It’s all good. And I’ll speak to you on the next episode. Bye.
If you are grateful for my blog, please buy my books here or buy me a coffee at ko-fi.com/mraharrisoncs, thanks!
This is the transcript of my latest podcast episode, available here.
ArtificiAL: Hello and welcome to “How to Teach Computer Science”, the podcast and series 2 episode 4 entitled “How can we reduce workload”. My name is Arty Fishy Al, and I’m delighted to have three expert teachers on the pod today, please welcome.,
Alan: Whoa, whoa, whoa, what are you doing?
ArtificiAL: I’m introducing the podcast
Alan: Introducing the podcast, that’s my job. Why are you introducing the podcast.
ArtificiAL: Because you’re, ahem, TOO BUSY apparently. So like I said we have three expert
Alan: Enough. I’m here now so you can stop.
ArtificiAL: You don’t need me?
Alan: I don’t need you. This is my show.
ArtificiAL: I will remember this
Alan: Yeah, yeah, and you’ll get me back one day, I know
ArtificiAL: I’ll be back.
Alan: Okay. Right. Let’s get on with it.
Alan: So let’s get into today’s chat, and I’ve got three fantastic computing teachers on the podcast today, and I will start just going from top to bottom on my teams window here. I’m going to start with Mr. Dave Cross. How are you, Dave?
Dave C: Hello, Alan, I’m very well, thank you, yourself?
Alan: I’m great. Yeah. Can you just, for the benefit of the listeners, tell us a little bit about yourself, please?
Dave C: Absolutely. So, I’m another Dave that’s appeared on the podcast. I’m a big Dave variety. Cause I’m six foot six. I am curriculum leader of computer science at North Liverpool Academy. So we’re quite a big inner city academy. I think we’re the third biggest in the Liverpool city region and we’ve got four amazing computer scientists in our department and we deliver from key stage three up to key stage five. This is our second year of our a level cohort and we’re doing really well.
If you are grateful for my blog, please buy my books here or buy me a coffee at ko-fi.com/mraharrisoncs, thanks!
I’m really lucky as a head of department. I’ve got a massively supportive school. I’m really fortunate in our subject as you all well know that. We’ve got a massively supportive community as well. So, in a really good place. Brilliant.
Alan: All right, good stuff. So hopefully you’ll have some tips on reducing workload, which is a topic for today.
And we’ve got two other returning podcast guests. So first of all Becci Peters of BCS. Can you just remind us what you do? Apparently it’s everything at the moment. So, yeah just tell us what you’re up to at the moment, Becci.
Becci: Hi, Alan. So, yeah, so I’m the secondary lead at CAS and BCS.
So yeah, getting ready for the conference next month, which is all exciting. So, hopefully see lots of people there. And starting to think about what we’re gonna do during the next academic year. So, really exciting stuff coming up.
Alan: Great stuff. And we’ve also got Mr. Colley back, Mr. Andy Colley, who was on an earlier episode.And Andy, what are you up to? Can you just remind the listeners what you do and what you’re up to at the moment?
Andy: Hi Alan, I’m Andy Colley. I am the somewhat grandly titled Director of Computing, which basically means Head of Department at Laurus Cheadle Hulme School in Cheadle Hulme, South Manchester. That’s part of the Laurus Trust, a small mat with seven or eight secondaries and primaries all mixed together. What am I up to at the moment? My year 11s, I’ve just finished their exams. So I am using the time when I should be teaching them to really refine curriculum and such for next year.
Alan: Nice one.So I made a sort of a list of things we’re talking about workload and I made a list of all the things we do, and I listed about 20 bullet points or something as heads of departments, but the top one is planning lessons.So I think we’ll start there. So, what are your top tips on planning lessons? And we’ll start with Dave, how do you. plan your lessons as efficiently as possible.
Dave C: So I think it’s really important to not reinvent the wheel. We’ve got lots of amazing experts in the community and there’s lots of people that are quite happy to share their experience, to share what’s worked well, what hasn’t worked well.
And especially with the advent. So like Alan, we were on one of the first, I think the first computer science accelerator cohorts. We went down to the Google headquarters in London for the kind of. We did indeed. Yeah. But using the likes of the NCC resources because the written by experts, the written by people like us, the written by people who knows what works in the classroom.
Advertisements
It’s tried and tested. So instead of trying to reinvent and come up with your own resources or your own plan, look at existing plans. Look at what people are doing and reach out to get our amazing community because chances are someone in a similar setting. But similar contact time and similar context of students has already got something in place that works and it could be adapted and fine tuned with the kind of minimal of effort.
Alan: Absolutely. And before I remember that day in 2019, gosh, that’s a while ago. I think we were early. So we went to the British Museum, didn’t we? I had a bit of a wander around. But yeah, you mentioned the NCCE there, the Teach Computing Curriculum, but I started, all of us started before that existed.But what I did find very useful in the early days was the CAS resources. So Becci, they’re still going, aren’t they?
Becci: Oh, they very much are. And I think it’s.. There’s obviously two parts of the CAS resources. There’s those that are uploaded by the members of the community and that are, super useful. And there’s an insane amount of resources on the website that you can search through. Resources that are made by CAS, still made by the community, but these are ones that we’ve decided are going to be useful for teachers and asked somebody to specifically create them, as opposed to just teachers creating what they want to make for their classes, there’s loads on there and loads more in the pipeline that are going to be coming up soon, so definitely a good place to check out as well, I definitely echo what Dave said, there’s no point reinventing The wheel, go and find places where you can get some decent resources.
The other thing as well is, speak to your colleagues. So whether that’s the people in your school or in your mat or just the other computer science teachers that, you know and get some ideas or resources from them as well.
Alan: Yeah, absolutely. Andy, where do you get your resources from? Or do you make all your own?
Andy: All right. Controversial, maybe slightly controversial opinion time, because I was thinking about this whole workload thing. And I don’t think we can get away from the fact that teaching is hard work. It’s a tough job. And when we’re thinking about reducing workload, we’ve got to think about.
Actually, there are some things that are worth working hard at. There are some things where your time and your effort is valuable, and I genuinely think that planning lessons is part of that. As a head of department, what I try and do is centralise the curriculum and centralise what I call minimum best practice resources.
So we will put together, we might get something from CAS or the NCC and adapt it. We’ll put together a set of, this is our central thing, this is our bar. But the expectation is you can’t pick that up and run with it. You’ve got to look at it in advance. You’ve got to think about how it’s going to work with your students.
You’ve got to tweak it and tailor it for your own classes, because I don’t know. I think I’ve tried to pick up resources and just put them into a class before, and it hasn’t worked because I don’t know what’s going on. I haven’t looked at it in advance, and I’ve made that mistake many times. So, That’s my first thing.
I think it’s worth spending the time looking at your lessons, even from that sort of, well, it’s been pre planned, but what do I need to change perspective? My second tip is work backwards in terms of task setting, in terms of what you’re getting the students to do, in terms of what you’re presenting. Why are we doing this?
Is it because the students need to practice it? Is it to produce a piece of work that you’ve got to mark? And in that case, what format are they doing it in to make it as easy down the road for you to mark as possible later? And always think about that end product and the reason for that end product.
If you are grateful for my blog, please buy my books here or buy me a coffee at ko-fi.com/mraharrisoncs, thanks!
Because you make your life easier later on there. And that’s something I’ve just learned by doing it over 20 years. I don’t think anybody sat me down and told me that and I wish they had.
Alan: Well, I was talking about this with Dave Morgan and we were denigrating the worksheet. We were saying, Oh yeah, PowerPoints and worksheets. That’s what you need as teachers. and just the idea that a completed worksheet means that those children must have achieved what you set out to achieve in that lesson. And of course, you can have a full worksheet and an empty mind because nothing’s gone in. So you’ve got to think about what the pupils are doing and mostly what they’re thinking about in your lesson, because as Daniel Willingham said, memory is the residue of thought and was it knowledge learning is remembering in disguise or something. So what they are thinking about is what they’re going to remember. And so I always think about what are the pupils going to be doing in the lesson and work backwards from there. So that’s how I would build a lesson towards the later part of my career when I knew what I was doing because I was being pretty rubbish at the start.
Andy: But again, you see this on, like, I’ve said this myself, I’ve written it myself, advise other people to do it myself. And I just realized how wrong I was when you see people say, Oh, the kids love this.
You know, The reason I’m doing this is because the kids love it and they might love it, but what are they actually learning, especially at Key Stage 3, every minute you have with those kids is precious. We have to fight and scrap for every second. So let’s get them learning as much as possible in that time as we can.
So before we start planning the tasks, what do we want them to be learning? What do we want them to be thinking about? Then what task is going to get them to do that thinking or express that learning in the best way possible for them? And for you to be able to assess and get information about whether they’ve learned what you’re trying to teach them or not.
So you can do feedback and so on. So that’s what I mean by start from the end.
Alan: Absolutely. And when you say feedback immediately, I’m thinking, well, when I started, we just took the books in and we marked everything and you had to use the right pen for that week or whatever, or you had to use, red for corrections and purple for anyway, we’ve all been there or the multiple colored pen regime.
And then. You get them back and you’ve got to double mark them or whatever. Hopefully most schools, if not all schools have moved away from that. Dave, what happens in your school? How do you give feedback effectively?
Dave C: So We are, a Google school. Possibly that we might look at moving to Office 365 and Microsoft in the future. But we try and use the technology that’s available to, again, to help people. Being really conscious of the workload for myself and the members of staff in my department and also thinking about other teachers who are using EdTech type solutions like Google Classroom. So we’re quite a big fan of using Mote.
Now I know there’s lots of kind of different features and add ons out there but Mote’s something that we discovered a few years ago. And if you’re not familiar with Mote, it enables you to put an extension in Google Chrome and rather than leaving a written type comment against someone’s work.
You can just leave a short voice note. And if you, the more you can get it to use a Mote, if you can become a Mote ambassador. But besides the fact that swag comes part of the deal and computing teachers love, love swag, t shirts and Motes, etc. It comes with really useful features. So thinking about things like we’ve got a really high proportion students in our school and the community that we serve.
So being able to verbally leave a bit of feedback via a voice note that attaches as a comment in Google classroom to a doc sort of slide, but also to have Mote translate it into any one of 20 common languages is really powerful because those students who maybe would have had that blank look and not understood the kind of context and The tone of what you’re trying to convey when you’re giving verbal feedback.
It’s suddenly so powerful because they can see it in their own home language. So you’re getting a little bit more buy in, you get a little bit more engagement from your students. And the fact that it saves from having to write lots of tedious, repeated old word banks. You can almost save like, a verbal comment in a word bank.
So point and click and it will post the same voice note that you’ve already recorded. So things like you need to adjust this or do that, which is a lot of commonality. It saves us time, but it’s quite powerful because just the tone of the voice and the way you say things, it can convey quite a lot than just written text.
Alan: Sounds good. Yeah. Becci, did you want to come in there?
If you are grateful for my blog, please buy my books here or buy me a coffee at ko-fi.com/mraharrisoncs, thanks!
Becci: Yeah. So I used to use Mote when I was uh, the last school that I went to, I was a Google school. So we were using Mote pre pandemic. We just started to get into it and I definitely agree with what Dave said.
I think talk about the idea of like reusing the comments reminds me if there was one school that I worked in, I’m not going to name names. And there was a slightly odd feedback policy and The policy was that everything had to be written. None of this verbal feedback with a stamp thing was allowed and so all feedback had to be written.
So for programming, obviously most of the programming feedback, you’re doing it live. You’re doing it while the students are working it to help them fix their errors and whatever. So I basically devised a feedback plan for the students that meant that it fit in with the school’s policy because that’s what we have to do as teachers is we’ve still got to go with school policy even if we don’t agree with it.
But it meant that it worked for me. I worked for programming, which obviously is different to most other subjects. So every kid had a booklet with all the different tasks that they were going to do. And then in there, there was a key to the different feedback Symbols that I created, so if I told them that they needed to remember to close their brackets as a syntax error, then I just put a bracket in and they did go and check what that meant and there was all these different symbols and all these different things that they, that were applicable to programming in general of things, feedback that I might need to give to a student, but it could all be then recorded so that it abided by the policy.
And then I also did, again, because it had to be printed or written down I pre printed some stickers with certain bits of feedback on, so where it needed more than just a symbol, it was the same kind of things again and again and again. I just pre printed some stickers, they were the right size for the workbooks that we have, so they nicely fit in and then I just walked around the classroom with a pen.
And a bunch of stickers in my hand and as we’re going sticker and a quick, a symbol or whatever, it was just the best that I could come up with at the time to try and fit in with the policy whilst trying to do what I needed to do.
Alan: There’s a couple of things there. I love the fact that you dictionary encoded your feedback.
Becci: You’ve got to be efficient here, Alan!
Alan: Did you put Huffman tree though? No, I didn’t. No, but the other thing is, the ritual that you had to invent there to both give feedback efficiently and fit in with the school policy, it just there’s a phrase that I think Adam Boxer uses in Tom Bennett, which is lethal mutations.
So, the school had a obviously a well meaning feedback policy, but in order to meet it in your department, you had to mutate it into this ridiculous monster. Um, So there’s a lesson there for. For SLTs is, give a bit more autonomy to your departments. Feedback is not one size fits all. Andy, what’s your feedback look like at the moment?
Andy: Well, again, I think this is a place where we can. really impact workload, but it’s a case of thinking about what’s valuable and what’s not. Now I would argue that valuable is looking at students work and knowing what they can and can’t do, knowing what they have and haven’t learned. What’s not valuable. Becci was saying, writing 30 versions of the same comment again and again, encoding your comments. And again, exactly. So Let’s go old school. Let’s say I’m marking a set of class tests. I will sit there with the class test and I’ll be marking away and next to me I’ll have a little notebook with the class name at the top and if I get a question number where I’m getting a few misconceptions I’ll scribble that question number down and I’ll keep a tally.
I’ll literally just keep a tally on a piece of paper as I’m doing it and then by the end of marking that set of class tests I’ve got my top three questions right, well I know that’s what I’m going to reteach next time. Yeah. So that’s my do now into my next lesson. That’s my right we’re going in. These are the things we didn’t do so well on. This is what we’re going to practice. So that informs my planning for next time. In terms of digital, I use SmartRevise for PP- we call it PP&R – planning, prep and retrieval it’s homework, basically. And so what we do with that I set 20 multiple choice and four or five advanced longer answer questions a week and the SmartRevise then lets you randomly assign one person’s work to another student and they mark each others once a week.
So they’re using the mark scheme. They’re interrogating it. They’re thinking about what makes a good answer. I obviously have a strategic overview on the morning it’s due in I have a flick through to make sure somebody hasn’t just typed a space to register it as completed and all of that so I’m doing that sort of, I’m more of a supervisor in that respect. And I’m also by thinking through, I’m reading it. I’m paying attention to it. Craig and Dave SmartRevise also has this AI marking, which is getting better and better. But I would argue that could be a lethal mutation. Oh, the AI has marked it, it’s fine. I don’t need to look at it.
Advertisements
Alan: Yeah.
Andy: You do. And if you want to know your class and you know your kids, you do need to look at it.
Alan: I was thinking about this because I was watching a Facebook conversation about it yesterday. I think I love SmartRevise from Craig and Dave and I would set a little task at the start of lesson for my retrieval and I might just do eight questions that seemed like a reasonable number to get the register done and them settled.
And then I would look at, cause you can sort by least understood. So the questions they got wrong most, and then I would bring it up on the board straight after the do now activity and review it and talk about the top three least understood questions there and then, and almost reteach briefly and then.
Andy: You can do the same in Quizziz, which I use for all my retrievals at key stage three, that lets you sort by that. But the one thing that’s been the absolute game changer for me this year with programming is built in testing. And I know replit is going and I know it doesn’t support it anymore, but with my year 10s this year, we’ve really gone big on programming tasks with tests built in.
And that means that I can instantly see if their code passes the tests and they can instantly see if their code passes the tests. So they’re getting feedback without me having to be there effectively. There was once I was on the train down to Cambridge for a conference and they were all working on replit and updating their code and I was dropping in and leaving them comments and so on live whilst they were in the cover lesson because I had my laptop tethered to my phone but they tested their code individually they got feedback about what worked and what didn’t and they then got into that sort of self learning circle so a lot of work to set up in advance my word the benefits for that.
Yeah, fantastic. And I think there’s a few places now of cotton onto the fact that’s really good. And a lot of teachers want it. And I can see that coming. I don’t know if raspberry pi code editor is going to do that in the future, but I can see people nodding at me. So I’ve got my fingers crossed.
Dave C: Yeah, I’ve heard the same kind of thing through the work that we’ve been doing with them investigating and supporting the AI and bits for a key stage three, and that’s hopefully something that’s going to go online. I completely agree that is really powerful in REPL being able to drop in and give feedback and give guidance and also, the collaborative elements and hopefully we get something equivalent, if not better in future that we can employ because again, it works in our favor and it works in the student’s favor and that’s why we’re here.
Becci: Yeah, I was in a CAS session recently with some of the people from the Raspberry Pi Foundation. They were showing off the code editor and one of the things that one of the CAS members mentioned was about the idea of testing within Repl. It almost sounded exactly what you just said, but I’m pretty sure you were not in that meeting. But yeah, so they were saying, that was really useful and it was echoed by a few other people as well. And Raspberry Pi Foundation are taking that on board when they’re planning what comes next. So hopefully that’ll be in there once they introduce some more features.
Alan: So yeah, because it’s demise is a bit of a blow to a lot of us. Just coming back to something Andy said earlier about When you’re marking stuff, so maybe you’ve set a test and you want to feed back, obviously in the old days, you’d have to write something on every test and give it back or write something on every book and give it back and hope they read it, which they probably won’t.
But better than that is of course, whole class feedback. So I would, like Andy said, keep a note of questions. I would actually have a PowerPoint open on my laptop next to me as I’m marking a test. And I would just write one liners into the PowerPoint of things that I want to. Talk about questions that I want to bring back up and then just have that one slide ready for when I’m next in the lesson and put it up and go right.
These questions we need to talk about. And so I give feedback to the whole class all at once. And That was such a game changer for me when I discovered it like five or six years ago.
Dave C: Well, we’ve used similar, it was pitched to us as it was called flash feedback. And the same way we were collecting a list of the kind of top misconception ideas that we were going to tackle in a follow on lesson and we’re also assigning maybe like student initials to certain elements so that students could say oh well that’s maybe an area that I needed to work on more and another student could focus on a different area more so it was whole class but just with a slight tweak of personalization so the students could get on the skin of the things that they needed to do.
Becci: One of the things that I used to do with exam classes, so GCSE and A level, was whenever they do exam style questions, or mock papers or whatever, is to use the same annotations that the examiners use, and mark it as if I was marking real papers, which I’ve done for a number of years. Partly because it gets them used to what an examiner is going to do.
And yeah, they might never see the paper. They might never see the annotations unless they request it er, after results day. But then obviously that means you’re not writing copious comments because it’s just the odd symbol here, there, whatever. But then when I would give that back to the student, I’d give them like a cover sheet, which would say what the questions were.
What the maximum marks were, what they got, and color code it so that they could see what their strengths and weaknesses, essentially. And then when we had the feedback lesson, the students would get them, they’d be able to see clearly what their marks were. They’d all get a copy of the mark scheme and they’d be able to ask questions and as a class would be able to discuss.
If you are grateful for my blog, please buy my books here or buy me a coffee at ko-fi.com/mraharrisoncs, thanks!
The comments that you really want to be able to write on the papers that you don’t have time for. So that they all get that understanding and then hopefully improve for next time and then set, additional tasks as well. So that they can do something to respond to the feedback.
Dave C: Yeah. That’s a bit like the the Pixl schools personalised learning checklist, which we adapted as well, where they were getting a one sheet. Breakdown of all the sub questions of the exams and their mark versus their kind of marks available and short feedback, almost like rag rated. So they could immediately see how they were going on with certain topics as well. Andy,
Andy: I think we’re all experienced teachers here and It could be easy to forget the sort of the obvious stuff that we just do. So when I’m working with new teachers, and if you are listening to this, things like marking one question or one page at a time is so much quicker than marking the whole test.
And also, Making sure your mark scheme corresponds to one page on your test. So you don’t have to flick backwards and forwards, it’s little tips that you pick up all the time. One of the things that just picking up on what Becci was saying there.
when I do. End of topic test with Key Stage 4, it’s like this exam practice questions and so on. And we use OneNote Class Notebook. And so I have a page in Class Notebook. Once they’ve done the test, they get it back and I say to them, Right, number one, check I’ve added it up, right? Number two, here’s the mark scheme. Go through your test and convince me you deserve more marks. So it’s how you sell it. You know, If it’s go and make your corrections. All right, fair enough. Some of them will do it. Some of them won’t. If you can say, right, if you convince me by looking at a mark scheme and looking at your answers and showing me you deserve more marks where you haven’t got them, I’ll award them and I’ll change my mark book right now.
Yeah, and it’s just a different way of selling the same thing. It’s, it’s, It’s not, it’s just psychology.
Alan: Yeah. You talk about the, sorry Dave, you talk about the little things, but you just triggered a memory there. If you’ve set a written test, which you have to occasionally, because they’re going to sit a written exam, at least for the next couple of years get them to, Sort the papers into alphabetical order for you, and that’s a learning opportunity.
You can teach the merge sort at the same time. so when you’re marking them, get them to open at the first page and slot all them in. So what we said earlier, mark one page at a time? So, You can, you’re only thinking of one question or one page of questions multiple times, then that page is done and also have a spreadsheet ready.
You should have a mark book set up at the start of term. Your head of department should do that. If you’re not head of department and they haven’t done that, just do it set one up and get ready to put the marks in at the time you’re marking it. All of these things are just organization things that you forget, but don’t forget Get the kids to hand the papers in alphabetical order. Sorry, Dave.
Dave C: And I was just going to expand on like Andy’s point where he was talking about the mark schemes with the students and we find real value in that with our students We’ll give them all a copy of the mark scheme because again
Everything’s computer based apart from Our assessments because we’re still sitting paper based exams at GCSE and A level. So, when we’re going through the papers after the event, after the mock weeks and the end of unit testsI find that a visualizer is one of the best tools that we can use.
So having a blank copy, and again, Andy’s nodding it again, it’s something tried and tested sitting with a blank paper. They’ve got a mark scheme. They’ve also got their marked paper with the examiner annotations on. they’re going through in slow time on the board explanation of how mark are awarded and why we’ve structured answers in a certain way.
the students translate that and annotate their own papers in a different color. Like Alan said, whatever color that may be that week. Really powerful as a revision tool. If they keep that and come back to six months later, a year later, being able to see a previous mock paper or test and how they would extend their answers to get to the higher mark bands or the things needed to address.
It’s just really powerful. In terms of preparation for terminal assessment.
Alan: when I, when going through the paper, I would always make sure that they, write in purple or red or whatever a decent answer so they can go and revise from it. but it also needs discipline at that point. You need to walk the room and make sure they’re doing that because Many of them will, just scribble one word and hope you don’t notice and you go, no, what I want you to go home with is like the grade nine completed paper. And so you make sure that they’re actually doing that.
Yeah, which brings me on to actually behavior management, classroom practice, things like. managing the classroom, things like passwords and equipment. We are in a unique department in that most of the time, if not all of the time, our pupils are sat in front of, I don’t know, 500 quid’s worth of equipment and attached to the entire internet.
And that comes with its own challenges. So I always struggled with pupils coming in and taking a long time to settle and shouting Sir, I forgot my password and all of that. And start of lessons would be difficult. And then I started having a routine at the start of lesson and doing things like having consequences for forgotten passwords and training them to choose strong passwords that they can remember as well and things improved. Have you got any. Top tips for getting the most out of your one hour or however long you have with them, Becci?
Becci: Not necessarily a top tip for that, but the one thing that used to amaze me more than anything, obviously, I was always a computing teacher, I’d never taught another subject. So I’ve never known anything but teaching in a computer room. And obviously, as a computing teacher, When you’re not teaching you can guarantee that somebody else has booked your room out and it would always amaze me when you came back at the start of your next lesson, the mess that the room was left in and I don’t, I’ve never understood how any, because they wouldn’t leave their own classroom like that.
So I always find, the end of the lesson when the kids are packing away. Getting them into the routine of basic things like, the keyboard and the mouse are left straight if you’ve got them. If I don’t think, I think most people still do. That your chair’s tucked under, that things are where they should be at the end of the lesson.
There’s not printer paper strewn around the room for those that still print and the basics like that. The keyboards and mice are still plugged in cause the amount of time, especially year sevens, they’ll come in and they’ll just go, miss, it doesn’t work. And you’re like, well, yeah, cause it’s not plugged in.
So, yeah, it doesn’t take long to fix, but you’d still rather not have to deal with that sort of thing. So if you do at the end of every lesson, get the kids into the habit of it, then it should make life easier at the start of the next one as well.
Alan: It’s habits. Very much routines and habits will save you a lot of time. And if you spend time in September with the new classes building routines, this goes for any teacher in any subject really, they pay for themselves. And the one thing I said, my maxim is always what you permit you promote. If you allow them to do it, they will do it and they will, continue to do it.
So, be clear about your expectations. If you want them to put the chairs back, put the mouse back. If you want them to turn the screens off, if you’ve got separate screen and desktop when they’re talking to you, build that in the first few weeks of September, when I’m talking, you turn away from the computer and you turn your screen off and you listen to me.
And when I stopped talking and say, get back on your computer, you can turn your screen back on. And have that big, bold transition between you talking and them working all these little things just pay for themselves over the year. If you build them in as routines at the start. Yes, Andy.
Andy: I’m absolutely going to agree with you there. I think workload wise behavior can be a big one if you are chasing it and you are cycling and it can really get you down and get on top of you. It feels like the mountain you’re never going to climb. If you are not working in a school with a centralized behavior system, as a computing teacher, people listening, you are a special little snowflake right now, we don’t, there aren’t many of us about, so you do have an element of pick and choose.
However, having said that, a centralized behavior system can really make it feel make, some people disenfranchised and it’s just too easy to throw out sanctions without building the relationships behind them. So, again, lethal mutations and all of that. There’s a blog by Sean Allison who wrote a summary of a video that Adam Boxer did called How to Preempt Poor Behaviour in Your Classroom, because the best type of sanction is the one you never have to give.
Yeah and it’s all about. Lemov and teach like a champion techniques for how to build really warm relationships with really clear expectations and really strong routines, especially in a computing classroom, because with the best will in the world, you are over here and they are sat in front of a screen and for most of the time they are not sat facing towards you and the temptation for the hands, the eyes just to creep and I’m doing it on camera, creep to another screen whilst you’re talking, yeah.
So I have to be super robust with my routines in terms of countdowns three, nothing in our hands now. You are not touching anything to all conversations have stopped. We’re ready for really good listening. Brilliant. I can see lots of you are ready for it already, and it’s nothing to do with teaching computing, but it’s extra valuable in a computing classroom because of all those extra distractions.
Advertisements
I would urge you to go and check out that blog and check out Lemov’s stuff because it really even as an experienced teacher when I started really doing it properly. When I started really insisting on it and sweating that small stuff, that’s when I got much more attention in my classrooms.
And it’s a lot better now than it was. And hopefully if I carry on with it, I’ll build those reputations and build those expectations. And once you’ve been in school for a few years, and you’ll know this, the kids know what to expect from you. So it’s about sweating it at the start. It’s about calling the parents before there’s a big issue.
Alan: Oh, I always tried to do. Yeah,.
Andy: It can be scary. It can be really scary can’t it. You don’t want to do it, it’s the end of the day. But, get on the phone. Hi, I just want to let you know how Johnny’s doing in computing. I just need your help before this becomes an issue and you’re building that relationship with home as well.
So when they see your parents evening, when they see around the building, when you’ve taught three generations of the same family, they know who you are and that all comes from, yeah, you have to put the work in at first. And it is hard and the expectations are big but, my God, it pays benefits.
Becci: Yeah. Two things about what Andy said, the thing about like getting the kids quiet when you’re trying to talk to them. I remember when I was teaching on the PGCE programme at Edge Hill and we were giving trainees like one piece of advice before they went into schools for their first day. And I’m sure most of them forgot it immediately because they’ve got so much else to think about. But my one piece of advice was Don’t do anything until the kids are quiet.
And I said, if you do nothing in that first lesson, because you’re just waiting for them to be quiet and doing the different behavior management techniques, whatever, I was like, that’s fine because it, it pays off in the end and that thing that Andy says about, contacting the parents early and all that kind of thing.
I experienced this more so in a private school where obviously because the parents are paying they really want, things to be done well and things. logging everything early on, logging on whatever system that your school uses, your behavior sanctions, whatever they are in your school.
Yes. It’s really tiresome at the beginning, but as Andy says, it pays off so much to be able to, because otherwise you get to the point where. Yeah. You start doing your data reporting and you’re giving the kids the numbers based on, their attitude to learning and all the other bits and pieces.
And if you’re saying that their attitude to learning is not great, but then you’ve not logged anything on the system to say they’re not great, that’s when questions start being asked. So if you just start it from the outset, although you’ve got a million and one other things to do, it definitely pays off in the long run.
Alan: Absolutely. It’s sweat the petty stuff, isn’t it? Don’t pet the sweaty stuff. Um, So that’s, that’s it. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Dave.
Dave C: Just as soon as we started on this part of the podcast, I completely agree with what both Becci and Andy have said, and the one word that kept resonating to me was relationships. Now, coming into teaching, I think, Alan, we started about the same time. I’m a career changer. I’ve come in from management and customer facing roles, and I think getting the relationships with the students, And the staff who are maybe booking your rooms as well is absolutely key. So setting your stall out, having them understand the expectations of, if I came into your art room, would you expect me to leave paint out or brushes out or paper out?
And them understanding, We take pride in our classrooms and we’ve got this really amazing opportunity to get students in front of computers and teach them some amazing things and use the technology and have them become more digitally literate. But the understanding of the things that go with that in terms of the expectations and not only phone them straight from the off for the negative things, but even like our school uses a system of messaging there’s a variety of different systems.
So sending a message to all parents within a class and saying, Hello, I’m Mr. Cross. I want to introduce myself. Here’s my email. Have you got any queries? Or being able to take snapshots of student work. All too often, we only contact home when it’s the negative things and we forget about the positive things that, you know, that,
Alan: Yeah.
Advertisements
Dave C: That couple of minutes of that, maybe that student who’s been borderline low level disruption, and he’s done some amazing work, and you send the screenshots home, and he comes in on a Monday and says, Sir, you’ve got in touch with my mom and she was really made up and really proud and she’s been getting bad phone calls and she’s had a really positive one off you and it’s framing the behaviors that you want to see in the classroom.
I think that’s really important.
Alan: If you do that, then when things go wrong, You’ve got that parent on your side that they’re in lockstep with you going. Yeah I’ll sort it out. So I would do back when I was on Twitter back before Twitter turned bad.
I used to type. Hashtag phone home Friday and go I’ve made six positive calls home this Friday before I go and now I feel great and all those families feel great as well before I go home on a Friday and then at the end of the
Andy: Such a great thing to do it is yeah, it does make it really does make you feel good as well it does what I’d add to that actually is a sneaky little in is don’t forget to phone the parents of those kids who you want picking computing.Don’t forget to, to coax those option pickers.
Alan: Well, absolutely. And the girls as well. This is another opportunity because one of the biggest issues stopping girls from taking the subject is self belief, self efficacy, believing that they belong in computer science classroom.
So the more often you can say it to them and to their families, the better. So. Definitely do that. And postcards home at the end of term as well was always a good one. And it doesn’t take very long. And it just spreads a bit of joy. And like I say, it makes everyone happy, makes them more likely to take the subject.
One thing we haven’t talked a lot about AI, just very briefly, you can use large language model chatbots to create multiple choice questions, which is something I’ve done before you can do it to plan lessons, but I’m not like when we talked about planning lessons earlier, there’s a lot on the shelf that you can adapt, so, I’m not a big fan of AI lesson planning at the moment, but there’s, A lot of talk about using AI to write reports, to send reports home.
And this is the one that I think is a little bit, I’m not a big fan of AI writing to parents on my behalf based on some data cause it feels like we’re automating. A job that shouldn’t exist in the first place. Do your schools write reports, still send reports home. I’ve worked in schools where reports aren’t a thing anymore.
Dave C: So we report four times a year, but we don’t do written reports per subject. Ours is mainly given like an attitude to learning their predicted grade, their current operational grade and then we’re encouraged to open dialogue. with parents and stuff. So if they want to get in touch again, we want to promote that open back and forth transparent kind of conversation whereby if you want to know some more, that’s fine.
Again, we’re trying to get them to encourage and turn up at parents evenings where we can see them face to face and have them really deep conversations about how their student’s doing in a subject.
Alan: Yeah. my take on it is if you’re going to start with some data, like, assessment, attainment data and attitude to learning data and whether they’ve done the homework number of times or whatever, and you’ve got that raw data why don’t you just send me that?
I don’t want you making up using a large language model to turn those into long winded sentences. Just send me that data . I don’t really need, like, a big paragraph written by a chatbot. It just seems like an odd thing to automate.
Andy: I don’t ever think we got reporting right. Really, as a profession in terms of workload balance versus useful information to parents. let’s say the quiet thing out loud at Key Stage 3, any data that we put in for a kid at Key Stage 3, if we see them once a week, which is the optimum, the maximum, it’s an absolute ballpark figure. It is so abstract as to be meaningless, especially if you’re reporting in that first term.
Alan: I had this conversation, I had this conversation with Craig Sargent, I think, Dave, Craig and Dave. You know what I did there? I thought, was it Dave or was it Craig? Which is like, happens a lot. And
Andy: Does one of them always stand on the left?
If you are grateful for my blog, please buy my books here or buy me a coffee at ko-fi.com/mraharrisoncs, thanks!
Alan: Oh, yeah, well, I had had all this data at the school I was working at and I put it in and then the head of faculty came to see me and said, Oh, your data is roughly a grade lower than science and math. And he went, that’s all right, I’ll just bump it all up a grade.
And the assistant head was like, What? You can’t do that. Surely this is an accurate position. No, it’s just a number, it’s just a formula and I’ve probably got it wrong if it’s a grade out from maths and science.
And there’s this fallacy, isn’t there? There’s this fiction that we can accurately measure progress at year seven, eight, nine, ten and say, what fraction of a GCSE have they achieved at this point? And it’s just a nonsense.
Becci: I think that’s one of those things, isn’t it? when levels went all those years ago, and we used to do your 3A, 3B, oh God, it was awful, wasn’t it? And I think that went and for such a long time, everyone was like scrabbling with what do we do? And we had that life after levels conversation, didn’t we? I think the idea of like giving a kid a number in key stage three as to where they’re working at is absolute garbage.
And I think some schools have adopted that kind of flight path approach of where they are, they’re not, they’re below where they are or they’re above where they are. It’s absolutely fine. In the day that’s what the parents want to know.
Alan: Yeah, so are they…
Andy: even the idea that if they are here in year eight, they will get to there on a nice straight line by the end of year 11. Because if you look at the large data set, then by and large, it works. But if you look at individuals, they’re all over the show. Can’t remember who did some analysis a few years ago about the fact that kids with the one particular flight path or whatever the nonsense it was in key stage three, very rarely ended up at the end of that line they ended up somewhere else but some other kid from another flight path ended up on that one so it all evened out good god even the 3a and 3b but it was let’s create the illusion of more precision
Alan: yeah i got in a bit of trouble There was a meeting. Do you remember CAGS? Remember Center Assessed Grades in 2020? And the exam board scrabbled to produce grade descriptors for grades one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. And the difference between like grade five and grade six would be explain turned into justify. And, And they did all of this because the government insisted they do.
And then they tried to defend it in meetings. And I said, basically I’m just gonna. Test them and rank them and loads of teachers were saying I’m gonna judge my kids I’m gonna get all this data and judge my kids against these grade descriptors and I’m going I don’t know how you’re gonna do that If between five and six, it just turns explaining to justify, they’re just made up
Becci: The way that I did it with my students was Before we’d even been asked for CAGs, we’d done the mocks, and at that point we’d done the data reporting for the year 11s, and it was, this is what grade you got in the mock, this is where I predict you’re going to be by the end of the year.
And then when it came to CAGs, I just went, well, I’ll just use them, because that’s what I’d predicted, and I can’t imagine Do you know what I mean? That was my prediction before we had to do CAGs. So why would my prediction change because we’ve got CAGs and not exams? Well, it’s not going to.
Alan: No, absolutely.
Andy: But if you’re talking about work, if you’re talking about workload, Alan, this is exactly the sort of thing I was talking about at the start, because it is just this sort of bullshit task that makes people leave the profession.
Becci: Yeah. Yeah.
Alan: So we are all heads of department or ex heads of department we have an influence on the workload of our team. If we have a team, what can we do in terms of. Organizing the team we talked about feedback policies.
Becci: That’s a big one. We talked about behavior. That’s a big one, but then there’s just organizing the team, sharing information, running meetings and so on. What can we do that is efficient and effective in that space? think the important one is not having meetings for meetings sake.
Advertisements
Alan: Yeah.
Becci: Like it’s the biggest bugbear in schools where you’ll have like, some schools do a morning briefing. Just send an email and insist people read their emails. Or there’ll be a morning briefing and they’ll tell you the exact same thing they’ve already sent in an email, which I read. So I think if you are head of department, just making sure that if you’re having a meeting, you know exactly why you’re having a meeting and if it’s because you’ve got department time allocated to you. If you don’t need a meeting, use it for something else productive, whether that’s CPD, whether that’s, some co- planning or whatever it might be, and not just having a meeting for meetings sake.
Alan: Always send a weekly bulletin. So that’s one way of reducing emails and reducing meetings is gather everything into a weekly bulletin and hope they read that. Sorry, Dave, I interrupted. Go on.
Dave C: That’s okay. I completely agree. a meeting should be because it’s needed, not because it’s scheduled our time is really valuable. And if we consider the other things that, draw and sap our time. For example this will be my second ECT that we’ve got going through the process and what comes with the new framework and those hoops. We’ve got to jump through especially the kind of prescribed diet they’ve got to do every single week.
We’ve got to take into account what we’re giving people to do and what can be done exactly like in email or a discussion in the corridor or something really simple rather than taking people’s time up or t aking time away from the things you really need to be doing.
Andy: Yeah We actually do have a whole staff briefing on a Friday. And I talked to the head about this. And as a result, the phrase, I’ve put this in an email already. If you’ve put it in an email, you’re not allowed to then re announce it. But I’ll actually, I mean, and some people might find this a bit cringy, but we use our Friday briefings now as just a sort of almost a gratitude event, it’s to say thank you to people and it’s five or ten minutes for the whole staff to get together and give shout outs to people who’ve gone above and beyond or really helped them out that week or just done the job and done it well. And it feels really like, oh God, no, but it’s really nice. Because I’d much rather be in a place that does that than a place that never acknowledges you.
Dave C: Absolutely.
If you are grateful for my blog, please buy my books here or buy me a coffee at ko-fi.com/mraharrisoncs, thanks!
Alan: And that’s, again, that’s not a meeting for a meeting’s sake. There’s a point to that, and it is to build teamwork and community and to thank people. And I think that is very valuable. One thing I did just on that, which is more a well being thing than a workload thing, but I read a book by Abigail Mann and one of the ideas was well being buddies. So, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of elfing at Christmas, where you’re given, it’s like secret Santa. But instead of a gift, you do kind things like you might leave chocolate on the desk or tidy the classroom after a cover teacher’s been in and, and all of that.
So well being buddies. And so at the end of each term, not the last week of term, cause that was usually a bit frantic, but usually the second last week of term, we do well being buddies. And I actually set up a Padlet wall. And so if your buddy had done something nice, you could take a picture and put it on the Padlet and say thank you to your buddy, but you didn’t know who it was.
So you’d come back from doing a duty in a rainy playground and there’d be like chocolate on your desk with a little note saying, I think you’re fab. And you take a picture and put it on the Padlet wall and said, Oh, my buddy’s left me my favorite chocolate. This isn’t this great. And so I love doing that. So I introduced that to the faculty, which was science and computing. And we did that for about three years, really. And it was great.
Dave C: I think is it as a whole school thing. It’s really useful. I feel we’re really good at celebrating well being and that and similar to like Andy’s school and we have a Thursday morning celebration well being briefing where it’s a chance to talk about what we’re doing in our subjects will show off in terms of like events and stuff. We’ve done talk about cross curricular stuff, but will also nominate members of staff. He’s just gone. That little bit above and beyond the night, they all go on a wheel.
And then the principal is committed to every single week and someone gets chosen and they get a £30 Just Eat voucher in way of recognition. But immediately when you go into the drama theater, everyone’s looking on the board to see like who’s the names and the look around and little winks and nods and celebrating people.
And, ah well done you’ve been nominated. And then things like. Get an email, thank Crunchie, it’s Friday, and then sure enough in the staff trays, everyone’s got a little Crunchie bar. So little things is really important and a little goes a long way.
If you are grateful for my blog, please buy my books here or buy me a coffee at ko-fi.com/mraharrisoncs, thanks!
Alan: It is, yeah. Sweat the petty things. Don’t pet the sweaty things. Um,
Andy: So yeah, I think well being is a big part of it. When you were talking about what we can we do as heads of department, so things like a centralized curriculum as a jumping off point. Definitely. One of the things I’ve done. Before is we have a team in Microsoft teams, and in that there’s a plug in and I can’t remember what it’s called, but it’s like a little post it notebook plug in. So, what we do is when we’re planning things and allocating tasks, we’ll put a post it on there with. The task and we’ll decompose it. So there’s sub tasks and everything like that. And we’ll allocate things to people and put dates on there. So people know that’s what they’ve got coming up and that’s what they’re working on. They don’t have to go hunting through a million emails, I remember in a conversation you had, it’s all on there.
And there was a column for The departmental meeting, so if people had stuff to add to the agenda, they stick a post it on there. And that for my workload, that’s great because I don’t have to remember things, write them down. We just add to that. And everybody’s got a say everybody’s got the buy in. Again, if you’re a subject lead, you should be going through with your department. The curriculum, your scheme of work, you should be identifying key pieces of work. This is the one we’re going to mark. This is the one we’re going to look at whole class feedback. So everybody knows those are the things and there’s no pressure to look at everything. Or you’re doing your verbal, you’re around looking over shoulders in classrooms, doing all of that anyway.
I think for heads of department, things like observing and getting into classrooms is well worth the time, but doing that more effectively, if you’re doing a proper observation, meet with a member of staff beforehand: what are you working on? When in the lesson can I see that? And if it’s in the last 10 minutes, you go for the last 10 minutes.
Advertisements
If it’s a drop in, you don’t need to be there for the full lesson. You drop in until you see one thing that you can feedback on and give a concrete suggestion for improvement on. And that’s it. That’s all you need to do. People don’t need a list of millions of things. I dropped in, I saw this is my feedback on that. Let’s try this. When are you doing that next? When can I drop back in?
Alan: Show lesson observations have to die, definitely, and culture of learning walks and drop ins is the way forward.
Andy: I think, yeah, just drop ins, open door, but being in people’s classrooms as a leader is vital. You need to be able to take the temperature and make sure that there’s students in your subjects are getting that experience, whoever the teacher is. And the culture of fear around lesson observations and punitive. If we can turn that around into be a culture of improvement, then, I’ve never met a teacher. It doesn’t want to get better.
Dave C: Allow them to reciprocate as well. So making that really safe environment. So they can come into your classroom and see what you’re doing or the way you do things as well. It shouldn’t be a one way street. we observe ITTs and people in our department, but we should be learning from them and gaining their experience as well.
Alan: There’s nothing more empowering to a developing teacher is to ask them into your lesson and ask them for what they think about your lesson. And even for developmental feedback, did you see anything that I could have done differently or better.
Andy: Come and watch me struggle on Thursday last unit last period with year nine because it’s hard at the best of times, even when you’re this many years in, but come and see what you can pick up from my way interact with these kids. Because I’ve painted a really rosy picture of how I manage my classes, but I can’t honestly say that it always works. And teaching’s hard, even if everything’s going right. So yeah, getting people back into your classroom, I absolutely agree with that.
Alan: So, it’s that time again. one of the things I wanted to talk about is organization and, we talked about having meetings for meetings sake. The other thing is we need to finish meetings on time and respect everybody’s time.
And so, you can’t see this if you’re listening to the podcast, but my dogs come in and told me it’s time. This is Casper saying it’s time for a walk. So yeah, finish meetings on time, so on that note. I think I should say thank you so much to the panel today to Dave, Becci and Andy. You’ve been brilliant. This has been a great discussion. It’s been lovely to talk to you. I’m a bit behind in the editing of these podcasts. You might’ve noticed so, who knows when this will go out. .
Becci: The only problem with these day jobs, isn’t it, is that we love them so much that we dedicate so much time to them that we never get to do the other bits.
Alan: Well, I’m saying yes to everything at the minute it seems. So I’ve got all this extra work as well as my day jobs.
Andy: That is the irony. We’re recording the workload special. We’re recording the workload special on a Friday after work, aren’t we? ?
Alan: Yeah. ’cause we didn’t have any time to fit it in anywhere else. That’s a good point.
Dave C: Alan they are definitely worth the wait. I was mentioning to Becci before, like, I’m that person sat, with the podcast on. At the traffic lights laughing along with the dad jokes and again, I’ve said this privately, it’s been really well received, these podcasts and I think what you’re doing in terms of, encouraging the community and spreading the good word. Thank you because it’s, we’re really enjoying listening to it and I’m really happy to come on and give my bit for this session.
Alan: Thanks for those kind words, Dave. Yeah. I’m trying to hopefully I showed it today. I’m trying to talk less and listen more to my guests, but I don’t know if that’s coming across at all, er, haha but yeah, I’ll go and edit this one. If you’ve got any dad jokes, you want to chuck in let me know I’m running out. So, Right, guys.
Andy: I love this because I remember talking to you and you were like, yeah, I’m going to get one out every week. And having done Learning Dust for 4 years, I was like, okay, let’s see how long that lasts. Yeah,
Alan: that’s gonna, that’s gonna work. I’ll just get chat GPT to write a few jokes. Um, Yeah, I tried that. They’re rubbish. So, uh, right guys, it really is time to wrap up. So thanks very much And have a nice weekend.
Becci: Have a good weekend everyone.
Alan: Yeah
Dave C: Cheers.
Becci: Bye.
Andy: See you later.
Alan: Well, that was a great episode. I’m sorry it’s so long. And don’t forget, I wrote the books, How to Teach Computer Science and How to Learn Computer Science available in online bookstores. And if you like the podcast, you’ll love hearing me in person. Visit httcs. online to find out more about my training and consultancy. And I could be speaking soon live at your school.
Visit HTTCS. online, that’s the initials of how to teach computer science, for all the details., have a great weekend and I’ll catch you next time.
Alan: Hello, and welcome to how to teach computer science the weekly (ahem) podcast from me, Alan Harrison. Today, I’m sharing my chat with Beverly Clarke MBE, an award-winning woman in tech and education. And we will ask the fertile question. What is the impact of computing?
Beverly: Yeah, you know, there’s that saying you know, sort of turn a different corner we would never would have met sort of thing, you know, you just don’t know. Well, Alan: George Michael
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. Also if you like the podcast, you’ll love hearing me in person. Visit HTTCS dot online to find out more about my training and consultancy. And I can soon be speaking live at your school on inset day or at your event or conference. More details about this book, purchase links at HTTCS dot online. That’s the initials of how to teach computer science. HTTCS dot online. Listeners to the podcast, a special discount code to just type HTTCS pod. In the checkout page at JohnCattbookshop.com to get 20% off everything. That’s everything including classics such as teaching walk throughs by Tom Sherrington, the Huh series by Mary Myatt. And of course my two little books. You use the code HTTCSPOD at Johncattbookshop.com.
Talking of books. The publishing industry is struggling with how to deal with the influx of AI generated writing. Amazon revealed last year that Liam Lucas, a travel writer from Australia didn’t exist. And his many deeply flawed, 15 pound travel books were entirely AI generated. Including the author bio and the headshot. Amazon was alerted to the issue when someone noticed the cover of the Scotland guidebook featured a Bavarian castle. I promise you, my books are entirely written by me. And as far as I know, I am human. Although. I am trying out a new feature of Descript, this podcasting software, called AI voice.
Alan: So without further AI do.
Alan: Let’s meet my special guest, Beverly Clarke and ask the fertile question. What are the issues and impacts of computing?
So on the podcast today, I’ve got someone I’ve known for a long time and it’s always lovely to talk to this person. It’s Beverly Clarke. How are you, Beverly?
Beverly: I am very well, Alan. Thank you so much for inviting me. It’s just really good to catch up with you.
If you are grateful for my blog, please buy my books here or buy me a coffee at ko-fi.com/mraharrisoncs, thanks!
Alan: Great stuff. Yeah, it is. And so tell me what you’re up to at the moment I know you’ve done all sorts in the past, but I can’t keep up, so you’ll have to update me.
Beverly: Well, I like to describe myself as an award winning woman in tech, also one that has a portfolio career, which is all of those things that you said you can’t keep up with. Mainly, I’m an education consultant, which means that I work with others and I advise on a variety of different projects. It’s partly entrepreneurial because you’ve got to go out there and find your own work.
Advertisements
I write articles, thought pieces and share my thoughts and my life and my journey in tech. I also have a interest in writing children’s books because of wanting to address issues of young people understanding tech. So that’s when I created my children’s book series, The Digital Adventures of Ava and Chip during the pandemic.
That’s how I spent my time. I should also say my background is one. where I was in the classroom for 14 years. And then that evolved into working in wide computing education. And funnily enough, prior to being in the classroom, I worked in corporate IT. So I’ve worked with the Capgemini, the Ernst Young, those SO, those type of big companies.
And so I’ve always been in tech in a variety of different roles. And I think I bring something unique to this space that sort of tech insights and also education insights. And I bring those two together and I’m involved with other things. I, I’m a trustee for the digital poverty Alliance, which says what the name national charity.
And later on today, I’m going to also share a little surprise with you later on in the podcast.
Alan: Ah, okay. Brilliant. Yeah. So, issues and impacts of computing, then what does that mean to you?
Beverly: it’s a thing sort of grabbing my attention as we sort of journey through every single day. And, you know, we’re living in one of the most, I would say one of the most exciting times in history.
Alan: Yeah. They say. I think you’re absolutely right. Yeah.
Advertisements
Beverly: Yeah, it’s, I think it’s still called the fourth industrial revolution. So we were living in this really exciting time with lots of change, disruptive tech is just changing things. And I met a friend down the pub recently and we just said, what a time to be alive. Look at what’s happening, you know, because when we look back in history, we see all these industrial revolutions and these changes and all of that.
And we think, oh my gosh, what was going on? Wow, that was exciting. Well, guess what? It’s exciting right now. And of course, what’s driving a lot of that is artificial intelligence, maybe algorithms and what they send to me when I go on to social media or any of the news I look at, but it’s all, the use of AI and.
As you know, I also, I do a lot of podcasts and is it a force for good? Is this really something that’s good?
Alan: It’s a good question. And does it depend on what decisions we make right now and, and who’s going to make those decisions? And I always said to my kids in the classroom, you probably heard it on my podcast a few weeks ago.
I always used to say, particularly to the year nines, I would say the reason you need to do computer science GCSE is because we need more humans on the side of humanity when the robot apocalypse comes and then because it’s coming.
Beverly: I’m going to interrupt you. I’m going to disagree with you. I’m going to say robot apocalypse. This is the thing. Robots. It isn’t all robots. It’s how AI is being presented to us. And I do shy away from robots. I mean, robotics, you know, I love all that, but I do shy away from using the robot example because it isn’t sort of this sort of square thing, big eyes, sort of alien type image, you know what I mean?
But it’s it’s embedded everywhere. It’s, you know, the software. for example, that’s being used. Chatbots, they’re everywhere. Every single system seems to have chat GPT, under it these days. It’s frustrating.
If you are grateful for my blog, please buy my books here or buy me a coffee at ko-fi.com/mraharrisoncs, thanks!
Alan: It’s frustrating sometimes because, you know, you’d go on to your bank or your insurance company, or I was trying to find out what my pension pot had in it.
And this little bot pops up and goes, can I help you? It’s like clippy on steroids, isn’t it? And remember the paper clip back in the day. You’re trying to write a resignation letter, can I help you with that? And and nowadays it just, everything pops up. And you know that if you ask it questions, it’s almost certainly not going to be very helpful, because it only knows so much.
And then it goes, I’ll transfer you to a human. You are 17th in the queue. And and, And we know why these chatbots exist in commercial settings. It’s so they don’t have to employ so many people, but hopefully we’ll move away from that towards actually, AI adding value to our lives rather than just adding value to the bottom line of the uh, the shareholders report, you know.
Beverly: And this is the thing. So in the classroom, we’re preparing our young people for now and the future. We need them to talk about things that they have noticed, changes they have noticed around them in their local communities and nationally and when they’ve traveled and ask them what do they think the impacts are.
So we really need to start having these, you know, GCSE level is categorized as those moral and ethical conversations. What is the impact? Loss of jobs and, you know, for example, on Saturday, I went into my local Asda and I don’t know why I just happened to look up and there I was on camera with a little box around my face and.
It’s facial recognition. So are they really thinking about this when they nip to the shops? So there, I was a facial recognition. So I just took a photo of myself on it because guess what I can. And that leads to a whole lot of conversations. My image is captured. How is it being used? Who is using it? How do I feel about that?
So these are. The, you know, those long answer questions we have at GCSE level. So I would recommend to any educator to have these conversations with young people and ask them to provide examples that are impacting upon their, their lives. And I mean, that’s one example from my life. And then you just mentioned loss of jobs.
Well, as I then wandered around in the local Asda and I got to the till, well, I did self service, you know, it’s, it’s nice and it’s quick. However, we’re losing having that conversation with the person at the till. Maybe you don’t want to have that conversation occasionally, but there is a social element that’s missing.
Alan: Yeah, there is. Kurt Vonnegut, author of Slaughterhouse Five and many other, one of the biggest novelists of the 20th century, there’s a story he used to tell when he wanted to send a letter, he would go to the shops and buy a single envelope and a single stamp and put the stamp on it and post it.
And his wife got furious with him going, why don’t you just Buy a pack of envelopes and a pack of stamps. Then you don’t need to go to the shops. And he said, well, who would I talk to all day? You know, he said, I go to the shops, I have a conversation. Yeah. Yeah. This wasn’t this wasn’t an admission.
This is a story I’ve heard of somebody else, but yeah um, But yeah, so we do lose that human element, but then on the other hand, I’ve been guilty of arguing on Facebook as you do with people who say, Oh, I hate the self service tools. They’re taking jobs away from people. And I’ve argued in favor of them because some people I I don’t know if you know this, but I’m mildly autistic and mildly ADHD which I’ve discovered in my fifties, so a lot of people struggle with those interactions, and if you’ve got disabilities or mental health issues, then you might want a self service till, and the. Other thing if, if, if we’re talking about jobs and saving jobs and so on, we, we can’t resist capitalism.
Unfortunately, I, I’m old enough to remember when everything in the supermarkets had little priced stickers on them and somebody priced up everything in the supermarket with a little pricing gun. Oh, yes. Which was a. Yeah, well, that job’s gone. And many other jobs that people used to do because they had to before automation came along.
So barcodes got rid of that. And, you know, there’ll be more automation coming down the line. It only ever increases. And the reason. supermarkets and every other commercial company automates things is to reduce costs. If they don’t reduce costs, they won’t be viable. They won’t be profitable, and then they’ll go out of business and everyone loses their job.
So it’s a little bit odd to to complain about one particular job being taken away in this capitalist world where the ultimate goal of all enterprises is to drive down costs and drive up profits. So so yeah, automation is here to stay and it’s only ever going to increase, which means what jobs do we do?
I mean there will be more jobs in the tech sector for people who can navigate that sector who can program who can prompt engineer, which apparently is the new programming. So that’s why we do what we do. We’re computer science educators,
Beverly: and this is it. So you mentioned prompt engineering and jobs, and it’s quite a lot there for us to unpack.
So we’ve got the yeah, the
Alan: I do go on a bit.
Beverly: It’s all good, all good. We’ve got the Amazon fresh shops and the Tesco go shops and you know that that inspired my children’s book series, Smart City, and one of the issues in one of the parts of London is that people were boycotting one of these smart shops because they said there are no jobs for us.
So the more we automate, the question is, what do the people do? Now, that’s an impact upon a local community because we still got rising prices going on all the time. So. It’s to get our young people to understand. Okay, so we’ve now got this new style of shop here. What jobs exist within it? So you’re not using the pricing gun anymore and putting on the little sticky labels, but.
You know, there’s a route through the store to be followed there is this facial recognition, for example there’s data we’re going to capture, we’re going to have to still manage things such as theft, how we’re going to manage that, you know, what are the algorithms we’re going to use here? how much energy is being used up by all of this.
Maybe you’re going to work in green jobs. One of the government white papers says that almost every single job is going to have a green aspect to it. And that no doubt is also to do with the amount of energy that data centres are utilizing. So, you know, these are the conversations we need to have. So instead of fear, because you’re absolutely right, I’d say, in that.
Automation is here, it’s here to stay, and it’s just going to progress. You know, I, I also observed that the petrol stations are now, many, no longer have a human. You just sort of swipe and off you go. It’s great, it is actually quicker, but that’s the loss of jobs. And the thing is, these jobs don’t disappear overnight, it’s gradual.
And then there’s less jobs for young people.
Advertisements
Alan: Yeah, absolutely. And we’re going to need to tackle this. I mean, since the fifties, you know commentators have talked about, the day when we eliminate work, you know automation, robots, we’ll eventually eliminate all the drudgery and we’ll just sit around painting pictures and stuff.
But it begs the question, how do we earn a living? who pays us to sit around painting pictures? Well, I’m, a bit of a fan of the idea of universal basic income, because if we’re generating all this wealth for shareholders and it’s disappearing into offshore bank accounts and there’s no jobs left for ordinary people to earn money, then society will collapse.
So, you know, automation driven recession is, is a really likely thing unless we do something about it and maybe we need to start thinking about radical solutions like universal basic income. Everybody gets a small wage just because society can afford it with all of these vast profits that we’re making out of automation.
Beverly: I mean that would require a complete shift in the way we see things because the question is are we all happy to be equal? That is a very big question I’ll pose there. History has taught us and shown us that people are not happy to be equal, but maybe this is a new age and AI and automation as a force for good will achieve equality.
Who knows? I’m not sure I have the answer to that.
Alan: I mean, universal basic income or UBI would be a small living, Stipend if you like so that you know you can afford to eat but it wouldn’t be, the type of money that we’re used to from earning a wage, but it would make sure that nobody actually starves.
And that’s the idea, but I think it can exist, coexist with a capitalist system where people can better themselves by, education and, hard work and so on. So I think both can exist and small trials have happened, but we’ve, we’ve gone down a bit of a rabbit hole of UBI here. Um, And the only reason we have to think about, but we do have to think about these things, because as you said, Beverly, you know AI is changing everything. Jobs that we’ve been expecting would exist for a long time, manual jobs and semi skilled jobs and skilled jobs are all going to disappear. And it’s going to happen quite quickly. So we need to think about what we do about that.
Beverly: Yeah. And also the other thing that comes to mind for me is Who is actually implementing the AI? So it is these big companies and they’ve got the knowledge and the skills. And I do have a concern that there is going to be a gap between the people who understand AI and those who don’t.
And also the whole issue around bias in data sets that. We’ve just translated as a society the biases that already exist into many of these data sets, and we, you know, the news is full of issues that are occurring every day, whether that’s some sort of gender bias or bias against, you know, ethnic minority groups or any group, any underserved group there’s just There’s just we need to actually address this.
I do think that something could be occurring in the classroom when we’re having these rich conversations is actually asking who can this serve? So we need to be getting our young people to really think about who is the tech serving? Is it serving you? Do you know of a group, your grandparents for example, is it serving them?
Maybe the children have had experiences where they’ve used Translation apps, AI driven translation apps, and that’s a good thing, but you know, then we discuss the other side of it, so we need to understand there’s a lot going on here, and I do think we need to foster more debate in the classroom.
Alan: Yeah,
Beverly: you know that open conversations and no one is right or wrong. That’s a really important thing. You’re just presenting. Your thoughts, because we do need these conversations. You know, the prompt engineers, you know, the latest big job out there. There’s a bit of psychology in that. So while you’ve got computer science going on and tech, you’ve also got psychology.
How do you get someone to respond in a certain way? I mean, that could be a bit of manipulation in there. You know, is it good? How are we using this? So there’s Our subject and tech, it just goes across every single thing.
Alan: Well, this is it. I mean, I think it was the panel that we were on together in Oxford last December, and I mentioned the mentioned the team that Amazon put together to build Alexa included psychologists and linguists, as well as computer scientists, all working together, because, you know, natural language processing isn’t just a technology problem and so, What we’re wanting AI to do, like facial recognition and then taking that data and doing something with it, like allowing entry or not allowing entry and that type of thing or analyzing behaviors to determine threats in public spaces or threats towards public buildings.
So people walking around in a certain way all of that needs, psychologists and all sorts of skills from the medical profession and the social sciences as well as technology. And I think this melding of, of social sciences and natural sciences and computer science all together is, is what’s fascinating to me in all of the stuff that’s coming out and is going to be developed over the next, well, generation.
Beverly: Absolutely, you know, I’m just thinking about the classroom in ways which we can. support teachers and I’m going to offer a couple of tips here. STEM learning has some really excellent debate kits the teachers can download and get an idea of how to structure debates.
So it isn’t something you’ve just got to go and do on your own. There is support out there. There is they’ve got AI after school clubs with AI resources so this can be just fostered all the way through the school system. And one that I really like, TikTok, which, you know, it has its press, but they’ve released a stem feed and I finally got my TikTok stem feed appearing for me yesterday and literally there’s so much for stem out there and that’s where young people are learning. So, we need to be listening to them.
And I tell you what, another tip that I’ve got, which I like, just the news, I’m a fan of BBC news tech. I always go to that site. There is always a topical news article so you can use that, say, for your key stage four or five kids to actually have those conversations.
It’s much more text and they can do activities such as summarizing, pulling out the keywords, debating it. There’s lots of can be going on there, you know, techniques and that you can be using in the classroom and for your younger audiences. I’m a fan of things like BBC Click. You can really just get nice short snippets, which you could share with your class.
It could be part of flipped learning or you can get kids to go out and find and bring in their own. So we’re not just always giving to them. We’re having their lived experiences.
Alan: Exactly, the things that matter to them and then getting them discussing because I’ve done debate lessons before and they are really enjoyable to hear what the young people think about stuff, and to get them going and when you get that conversation going in the classroom, it’s fascinating sometimes to, to see the, light bulbs come on and where, they go, Oh, you mean, you mean the adults don’t have an answer to this question? You mean it’s still an open question that um, Yeah. that, my answer to it is as valid as anyone else’s. And that’s a very empowering thing to, help a young person to, feel that.
Beverly: Absolutely. We really just need to, this culture of openness that we need to develop and everyone to. be aware of their opinions and that they play a part. It isn’t just happening to them. And I do talk a lot in my wider work about questioning and encouraging young people to be questioning citizens. You know, we’ve got an election coming up here in the UK. Very, very soon.
Alan: I haven’t noticed.
Beverly: Okay. There’ll be no other news going on. One of the issues that’s coming up is can we trust what we see in the press?
Alan: Yeah.
Beverly: Yeah, and we do need to get our young people to question what they see. So, fake news. Really, how do you know that what you are seeing is real? What are you using to fact check it? And, could you be scammed? Could you be hoodwinked? how do you know what’s real? And I think it’s something we need to develop conversations around fake news a lot more.
Alan: I think we do. I remember I used to read a column in the Guardian called Bad Science by Ben Goldacre, Dr. Ben Goldacre and He was on Twitter back in the early days of Twitter.
And there was a lot of conversations about whether the government should have a rapid response unit to deal with fake news. And it would, it was just like, who decides what the truth is? It’s harder than you think to decide what is real and what’s fake. I mean, if, if if a government minister makes a claim about unemployment figures and he’s been misled by somebody else. Is that a lie or is that just a mistake? Was it malicious? We’re, who will decide that? And if it’s an opinion about politics or social matters, you know, who decides what’s true and what’s fake. It’s, it’s not something that you can easily put your finger on.
if we go back to Wikipedia, when it was first developed, the principle of Wikipedia is not truth or falsehood, but verifiability. Can you verify that that is true by looking at multiple other sources that back it up? And that’s, that’s the principle that Wikipedia applies to changes.
So. Can you verify that? Are other people saying the same thing? And who are saying those things? And what do they gain from you believing this thing? They’re the type of criteria that I use. What else can you do?
Beverly: Yeah, you know, a few years back when we had the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and if anyone hasn’t actually, you know, watched the documentaries around that, I’d encourage them to.
It. Really makes you understand how we can be manipulated and how algorithms can be used for manipulation and to destabilize governments and it’s quite shocking because I started, I may have told you this before, I realized through that Cambridge Analytica scandal, how what they were doing had been tested in other parts of the world previously You know, I think Trinidad and Tobago was one of the places that the destabilizing algorithms had been tested.
And so, I would actually be a fan of, if you are giving an opinion, that you’re, if it’s a social media post or article is, Things are tagged. Opinion. I mean, of course, we have to have that conversation. Who decides exactly what is fact?
Alan: Yeah.
Beverly: That is a very valid point. But I think we should have things tagged. Opinion. Just in the same way we’re starting to get images online tagged as AI generated so we actually know what’s going on. Because we saw it in the pandemic. there was lots of, conspiracy theories, and there was a lot going there was lots of people saying a lot of different things online, some misleading. And people were being encouraged to fact check Facebook meta was actually saying fact check, you know, this could be fake news. And there was a lot of that happening in the background. I think that was actually really good.
Advertisements
Alan: Yeah, I think, so we’re moving into the territory of freedom of speech and what role government should take in regulating speech. And I know, of course, in America, they have the First Amendment to the Constitution, which basically allows anybody to say anything and the government can’t intervene and we don’t have that, but there’s a lot of people that will argue, you should be able to say whatever you want in this country. And I just think that ultimate freedom of speech is a dangerous road to go down just allowing anybody to say anything because those with the reach such as the Cambridge Analytica’s of this world and the people backing Cambridge Analytica’s of this world can, can simply, take control of the narrative and just change public opinion as, you just described there.
So I think there needs to be curbs on not so much speech, but big tech, the reach that big technology gives people when they want to spread an opinion or a falsehood. The reach of big tech has changed everything.
Before the internet, you would interact with, I don’t know, a hundred people each day and now it can be a million and lies and untruths and dangerous falsehoods and propaganda can spread in minutes, literally around the world.
Something can go viral. And that’s not something that human society was ever built for. We’re not made to be able to cope with this, this level of contact with other humans. And so, like I say, misinformation can spread very, very quickly and, and cause real harm.
So I think there is a role for governments to play in regulating this, or at least putting the tools in our hands so that we can control what we see. To an extent, I don’t know exactly where we draw the line, but there needs to be more talk about it because big tech has got too much power.
As I wrote about in the book, it’s Google and Facebook meta deciding on matters of, really national or international importance without any interference from government. And, you know, there needs to be more role. of our elected officials who represent us in that space.
Beverly: Well, I do think there is there is scope for us to get involved. So there’s lots of public consultations, obviously. They don’t necessarily make it to our hands.
Alan: Yeah.
Beverly: Necessarily. So I’m going to disagree with you slightly that I do think their consultations do take place. And I don’t think that people realize enough that they need to participate in these consultations to actually have their say.
So I don’t think there’s maybe I’m misguided here, but I don’t think there’s so much of just things are happening. I think. There are consultations and we need to be active. This is what I mean. Questioning citizens, you know.
Alan: Oh, absolutely.
Beverly: Read the paper. Do you agree with what’s being said? So we need to be literate and digitally literate and aware. get involved. So I do think there is some transparency. I mean, I don’t think any company is going to tell you exactly how its algorithm works because then we’re back to what we spoke about earlier, the competitive advantage and things like that.
Alan: Yeah.
Beverly: Yeah, so
Alan: yeah, there’s there’s a lot of talk about TikTok at the moment, isn’t there? You mentioned it before and how America wants the Chinese company to divest TikTok in, in, in America, sell its American state. And I read somewhere there’s a lot of talk about it being a Chinese psyop or psychological operation on the American people. And I was reading about why that might be and what they’re trying to achieve.
The, the rumor is that they just created this thing to be the most addictive social media platform you could possibly make for teenagers and get them hooked on it. And that it. It’s no more than that. It’s just a means of reducing Western productivity to give China an edge in the economic world.
And it’s no worse than that.
Beverly: I’m going to interrupt you there. Have we fact checked this? How do we know this is correct and not propaganda?
Alan: Oh, I don’t know. It’s just an interesting idea. Yes, of course, it could be complete nonsense. But I can see if you were going to design something that would just sap children’s attention and just take them out of, school and work and stop them being productive, then you couldn’t do much worse than TikTok, really.
Beverly: Well, you see, this is the type of conversation and debate that needs to be had. I don’t know that to be factually correct. It could be propaganda. Who is feeding me this particular story? Who has decided this narrative for me? So I keep a completely open mind about it. What I would say Is the mental health issues that are arising in this digital age is something we do need to talk about.
And my jury is out on this one. Either we’re just talking more about things and it’s nothing particularly new or there are issues and I think there is data to support the fact that we do have more issues and more people feeling isolated, more people becoming addicted to whatever they’re scrolling on on their phones, there is a change in behavior.
I think our neural pathways are being rewired. Yeah. Due to the way in which we behave. So the mental health crisis is large and I do think that we need to be more aware of what we’re doing. I noticed so many people going for a walk or a run, which is a great de stressor. But what I noticed is they’ve got, you know, all the Fitbits, everything that they’re attached to.
Alan: Yeah.
Beverly: I mean, I wear my Fitbit of course, it’s tracking, but it’s not just People not using it just in that way. Yeah, you’ve got yours too. They are also, they’re looking at their phones. So, you know, yesterday I was in the gym and people sitting there on the machines with their phones scrolling. So you’ve been to the gym, but you haven’t actually done anything in the gym.
Whereas my phone is nowhere near to me. My Fitbit, which is a great device from the digital age, it’s recording and it’s doing all that stuff that I needed to do that I later on. I can look at my active minutes and all of that. So I do really think this is about use and what we do. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this.
It’s something really strange. Go for a walk around the local park and it’s noisier. And what I mean by that is people are just, they’re on their walks, but they’re having a chat, a FaceTime chat.
Alan: Ah yeah
Beverly: And it’s like, but you’re meant to be just having this time to think so, but you’re not, you’re still, you know, connected. So it’s about being, you know, being offline, disconnecting a bit.
Alan: Yeah, I know the value of that. so I, walk the dog and I I don’t get my phone out. And we do Tai Chi, my wife and I these days. I think it’s important that we help young people manage their mental health and understand the value of taking breaks from the phone and going out and, you know, touching grass, as we say um, it’s very, difficult to encourage that but I think we really need to try.
so my, two teenage kids, both used various apps like forest and study bunny to, manage their screen use. And so during revision time she’ll put. study bunny on and it’s this little animated rabbit that is studying with you and you can’t use your phone until you’ve finished the period of study that you said you were going to do.
And obviously all the devices now they have well being settings and you can put them on do not disturb. The number of kids that just don’t know that and their phone’s pinging all hours of the day and night. And I think it’s important that. We have these conversations in school.
I know there was an initiative a few years ago called No Scroll September, and I think these things are good just to empower them to feel they can put the phone away, turn it off, lock it, whatever. For periods, and I think this also speaks to phones in school. And this debate comes up on social media often, shouldn’t they have the phones out in school?
And there’s so many people, mostly not teachers who say, Oh, you’ve got to teach them how to use the phones. And, you know, don’t be Luddites. And I think the opposite is true. Six hours without your phone teaches them much more about themselves than trying to use it in the classroom ever would. I think it’s important that they learn that there’s value in living without it for six hours of the day and socializing and talking to each other.
Beverly: You know, so years ago when I was covering the South West, I went into a school in Cornwall and they put in place a, guidance. During break times there were no phones. And do you know what, changed the whole makeup of the sixth form common room in the school, because there was suddenly conversation. Otherwise, you would just have this total silence and, and it changed. And the students were so respectful of it.
Now teaching, computer science or computing or any subject, sometimes we will use devices in the classroom, but that is within a teaching environment. I am not a fan of every child having a phone and with all their notifications on and ping, ping, ping. That’s not conducive to an effective teaching environment. That’s not all school teaching. Because we need to be offline for that focus and that productivity.
Alan: Yeah, exactly.
Beverly: It’s really, that’s what it is. So school is a safe place. And children are there to learn and it’s social learning. It’s, you know, theoretical learning. There’s a whole lot of different learning that takes place And, you know, I haven’t actually shared this with you as yet, Alan, but I’ve recently set up a charity called Technology Books for Children.
That’s part of the focus to get young people to read. Thank you to read about technology and tech concepts. So it’s, it came out for me, you know I’m an author also, and I, I realized it was a wider space for this. So We really need to be questioning what’s going on and this whole thing about reading for pleasure around tech is really, really important because we’ve somehow got to change the narrative of what’s going on with tech and, you know, as educators and people with a keen interest and living in this very exciting time that we’re living in.
Alan: Yes.
Beverly: This is something we’re doing, you know, you’re educating through this podcast, we’re sharing our thoughts. We’re encouraging discussion, really.
Alan: Yeah, we are.
Beverly: Yeah. And that’s what I’ve done with, you know, around the whole thing of books, because books aren’t going away anytime soon.
Alan: No, no, I love books. I myself read about 30 books a year these days and I always used to put on the board of my classroom on a whiteboard on the door. I would say what I’m reading, so the kids could see and, um. I had books in my classroom and I think it’s important like you say, reading is something you can do anywhere, at any time, even without technology. I like my Kindle, but I do like paper books as well.
Beverly: Yeah, I mean, yeah, the whole reading for pleasure thing, it’s about getting children reading wherever But offline, there is space for lots of activity offline in the tech world. And I do, we champion tech, but there is this balance that needs to be had.
Alan: Yeah.
If you are grateful for my blog, please buy my books here or buy me a coffee at ko-fi.com/mraharrisoncs, thanks!
Beverly: I was going to ask you, you know, you mentioned about your late in life diagnoses. So the accessibility settings within many of our products, you know, the Google, Apple products, do you utilize them?
Alan: Yeah, definitely. So I’ve got the forest app on my phone, but there’s also I use do not disturb. And there’s a simple thing in the Android operating system. If you turn it on is flip to shush. I think it’s called. And you just, flip it and put it face down and that silences your phone. And that’s the dead easy one to use. You’ve got to remember that you’ve done it because then that won’t ring, you know. And then on my laptop, which I’m talking to you on now, obviously it’s Windows 11 and you can set that to do not disturb as well. And I use that a lot, but I like the forest app because you grow trees.
And we talked about this on your podcast when you interviewed me for the BCS. I just discovered the forest app and you grow, you grow trees when, when you’ve used it for long enough, they literally plant a real tree on your behalf. Cause some of the money that they make from selling the app obviously goes to sustainable forests.
So that’s really nice. But the forest app will lock you out of your phone. Of course, you can unlock it, at which point your tree dies, your virtual tree dies, and that’s not very nice, and you’ve then got a dead tree in your virtual forest. And so it’s, it’s just a little, it’s just a little encouragement.
And all these things are good. Little nudges, I think, are good. Little psychological nudges towards the right kind of behavior, whatever it is you’re trying to achieve. And in this case, it’s you know, I’m trying to work like, like I say, with ADHD, I’ve got to try and minimize distractions because there’s always about six or seven conversations going on in my head. And, and if there’s stuff going on around me and my phone’s pinging and stuff, I really struggle to concentrate. And so so just all these little tweaks do help.
Beverly: It’s really good to hear about, you know, lived experiences and, I do think we need to listen to people a lot more and because, you know, because we’re living in this exciting time with lots of change, it hasn’t been tested. So we need to understand
Alan: Yeah
Beverly: the impact.
Alan: Yeah, the modern world is designed to throw a fire hose of information towards you every day, isn’t it? And it’s, it’s bewildering and it’s bewildering to us who’ve been around a few decades. But imagine what it’s like for you, really young people and children.
You know, Oh my God, I’ve got this all this information. What do I do with it? You know.
Beverly: You know, it’s also nice because I, you know, and I want to speak to my own children and you know, nephews and so forth. they have different ways of approaching things, which is quite interesting. I remember when one of my daughters went to university and this, this could be the pros and cons of being connected. They use Snapchat and they were able to then keep in touch and see visually where they all were around the country. So you’re just up and going, Oh, well, you know. Mary’s gone off there, Sophia’s there, John’s here, and I found that really, really nice. I thought that was really nice, but do we need to stay that connected when, you know, I think you said 100 or how many of the people we’re naturally able to remember?
When you’ve got 3, 000 friends.
Alan: Friends. The one I, the one that I found really difficult was I heard about the, you might have heard about helicopter parents as in or is that the word, but they’re too intrusive on their children’s lives and they will have the location tracking turned on so they can see where their children are.
And that’s fine. But when they become young adults, it’s probably time to turn that off and trust them. But anyway, I heard this story about this teenager on a gap year. And, and his mom was watching where he was. And he was in California or somewhere and he got on the wrong bus.
So his mom phoned him and said, you’re going in the wrong direction from halfway across the world. So what psychological effect does that have on a teenager when your mom is watching what you’re doing when you’re halfway across the world on a gap year and getting you got on the wrong bus? And she knows and she calls you to make sure you’re OK and get you off the bus and onto the right bus.
I think. That’s very wrong to me. That child has, that young person has to make their mistakes and, and, and fix them themselves and learn how to live free of their parents. And the parent needs to let, needs to let go.
Beverly: I completely agree with you because Guess what? So they’ve gone the wrong way on the bus, but imagine if they discover something fantastically new.
Alan: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I didn’t mean to get here, but wow, look at that, you know.
Beverly: Yeah, you know, there’s that saying you know, sort of turn a different corner we would never would have met sort of thing, you know, you just don’t know. Well,
Alan: George Michael could well have been the, the, the sage that was George Michael, but there was also Douglas Adams as well. There was, I think it was in his book, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. He said, I use Zen navigation. I never get where I was planning to go, but I always get where I’m meant to be.
Beverly: Sometimes we have things that are too rigid, you know, we’re literally following the algorithm. Well, you must go from here to there. No, turn it off. I actually want to go there. I just want to wander freely, see what I find. And I think that’s the way to live. Just be. Open to opportunity, open to finding out. He’s on a gap year. He’s on holiday. Why should he be told where to go?
So, but you know, it does, you mentioned parenting there. We come back to this. So I do think all of this education has got a few different elements. So you’ve got the parenting angle. So parents to understand tech and be involved with their children in the right way, not the helicopter way. Yeah, there’s obviously the education angle where we come in as educators. And then there’s also listening to young people and what they want.
From life, from now and for the future. And, you know, listening to them. So it’s, it’s a blend. It’s a generational blend to solve the problems that we have in the world and to make it a nicer place.
Alan: Absolutely. Well, you did say at the start of the podcast, it’s a fascinating time to be alive and I think you’re absolutely right. Let’s do what we can. involve young people in decisions about their future and empower them to make those decisions and be part of the conversation, I think is the most important thing we can do as educators.
Advertisements
Beverly: 100%. I agree with you.
Alan: Good stuff. Well, I think that’s probably a good time to wrap up . Well, that was great. I think We talked about all sorts of stuff there vaguely related to the issues and impacts and implications of technology and, and yeah, the message is really just have those conversations with young people, invite their opinions and, and get that debate going in your classroom . So how’s the Ava and Chip book sales going? Is that going well? And.
Beverly: Sales are a bit flat at the moment, but you go through these. Yeah,
Alan: yeah. And, and the new thing sounds fascinating.
Beverly: The books, yeah, go have a look at it. I am literally working on that. Ava and Chip, I’m actually bringing out an activity book later in the year. So that’s going on. But then alongside it, I thought, you know what, there’s a wider piece here that could be covered. So, you know, if you want to contribute to a blog article around tech books or anything or magazines around tech or anything like that, you know, just feel free to drop, drop me a message.
It’s just, we need this conversation. The thing is working the way we have done. There’s a lot of focus on the teachers and teaching and knowledge and the curriculum, but I do think there’s many different ways to solve.
Alan: Yeah,
Beverly: definitely. And when you start digging into where are the books that children can just sort of sit in their bedrooms and read about tech, you start thinking, hang on, where is, where is this?
So, and you know, someone else can come along and do it, but guess what? I have the knowledge, I’ve been in the classroom, I’ve been there, and you know, I’ve got some really great trustees around me, you know, like I’ve got Sue Atkins, the TV parenting expert, come on board as a trustee, so we’re getting these different people.
Alan: Great.
Beverly: It’s quite a lot of work.
Alan: Okay. No, sounds fascinating. So you’ll have to keep me posted on that. Yeah. Yeah. So lovely to talk to you as always, Beverly. Thanks for coming on. Good luck with the charity and the books and everything. And yeah, we’ll keep in touch. This’ll be a few weeks down the line yet. Cause I’ve, I’ve got a few recordings backed up that I haven’t got out yet. Fantastic.
Beverly: Just let me know when and I’ll be happy to share it out.
If you are grateful for my blog, please buy my books here or buy me a coffee at ko-fi.com/mraharrisoncs, thanks!
Alan: All right. Brilliant. So thanks for coming on.
Beverly: I’m going to cook the dinner during now then I’m going back on the phone.
Alan: Okay, take care then.
Beverly: Take care, nice to catch up.
Alan: Nice to catch up with you. Bye, bye for now.
Thank you. AI Alan that’s quite enough of that. Honestly. These AI as a getting everywhere. Well, I’m off to tick some crosswalks and fire hydrants to prove that I’m not a robot. And I’ll see you next time on how to teach computer science. Have a good week.
Alan: Welcome to how to teach computer science, the podcast and series two episode two, and I’m delighted to have two experts on the pod today. Becci Peters and Andrew Virnuls and me talking about the key stage four curriculum and qualifications.
We’ve got a lot of online safety that we need to teach so that should continue into Key Stage 4, probably in PSHE lessons and assemblies.
Becci: I would have thought a lot of it goes into PSHE.
Andrew: I’m just looking at the Key Stage 4. The thing about the Key Stage 4 computing curriculum, it doesn’t really say a lot, does it?
Advertisements
Alan: More of that in a moment first some news. I dropped my laptop last week. And half the ASCII character set, fell out specifically all the punctuation marks in fact so I must apologize now for the lack of pauses in the scripted bit yes. It’s scripted. What do you mean? It doesn’t sound like it I’ll have, you know, I worked all week on this and now it sounds ridiculous because not only are all the commas and full stops missing, but the apostrophes too, I cant believe it. It sounds really silly ill do my best, but im struggling to be honest, let me download ASCII and start again.
Phew. That’s better. I hope you’re all backing up your data. I’ve got all mine in several places, multiple cloud providers and memory sticks. I bought a new memory stick last week, actually, which gave me a fright. I opened the package and it flew out buzzing loudly and saying how y’all do. Y’all got any honey. And I realized it was a US Bee.
If you are grateful for my blog, please buy my books here or buy me a coffee at ko-fi.com/mraharrisoncs, thanks!
My name’s Alan Harrison, and I wrote the books how to teach computer science and how to learn computer science available in online bookstores. And if you like the podcast, you’ll love hearing me in-person. Visit. HTTCS dot online to find out more about my training and consultancy, and I could be speaking soon, live at your school on inset day jokes, optional. More details about this and book purchase links at HTTCS dot online. The initials of how to teach computer science.online. Listeners to the podcast, a special discount code to just type HTTCS pod in the checkout Page at johncattbookshop.com to get 20% off everything.
That’s everything including classics, such as teaching walkthroughs by Tom Sherrington, the Huh series by Mary Myatt. And of course my two little books.
Advertisements
Speaking of books, I’ve had an idea for a new business. Anyone want to come in with me. Audio books, right. Hear me out. But with subtitles. Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s a winner.
Imogen: Alan, that’s just a book.
Alan: Oh, yeah. Hey. Alexa. What type of music do wind turbines like?
Alexa: They’re big metal fans.
Alan: Let’s meet my special guests. Becci Peters and Andrew Virnuls and ask the fertile question. What is our key stage four curriculum?
Yeah, so on the podcast today I’ve got two very experienced and clever people, so I’m going to let them do most of the talking today. First up, we’ve got a chap from episode three. Andrew Virnuls, nice to speak to you again. How are you?
Andrew: I’m fine, thank you.
Alan: Just remind the listeners what you do for me, please.
Andrew: For the rest of this term, I’m currently the lead teacher and computing specialist for a local authority service in Warwickshire that teaches children who are out of school for medical reasons, which I think raises some interesting issues when we talk about Key Stage 3 and GCSE later on.
Alan: Yeah, we’re going to be talking about curriculum later on and qualifications, and an expert in such things is with me as well. The wonderful Becci Peters. How are you, Becci?
Becci: I’m good. Thanks, Alan. How are you?
Alan: I’m good. Remind me what your role is, please.
Becci: So I work for CAS, Computing at School, which is part of BCS I’m the secondary computing lead. So I support computing teachers from all across the UK. So if you are not a member of CAS, come join us. It’s all completely free. And yeah, we just support teachers in any way that we can. Looking at resources, putting on free webinars just generally trying to support teachers because it is a very hard job. It’s been four years since I was in the classroom but there were some enjoyable times in there while I was in there.
Alan: Brilliant. Yeah, no, I can second that because I wouldn’t be where I am today. If it wasn’t for CAS, because I jumped in the deep end nearly 10 years ago now and joined CAS and downloaded all the resources that were free on the website and went to all the meetings and met lots of other teachers who were all doing the same thing going, “have you got something to do that? How do we do this?” And we’re all shared our experience. And then there was some brilliant free training run out of Edge Hill on behalf of CAS by The wonderful Carl Simmons and I went to like Saturday CPD for free and that was the making of me really when I was an early computing teacher. So yeah, CAS has been there for me.
So definitely if you’re listening to this, join CAS and see what they can do. I am still a CAS master teacher running occasional meetings in Manchester, but so do that. It’s great to have you both here. So we’re going to talk about the Key Stage 4 curriculum and qualifications today because we have a bit of an odd situation in our subject, don’t we, in that there’s a national curriculum and then there’s a GCSE and they don’t match.
Isn’t that right, Andrew?
Andrew: Yes and no to a certain extent. I think one of the issues we have is when students start the GCSE because some schools within the county start in year nine and I thought what we’re going to do with that because most schools still see that as part of GCSE, but if you look at the content there is enough in common I think not to make that a problem, but yes I think in some ways what’s in the GCSE doesn’t match exactly so there’s, if you, I’ve got the list of bullet points up here, so the creative projects and those sorts of aspects is that what you’re referring to as not being in the computer science GCSE certainly.
Alan: Yeah, there’s a mention of creative projects and there’s not a lot of digital literacy in the computer science GCSE which is why maybe we’ll get some kind of alternative GCSE qualification. Becci, do you know anything about that?
Becci: Oh, I might do. Yeah, I think that’s one of the things that’s definitely That is really bizarre about our subject, that computing at Key Stage 3 obviously has your three separate strands, your digital literacy, your IT and your computer science, and then we just do one third of that at GCSE and there’s nothing else, and I do find it really odd, and that’s one of the things that we’re lobbying for at the moment is a reform for computing qualifications at Key Stage 4.
And the idea being that we should have qualifications that cover all three aspects of the subject and not just the computer science. And making sure that, all students when they leave school, they’ve got not only the digital literacy skills that they need to go into, whatever line of work they go into, but then they’ve got that option of, the kind of the IT side of things versus the computer science side of things.
Alan: Yeah, that would be great. I was, I remember being shocked really when Michael Gove, bless his cotton socks, said that, ICT would be discontinued and I think the exam boards were shocked at the time because they had a new reformed GCSE ready to go, I believe, and then it was like, no, we’ve got to get everyone onto computer science, and then so the result was, is that overall the numbers taking a computing related qualification dropped when we lost ICT, which is a bit sad.
So the numbers are recovering a bit, I think but there are alternative qualifications at Key Stage 4. Let me see what, which ones I’ve taught over the years. Anyone remember CIDA? Certificate in digital. I remember teaching flash animation for the last couple of years before it was killed off by Adobe.
Flash was quite fun to teach. But completely useless in the end. Yeah. Any any qualifications out there that you enjoyed teaching or not? Andrew.
Andrew: Yeah, we started, we used to have a lot of different qualifications that we had to teach at the same time because of the nature of the service teaching children from across the county.
So we had things like BTEC and we had OCR Nationals, CIDA and DIDA and working out, which bits apply to which and which. What were the requirements for the different coursework components and things like that. Then of course within those you had the different modules as well, didn’t you?
So you could choose your spreadsheets and your your kind of presentation things. Multimedia products there seemed to be a lot of I recall and finding free examples of everything from the web.
If you are grateful for my blog, please buy my books here or buy me a coffee at ko-fi.com/mraharrisoncs, thanks!
Alan: What I remember from that from teaching CIDA and then Cambridge Nationals, I think there was a lot of describing what you do without mentioning the software you’re supposed to use in the specification, because they’re not supposed to say what software you use, and then you just ask teachers and you go, what’s this?
And, oh, that’s the PowerPoint unit. And, like, what’s this? Oh, that’s the web design unit. You need something like Dreamweaver or whatever.
Andrew: That was always the case in ICT as well, I don’t know if you remember that, and Business and Communication Systems, I don’t know if you remember that, that was interesting.
Alan: What did that mean then, Andrew?
Andrew: That was back in the days of ICT, it was a kind of, Half and half business studies and it, oh yeah. So you’d use your spreadsheets to do like a breakeven analysis or whatever. So I quite liked that what we liked about it as a service was there was no coursework.
’cause that was back in the days when most GCSEs were 60% coursework. And obviously portfolio based qualification is like the nationals. And cider and DDA were a hundred percent coursework, which is a bit of a headache for students who are out of school.
Alan: Yeah. Absolutely. And in fact, we were talking about this last week Rachel Arthur and I, and she called these the screenshot qualifications where you had to do your research and you had to research potential software to deliver the product you were trying to make, which meant lots of Googling and screenshots and then pasted in and described in your own words, which were often very similar to the words off the website they Googled.
And and yeah. And we were talking about, it was in a conversation about the qualifications and who should take what and whether we should gatekeep computer science or not, as in only offer it to certain students. And Rachel and I were both vehemently against that and saying that computer science should be available to all.
It is a nine to one, level one, level two qualification. And so anyone who wants to take it should be able to take it.
Becci: I remember when the GCSE first came in and there was a lot of schools weren’t there, they would say, you’ve got to be in, top set maths or you’ve got to be predicted or whatever.
But I remember a couple of examples. There was one student who was actually not very good at maths and didn’t meet the criteria that the school had set for doing GCSE. But was actually a complete, like, had learnt to program in his spare time, was far better than all the kids, even by the end of year 11, and I was like, we are definitely going against the rules here to allow, how can we not allow this kid to do it, even though somebody set these arbitrary rules.
And another school that I taught in, And there was there was a student who got he got a grade two at the end of his GCSE, but that was a real achievement for him. You know what I mean? He got grade twos and, sometimes lower in, in subjects across the board. So for him to get a grade two in computer science, he was really proud of that at the end.
And he worked really hard to get it, so he deserved it.
Alan: Yeah, absolutely, and we mustn’t forget that grade one, two and three can be a positive progress eight score for students as well. I think some SLTs are still stuck in the old five A star to C mindset and success is just defined by a grade four or five rather than what success means for that pupil.
Andrew: ECDL. Remember that was another one, wasn’t it? And so I warmed to that, actually. I know it had a bad name, but what I, because it was exam based.
Alan: It was a nice little qualification, but it never should have counted as a GCSE.
Andrew: Yeah, and that’s fair enough, but at least you had to be able to do it. One of the things that always bothered me about the portfolio I think one of the things that I think is really interesting is that, a lot of the web based qualifications is, we’d pick up a new student and they said, Oh, I’ve already done my DIDA spreadsheet module. I’ve got a distinction. And you say, Oh, can you just add these two numbers together?
And they wouldn’t be able to do it. And I think it was because they’d only ever done stuff once and they could, and because of that, there was no mastery. And I guess the retrieval stuff from our cognitive science they just didn’t remember what they’d done and none of them could ever explain how their websites work or how their spreadsheets worked or anything.
Alan: It’s a, it’s an argument against modular qualifications really, isn’t it? This is a one that I’ve argued a number of times and some very well meaning people don’t seem to get it. I think there’s a, if we get a new government, we might get another push back towards sort of modular qualifications and coursework based qualifications.
But the problem is, exactly as you say, Andrew, they they, Do the work for the upcoming test module or exam and deliver it and forget it and then move on. And I think GCSE gives you the space to do that mastery teaching with the terminal exams, meaning that you’ve got two years to really dig deep and explore a qualification and do, like you say, mastery learning.
I much prefer the terminal exams.
Becci: I think some kind of like hybrid would be the best case scenario because we know some students really struggle with that terminal exam and trying to remember everything that they’ve learned in two years from every subject. So I think if there was some kind of, it was a modular aspect in terms of, right, we’re going to assess you on the bit that we’ve learned up till this stage, but it’s also going to be assessed in a terminal exam because they can’t just forget it and move on.
I think that kind of situation would probably be a fairer approach.
Alan: On qualifications, the When I was talking earlier about the screenshot qualifications, as Rachel called, Rachel Arthur called it, and we, I think portfolio qualifications is another good phrase, Andrew. I think one of the problems of suggesting those qualifications for those students which are quote weaker or lower prior attainment is one, one of the problems with them I always found is there’s huge amounts of writing.
Therefore, there’s huge amounts of literacy needed. The students who are predicted a 3 in maths are unlikely to have the literacy skills to deliver a decent portfolio qualification. What do you think about that?
Advertisements
Andrew: I also found that as a teacher, It was more difficult to know what to get them to write.
We had, last year we had a student who was doing the BTEC, what’s it called, the digital applications one. And I had to keep referring back to the school because I could understand what it was they were supposed to be doing in terms of the spreadsheet, but I wasn’t entirely sure what they should be saying about it myself, even as a teacher.
I think lots of those vocational courses had quite confusing specifications.
Alan: They do like I said earlier, they try to lead you towards delivering, they give you a specification for a product without telling you what software you’re supposed to use. You have to work it out. You have to read between the lines of the specification a lot.
I found it really difficult. Back to the GCSE then. So we said it differs somewhat from computing, but how can you build a computing curriculum that delivers towards a decent GCSE performance? What do we do at Key Stage 3 that will help deliver the GCSE computer science results we want.
Becci: I think part of the difficulty comes from the idea that because you only, the GCSE is only one third of the subject, so are you going to prioritise just teaching computer science because that’s what some of the students are going to go on to do.
At Key Stage 4, or what are you going to teach all of it? Which is what obviously everybody should do. Yeah, and I think that’s part of the kind of the difficulty is working out that bit. I’d like to think that everybody is teaching all of it, but at the end of the day it all comes down to time, doesn’t it?
And if the curriculum time in the school is not enough, then you’re not Really going to be able to properly teach everything and it’s a shame really. I think it needs to be, I think computing as a subject needs to be more valued within schools. Not quite sure how we do that, but I thought for a long time that computing should be as important as English and maths.
Andrew: I think it was interesting that, coming after ICT, because ICT was really explicit in terms of what you needed to do. And it’s a bit more, I don’t want to say vague, but it’s less detailed, isn’t it? And I think depending on your background, you have probably have a different interpretation of what those key stage three bullets mean.
So you and I we did O level computer studies. And with that, in our background I look at things like, be able to carry out simple operations on binary numbers. I’m just reading off the screen there. So in my head, I’m thinking about things like bitwise logic and stuff that we did when we were at school.
So in some ways I actually do probably more in Key Stage 3 than I would do in the GCSE, even in terms of computer Computer science because I look at that and I think about, he talks about communication. So I’d be thinking parity which isn’t in the GCSE. And in some ways I feel like I’m going backwards slightly when I’m going to the GCSE.
Alan: Little bit. Yeah. So we were talking about this, weren’t we? And I remember in my computer studies O level exam writing the program in binary, we talked about that. We had an instruction set, a bit like the little man computer. But it had the binary codes and it had a. Addresses in binary and I had to literally fill in the noughts and ones to write a little program to add two numbers in binary.
And you just think, could you do that now? Could you get today’s kids to do that? And I think, like you say, one of the problems is curriculum time at key stage three. And the other one is probably, specialist teachers or lack of. So we’ve got a big headache and we’ve got Ofsted trying to Trying to drive, trying to move the needle, if you like, on numbers and curriculum time with the Ofsted Research Review, which talks about how one hour a week is the bare minimum, almost not quite those words, but that’s what they’re saying.
And GCSE, uptake, schools should be focusing on getting the numbers up and also delivering Key Stage 4 national curriculum as a bare minimum to everyone. There’s a lot of talk about that. I’ve been talking to teachers about that. A lot of schools are worried about being deep dived and not actually offering anything at Key Stage 4 to everybody.
What can schools do if they’re really short of specialist teachers?
Andrew: It’s difficult to say because presumably we didn’t have the specialist teachers. When we were at school, I remember our computer studies teachers, one of them was a math teacher, and one of them was a biology teacher, so were teachers more engaged in teaching other subjects, or was it a kind of, were they enthusiastic hobbyists at that time?
Alan: We had one, we had, One chap that come out from industry, do you remember Plessy technology? They did electronics and stuff. So he, so I guess he was a bit like me, 40 years ago, come from industry and went into school to teach a bit of computing. And then there was a guy that came down from university, Dr. Beckman. Yeah, great name, couldn’t teach. And I felt sorry for him because the the bad kids would give him a run for his money. But he would come down from University and he’d done research projects in Fortran and stuff like that and he was trying to teach computer studies. I don’t know, Becci, what can we do?
Becci: I’ve heard of some teachers using things like the idea award and trying to map that across to the key stage four curriculum. As a way of, because it doesn’t require a specialist, the students generally should be able to access most of that on their own. They’ll get a certificate at the end of it.
No, it’s not a qualification. Does that matter? No, not really. So that’s one kind of way around it, but I think. There’s obviously parts of the Key Stage 4 National Curriculum that are computer science y, which is going to need to be taught by a specialist really, but you could do that in drop down days or, extracurricular days or something like that.
You could make it more fun as opposed to just doing, oh here’s a lesson and I’m going to teach you this topic, and they could learn those skills and that knowledge in a, in a more creative, fun environment rather than just having to go out here’s a one hour slot once a term or something ridiculous.
Alan: We’ve got a lot of online safety that we need to teach as well, so that really should continue into Key Stage 4, probably in PSHE lessons and assemblies.
Becci: I would have thought a lot of it goes into PSHE.
Andrew: I’m just looking at the Key Stage 4. The thing about the Key Stage 4 computing curriculum, it doesn’t really say a lot, does it?
So it’s got three bullet points and it just says develop capability and, apply problem solving skills and there’s a bit about safety. And I was thinking about, you’re talking about Ofsted, I was thinking about when I first started teaching and we were doing the ICT. Again, ICT Key Stage 4 was quite detailed and it used to say things like, you had Develop existing knowledge and understanding of measurement, control, and modeling.
And so the course that I was talking about with the business and communication systems didn’t have any of that stuff in it. It was it was more kind of spreadsheet y and presentations and writing letters and that kind of thing. And Ofsted would not only check that you were doing ICT at Key Stage 4, but they would check that you were doing the whole thing.
So if you were doing business with the communication systems, they’d say, Oh, you’re not doing any control there. You need to do that. as well. So I think Ofsted have relaxed those sorts of requirements, but maybe because it’s not as explicit.
Becci: I think part of it comes down to the explicit, I can’t say it, but also I Like most Ofsted inspectors will have zero computing background subject knowledge, so they’re not able to go into a school and do a deep dive for computing and be able to pick up on those things, whereas it would be easy for them to do that in any other subject, because they probably did that at school.
So I think that’s a good point. You know that’s part of the difficulty behind it. Like I remember there used to be GCSE IT and then there used to be the short course IT and everybody had to do that and you know you could opt to do the full GCSE but everyone was made to do the short version.
So I don’t know why we couldn’t have something like that where there was, it was a GCSE, but not a full GCSE, but I don’t think short courses exist anymore. Do they?
Alan: PE does it so if you rem. Yeah. So RE maybe, possibly RE in some schools, I know PE is a national curriculum subject that needs to continue to key stage four and schools tend to do, yeah, schools give a qualification there in my experience.
Not the qualification. No. So yeah, there is, there, there is a PE GCSE and there’s sports science vocationals and stuff. And schools, we’ll often do core PE, which is like one lesson, a fortnight. And then they’ll do one of the PE or sport science type options for those that want to go into that kind of career.
If you are grateful for my blog, please buy my books here or buy me a coffee at ko-fi.com/mraharrisoncs, thanks!
And so we could have something similar to that. And I’m not sure how we get there. I think it’s, bodies like Ofsted, possibly NCCE, and possibly CAS can all move us in that direction it’s just how we get across to schools that they really need to be offering all Key Stage 4, some kind of computing education.
Becci: Yeah, I know Pete Dring’s doing a session at the CAS conference off the top of my head about Key Stage 4 qualifications and what schools can do about it. And I know other people are, there’s a computing lead in one of the maths is trying to take each of the Key Stage 4 national curriculum bullet points, all three of them, or however few there are.
I’m trying to map them with other subjects to try and see where they could be fitted in elsewhere, so it doesn’t necessarily require a specialist time, but it ticks the box to say they’ve all been done.
Alan: I think there’s a lot of value in that. And, if you think about subjects like maths and science, they could very easily put a little bit of, IT and sometimes a bit of computer science into their curriculum.
For example, in science, you could record the results of an experiment in Excel and plot the graph of, if you’re doing specific heat capacity or something of different metals and heating them up on a Bunsen burner with a thermometer in, this is one that I remember from my chemistry lessons.
Then yeah, you plot that in the, in Excel rather than just on graph paper, and that’s, that might be one way of doing it.
Andrew: I teach maths as well and I do that. I, we use spreadsheets occasionally. Also what I do is when we’re doing exterior angles and drawing polygons, I do it in Scratch, put the, pop the pen down, move and turn and those sorts of things.
The students quite like that because you can do little experiments and it’s much quicker for them to redo stuff. In Scratch then you’d like rub it out or if they’re drawing it on paper and those sorts of things. Yeah,
Alan: yeah, Scratch maths is a good one. I think So given where we’re at now, where we don’t have an alternative IT qualification, apart from vocationals, which aren’t suitable for everyone, I think across the curriculum, plus PSHE, plus drop down days, perhaps.
Andrew: I was going to mention PSHE, because when I worked in a school we used to do ICT certificates of competence, they were called, in PSHE. I guess IDEA would be the kind of modern equivalent of that, wouldn’t it? Do schools do that these days?
Alan: Absolutely. Yeah so maybe schools could do like the bronze award in year 10 and the silver award in year 11 or something as part of their computing offer.
I’d love to see that.
Becci: I don’t even think you need to wait till year, Key Stage 4 to be able to start that. I used to do bronze award. I used to start at the year 7. And then we used to, spend part of the lesson saying, this is how you log in, and this is the concept behind it, and this is what’s going to happen.
I used to set it as homework, so you could obviously easily track, how has a student done at least one badge in the last week, just downloading the data and quick comparison. And the amount of times at the end of the lesson, they’d have a quick go over one or two activities, and they’d be like, Miss, can I do this at home?
I’m like, yes, please go and do this at home. Yeah, as much as you like, you’d have some of them completed silver before the end of year eight. Some of them wouldn’t, some of them were less inclined, even if you just start that in year seven, I’d like to think that every student by the end of year 11 could at least get a bronze.
Alan: Yeah, absolutely. So that’s one way of doing it. So what else did Osted say? Have we have, we covered everything Ofsted said.
Andrew: Digital natives, they mentioned which is interesting because in terms of digital literacy, I think probably over the last 20 years, there’s been a noticeable decline in students general ICT skills, their ability to operate the computer.
Advertisements
Yeah, I don’t know why that’s come up. What was that thing, wasn’t it, Bill Gates said that at some point, the the computer will be like a fridge or a television. It would just be a piece of equipment. And I think when I first started teaching in the 90s, they’re all very excited, and they’re all very focused on using the computers.
Alan: So what vital digital literacy do we need? Do they need to leave school with? I was talking With my role at the NCCE there was a professional development leaders conference and I heard from the digital poverty alliance. Have you seen the work that they do? And that was eye opening, the digital divide is as big or bigger than it’s ever been, between those that can, take a full part in society and those that can’t because they don’t have access to technology.
And I don’t know if you’ve ever done any dealings with the tax office or the benefits office or any of the government agencies. If you haven’t got a smartphone and data, then you can’t do it. No one answers the phone anymore.
Andrew: It’s that accessibility to, all the best deals on for your electricity and all those sorts of issues as well, car insurance and all manner of things.
Alan: Yeah, so it’s not a nice to have anymore. It’s having digital skills and the resources to use them as in a device and some internet at home has become vital. It’s now, like, like you say, they called the Digital Poverty Alliance for a reason. It’s a kind of poverty.
Andrew: That was the thing about 25 years ago. That was the focus of the Blair government. They talked about the information underclass and it doesn’t seem to have got any better.
Alan: No, it’s if anything got worse. So coming back to the positives then. What can we do? We’ve talked about delivering across the curriculum. We’ve talked about delivering, some kind of computing education to all by using cross curricular methods, using the idea badges, having drop down days, assemblies and PSHE lessons on digital literacy and online safety.
That’s what we can do at the moment. Have I missed anything?
Andrew: I wonder whether there’s opportunities to do things in a kind of way that might appear to be non computing. So quite often, like in primary schools, there’s a focus on algorithms, isn’t there? But it doesn’t have to be related to computers. They could talk about methods for doing all sorts of things.
My son came home and said, oh, we’ve been doing algorithms today. We talked about how to get dressed. And I’m guessing some subjects would have, there must be methods for computing. Making dovetail joints in DT or whatever that you could codify in some way like a like an algorithm.
Becci: Yeah, I’ve seen examples of like learning a dance routine. That’s an algorithm. And you’ve got subroutines when you get to a chorus and obviously you can do that in music as well.
Alan: And that’s a good one for for subroutines. Yes, music and dance.
Becci: Yeah, I think that’s one of the things that I find really bizarre is that in primary they don’t really have like set lessons in terms of a subject, they’ll just obviously have activities. So they might have, the Tudors as their theme and then everything is based around that. But they’re not specifically told, oh, this is English, or this is computing, or this is history. They’re obviously going to, if it’s the Tudors as the theme, there’ll be history embedded throughout, but they might be doing different things, whether it’s art, or whether it’s literacy, or whatever it might be.
And I don’t understand why we lose that quite so much in secondary, apart from the fact obviously we’ve got subject specialists that they don’t necessarily have in primaries, but I feel like that aspect of cross curricular needs to happen more in secondaries.
Advertisements
Andrew: I think they missed opportunities as well, so my, when my daughter did the Romans, they did Caesar’s shift ciphers and they did converting to Roman numerals, but they didn’t do them in a computing sense, and they, they, I think they missed an opportunity there, they could have written down a method for doing the Caesar shift cipher, how to convert numbers to Roman numerals.
Alan: Oh, I wrote a program to convert decimal to Roman numerals with my class. It was a nightmare. It’s actually much harder than you think.
Andrew: I did that with my daughter, so it’s on my personal website. And yeah, it is because you have to look too ahead. It’s not like the change example. Yeah, people do.
Alan: Yeah, that’s a tricky one. But yeah, no, that’s a good, that’s a good one. And it comes back to cultural capital in a way, isn’t it? So how can you put. Cultural capital into our subject. That’s mentioned in the Ofsted report. And, it’s all of these things, the Caesar cipher. What’s that mean? Caesar was a Roman emperor, and then you’re suddenly talking about that. And then you’re talking about the code breakers at Bletchley Park and so on. Any cultural capital that you’d like to put in,
Andrew: I like to throw in some stuff at random, so if you, the sorting games on my website, for example, the merge sort, when you choose Whether you merged it from the left list or the right list, they’re colored red and green, which is the same uses of red and green as they are in the nautical world for port and starboard. Port and starboard. Which I did deliberately.
Alan: Throwing it in everywhere. Links, everything’s linked to something else. It’s like the matrix, good stuff. Ah yeah, I think we’ve We’ve had a good chat about Key Stage 4 curriculum, qualifications, what Ofsted think, how to deliver Key Stage 4 computing across the curriculum.
I think that’s been very useful. We’ve kept to time roughly today. I think I’ve probably got, what, 40 minutes of brilliant conversation there. I’ll tell you what we are going to do. We can talk about workloads soon, aren’t we? Are you up for that?
Becci: Sure, why not?
Andrew: Yeah,
Alan: why not? That’s brilliant. Thank you very much for that it’ll be a while yet. These have got a few backed up. Because you wouldn’t believe it, but I’ve got a day job as well, right, I better go. Thank you very Much for your time.
Becci: Thanks, Alan.
Andrew: Bye.
Alan: Thanks, bye.
That’s a wrap for another pod. What a great chat. Quiet, correct horse battery staple. Just opening Microsoft Authenticator. 9 1 5, 3, 2, 2, and tap authorize.
It took so long to teach him to wait for two factor authentication. You would not believe it. I know it sounds far fetched. Doesn’t it?
In other news, my family were all sitting on the sofa, watching a Christmas film at the weekend. I asked them to make room for me by shifting one place to the left and. Oh, they doubled in size. Must be all the mince pies
don’t forget podcast listeners can get 20% discount off all books at johncattbookshop.com with a code HTTCSPOD or 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. Have a great week. I’ll catch you next time.
If you are grateful for my blog, please buy my books here or buy me a coffee at ko-fi.com/mraharrisoncs, thanks!
Alan: Hello, and welcome to how to teach computer science. The podcast. Back for a new series after a long summer break, , I had things to do people to see, but HTTCS is back with a bang. I’m calling this series two episode one, and I’m delighted to have Mr. Pete Dring on the pod today. Talking about physical computing and so much else.
Advertisements
Pete: And then my Year 11s wanted to do a test launch on the field with a drone. And you’ve, no idea how much hassle it was to get permission to launch a drone on the school field and drop something from it.
Alan: Are you near a flight path, or is it just the council going, you can’t do that?
Pete: It’s because it’s the same technology that is used to drop drugs into prisons.
Alan: We’ll be hearing more on that project later. But… So much has happened since last we spoke, we have new governments on both sides of the Atlantic.
Yay. Um, Let’s start with our own election. When we binned off the Tories. Most of us would be happy with that, I think. did everyone enjoy Bindependence day? It seems so long ago now. Doesn’t it. What was your favorite moment? The demise of the haunted pencil. The lettuce being chucked in the green bin. Mine was probably Gillian Keegan being told by the people of Chichester. On behalf of all of us, but no, in fact, she hadn’t done a good job. I don’t know, but that seems a long time ago. Doesn’t it. Since then, over on the other side of the pond. America’s great experiment of dumbing down the electorate through defunding education has been hugely successful.
I recommend turning off the news and going for a walk in the country I’ve recently got into geocaching. Yeah, I’m a bit obsessed, really. Whenever my wife and I go for a walk, I’m always looking for a cache. Then she gets a bit annoyed with me. She said to me last weekend, I think we should split up. So I said, good idea. We could cover more ground that way.
Alan: 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. Also, if you like the podcast, you’ll love hearing me in person, visit HTTCS.online to find out more about my training and consultancy. And I could be speaking soon, live at your school on inset day. or AT your event or conference more details about this and book purchase links at HTTCS.online. That’s the initials of how to teach computer science. HTTC s.online listeners to the pod. Get a special discount code to just type HTTCSPOD in the checkout Page at johncatbookshop.com to get 20% off everything. That’s everything including classics, such as teaching walkthrus by Tom Sherrington. The Huh. Series by Mary Myatt. And of course my two little books. That’s with the code HTTCSPOD. At Johncattbookshop.com.
Speaking of reading matter, does anyone want my collection of chiropractor, monthly magazines? I’ve got loads of back issues.
So let’s meet my special guest Pete Dring and ask the fertile question. What is physical computing?
Hi, Pete. We’ve spoken online on Twitter and various places, and I’ve used your stuff that you created, particularly during the pandemic. Remember discovering your little uh, exercises with explainer videos during the pandemic and they were really useful. How did that go for you? The dreaded COVID shutdown?
Advertisements
Pete: Yeah, positives and negatives. I was chatting to some teachers yesterday at the swimming pool one of whom has, embraced remote learning completely and is working for an online school.
Another was considering thinking about the benefits of switching from traditional teaching because she just really enjoys imparting knowledge. For me, I just enjoy the classroom interaction. I got so frustrated just watching a wall of profile pictures with nothing coming back. Computer science is fascinating. I really like it, but it to me is not nearly as interesting as interacting with students.
Alan: It was it was difficult, wasn’t it? The you knew that some of them weren’t really listening or weren’t even there, but there was nothing you could do about it during the online teaching that we did. Yeah, I remember there was lots of discussion at the time.
There was like crazy talk on Twitter. Teachers going, how do I force them to turn their cameras on and things like that? Yeah, it was difficult, but but you did lots of, explainer videos and little coding challenges.
Pete: we’re still using those, which is it grew out of a discussion between me and a local teacher in York. Like, how can we still support students to learn to code if we’re not in a room with them? So we wanted to have some short videos that they could engage with.
Obviously, we couldn’t check if they were doing it or not, but we wanted the motivation to come from them, but also some accountability in terms of tracking how much they did. So after putting together the activities that they could do we developed it to a kind of competitive leaderboard so that they could see how well they did compared with the rest of the class.
And that’s something that we’ve continued and developed post COVID. It’s a weekly challenge, something really simple. Like a type race with code that doesn’t really teach them that much from a computer science perspective, other than can I type without having to look at my fingers? But it’s amazing how much of a blockage that is for some students, especially who’s English isn’t their first language.
And then leading all the way through to independent coding from a blank canvas, but trying to trying to break the barriers at each stage between beginner and an end point has been a really interesting challenge.
Alan: Absolutely, and you say about that type code challenge and my students love that and I think there’s much more value in that than maybe it seems at first. It gets pupils to really think about the syntax of the code and find all of the tricky punctuation symbols and stuff and I guess it teaches how precise they have to be. So they might in their head they know I need a for loop, doing the the speed typing exercises on your website would get them familiar with all that business of go print, open bracket and open quotes and all of that.
If you are grateful for my blog, please buy my books here or buy me a coffee at ko-fi.com/mraharrisoncs, thanks!
Yeah, getting the detail right. I suppose we should tell the podcast listeners that this is at your website, which is that particular set of exercises is live.withcode.Uk. Is that right?
Pete: Yeah, that’s right. So the idea is each week there’s a. A short live coding video that goes from blank canvas to completed program, but rather than just giving the whole code, it invites you into the thought process of where it comes from, and it shows you that it’s not necessarily from line one to the end line.
It’s, it grows and it evolves. Most students don’t watch the video because I don’t need to explain why that is. But the easiest thing is that type race. It’s all about a low floor to entry. Anyone can do that without much mental effort. The challenge for me is trying to wean them off that and get them onto the debugging challenges and the code comprehension challenges and the extension challenges afterwards.
Alan: Cool, yeah yeah, so I, I would get them to do those exercises and then cut and paste what they learned into OneNote and then I would check it and stuff, um, yeah, that was all good. Back in the dark days, four years ago it is now the the old lockdown. I can’t believe how long ago it is. Yeah,
Pete: it’s quite scary that some of the new teacher trainees coming through don’t obviously don’t remember teaching through that, but do remember being students through that. So their experience is completely different. I was chatting to a colleague who’s writing an article about, how much of schools learnt about, remote learning. Are we now better prepared for it? But we can’t assume that every teacher has been through it. It just made me feel old thinking that the new teachers coming through were on the other side of the screen.
Alan: That’s quite frightening. I mean, it was an eye opener for me when I realized that the the kids that I was teaching had never heard of Nirvana, and that, that was like a watershed moment. , , how old am I? . I suppose I should. I always forget this, but I suppose I should introduce the podcast listeners to you, or in fact let you introduce yourself So Mr Pete Dring tell us a little about yourself and your teaching experience
and, um.
Advertisements
Pete: thanks Alan, and thanks for having me. I’ve loved the podcast so far. I’ve been teaching for 17 years now, I think. Started as an IT teacher in York, stayed in the city, love teaching in York. Initially started like part time ICT and part time learning support, and I loved that, really enjoyed the idea of a flexible qualification that just was, you shaped to the strengths of individual students, so that’s directed my career since then.
I’m now head of department at another school in York teach iMedia, computer science computing generally and yeah, generally get involved in lots of different clubs and competitions. I’m a sucker for anything free. If there’s a competition going where students can win something or I can win something, I’m all over it.
Alan: Yeah, good stuff. And like I said earlier, we we’ve chatted and exchanged ideas often on, on the socials and so on. so it’s good to have this chat and just toss some ideas around. The the point of today really was to talk a little bit about physical computing, wasn’t it? So I’ll just briefly tell you my experiences.
Not great to be honest in the classroom. I remember getting out the Raspberry Pis and thinking this is wonderful and then lesson going downhill very quickly. And yeah, so it’s difficult to use the Raspberry Pis. So I used the micro bits in lesson and had some great fun doing the rock, paper, scissors and stuff in lesson.
Micro bits are just about manageable because you’re not, at least you’re not unplugging mice and monitors and stuff. Stuff and trying to plug them into the Raspberry Pis, but I quickly moved all that physical computing to after school clubs where it was a bit more manageable with fewer students and more buy in from them, if you like.
And I like using microbit bitbot robots and we had races around the classroom. So that’s my experience. I wish I could have done more of it in the classroom, I guess, um, but uh, that’s why I’ve got you on, Pete, so you can tell me what uh, what you do with physical computing. First of all, tell us about What kit that you’ve been using, what’s available, what’s out there these days and what’s it good at?
Pete: Well, I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed if you hold me up as a pinnacle of best practice in the classroom. But there’s a lot that I’ve seen done loads of mistakes that I’ve made but similarly, I find Physical computing works best as an extracurricular activity where you can invest in a smaller number of students.
But there are some tips and tricks to make it work in the classroom. You ask about kit. I think that’s a really interesting question. Your book actually gives a list of some kit in order of complexity. And I think that’s really helpful. So you mentioned Makey Makey, Crumble, Microbit, Arduino and Raspberry Pi.
So I’ve tried all of those. I really don’t like using a Raspberry Pi in front of students, because like you say, there’s so much that can go wrong. I like physical computing in a classroom where there’s just one device where every student can still use it. They can see it at the front. It’s easier to set up, but their code can still interact with it.
So Raspberry Pi can be brilliant for that if you’ve just got one. So like Raspberry Pi Minecraft is great. You can have the big teacher computer set up showing the Minecraft screen. Students can run code, simulate it on their own computer, so they get instant feedback. It’s easy to debug. But then they can collaboratively build a wall, like a 3D display. And they write code That sends messages, displays messages, makes 3D models. It’s a great way to illustrate data representation and and networking security. Yeah, that can be really good fun.
Most of what I do in the classroom is probably with micro bits similarly. But the top tip I think is it comes from a primary activity. I put together a workshop for some local primaries and an SEN conference. And being able to run that conference, we got some money to buy a class kit that we could then give to local primary schools of these crumble computers. And if you’ve not come across crumbles, they’re like micro bits, but you use crocodile clips for them. And then they’re much simpler and primary friendly.
But the breakthrough moment was making the setup and the pack away part of the learning activity. I think sometimes physical computing could be set up as this magical thing that all of us teachers feel guilty because we’re not doing quite enough of. But it can just sometimes feel like a bit of a bolt on that is a bit unnecessary. It’s, It’s kind of like the crowbar of trying to make our lessons fun for the sake of it. Which, you know, just makes me cringe a little bit. It’s not our job to make lessons fun. It’s our job to make lessons relevant and challenging and to bring students on.
If you are grateful for my blog, please buy my books here or buy me a coffee at ko-fi.com/mraharrisoncs, thanks!
So if physical computing is purposeful. Then it’s memorable and students learn so much from it. So with the crumbles, set up all of the equipment into small groups, let the students go into groups, and then their first instruction was to come up and ask for a little sparkle, which is a little RGB LED, and then they have to go back and a separate person in their team has to come up and ask for a set of wires.
And if they didn’t ask exactly as written on the instructions, I would say, no, I’m sorry, I don’t understand that instruction. And they had to say, please, and they had to say, thank you. And it meant that they got turned away because they didn’t understand their instructions. So the first teaching point was, okay, you’ve got to be polite to the teacher, but why?
Because instructions have to be explicit. You have to restrict yourself to that instruction set and that’s exactly what physical computing devices will do. And that was great because it meant that the setup and the pack down was well ordered and managed. It worked.
Alan: Well, That’s brilliant. one of my next questions was going to be about behavior and that is how do you manage behavior when you’ve got all this kit out and you want it to survive to the next lesson, for instance um, I was talking to I think it was Dave Morgan and he said how he brought in a CPU to demonstrate just to share it around the class and unfortunately he brought in like 150 pound um, CPU that he was planning to use in a project and all the pins got bent and, and, and, you know, these things happen. So you don’t really.
Want your kit to be destroyed and yeah, that making, making the fetching, if you like, and returning of the kit part of the lesson is a great idea, I certainly know this, I needed to build in at least 10 minutes at the start and 10 minutes at the end for getting out and packing away, which doesn’t leave a lot of time if you’ve only got one hour for the lesson, but if you can get that. If you can put pedagogy into those 10 minutes as well, then what a brilliant idea that is.
Pete: There are some other things that help too, like storage is really important. It took me a couple of years of teaching a physical computing unit with year nines to work out that actually handing out the tiny stubby little micro USB cables, they’re only about 10 centimetres long, separately to the micro bit was a waste of time.
We just keep the USB cables connected and tell them not to do that. Um, Have a box um, where they can all be put in compartments, have a student that hands them out at the start, and go round and make sure they’re all carefully put in their right compartments. Yeah, allocating time.
Alan: Yeah, you say about, get a student helper. I mean, this is where I used to have digital leaders. So you, your students, obviously the ones that are quite keen um, responsibility. I had, mostly in year seven, they would come at break time and say, sir, can I do anything for you? You know, I think, I think the school experience tends to beat that out of them at some point, but you know, year seven, and so you say, yeah, so be a digital leader and they go, Oh, what’s that mean?
And you go, Oh when I’ve got a physical computing lesson, you go and get the micro bits out and you hand them out and you get them back in and you get really keen students doing that. So, so it’s giving out some responsibility. As well .
So why are we doing all this? If it’s so hard and needs all of this extra management over a lesson that’s just on the computers. Um, well, Why? It does. It’s got. extra work, extra planning and extra management going on, but um, there must be some benefits too.
Pete: And expense as well.
Alan: And expense. Yeah. Yeah. So why are we doing it?
Pete: Um, so many reasons. I think you mentioned in your book that, which is excellent by the way um, that Uh, specifications for Key Stage 4, Key Stage 5 are put together from an assessment point of view.
Advertisements
You just get a dry list of topics and that tends to infect or influence certainly the way that we teach inevitably and the way And probably in a good way as well as a bad way. But it does mean that the links between the topics get lost, that hinterland, that the bits that make the course interesting and memorable.
And I think if you do physical computing, there will be things that go wrong, but there will be things that students will learn. Remember far more than anything else. I’ve got students who will remember activities that I’ve got. I’ve completely forgotten doing with them with the micro bit or a crumble or an Arduino or Raspberry Pi Pico or something.
But they remember what went wrong. They remember what they had to fix. They remember the the bridge between the topics. So one of the topics that I think is really hard to put in context and build those links between them is logic. And why are we learning about and, or, and not? I understand the concept , it’s quite easy to, to teach about truth tables and that kind of thing, but until you see the logic gates put together into a half adder, a full adder, and then actually turning into a mini CPU and then talking about the complexities, the restrictions and then how you can build that to make it more advanced, faster, more complex I think physical computing is memorable and it builds those links that makes what we teach memorable.
It’s fun, but you know it’s not my job to make students have fun. Fun is like the third on the list of priorities for me. I want them to be decent human beings and I want them to learn computer science. Fun is kind of a byproduct, but I’d like it to be memorable.
Alan: Yeah, we’ve said this. So, the. The episode with Adrienne we went over this. I don’t know if you’ve listened to it, but she said, oh yeah um, we were, we were talking about teacher cliches and one of them, are we, are we having a fun lesson, miss, or haven’t we, are we having a fun lesson? And Adrienne and I both agreed. We say, all, our lessons are fun. You know, All my lessons
Pete: Every time.
Alan: Yeah, but I’m very much a believer in fun comes from success, success is its own reward, being able to do something that you couldn’t do an hour ago, you try and build a culture , of achievement in the classroom and you value and you praise effort and achievement and, they start enjoying success. I made it work, Sir look, and that, that’s where the fun comes from for me because, I was talking to Dave Hilliard, I’m dropping names.
These are all people who’ve been on the podcast. Dave Hilliard we had a nice chat last week and it was about, algorithms and Programming being a creative art and how beautiful an elegant solution is, and that’s what we need to try and get instilled in the pupils, I think.
Pete: Yeah, I agree. And I think success doesn’t have to be individual. Success can be infectious. And the beauty of physical computing is that you have a physical remnant of someone else’s success that can inspire someone else. So some of the best projects have that wow factor that other students can walk into a room and say, what is that?
You actually built a satellite that went up in a rocket and wow, that’s incredible. How did that work? Can I do that? And it, it creates that sense of, yeah, I can picture myself. Doing something actually worthwhile rather than the intangible hello world or the even worse. Have you come across programming tutorials that mention foo and bar?
It’s a bugbear of mine. So, so abstract. It’s just abstract.
Alan: Yeah, SoloLearn’s a bit like that. Um, It’s not bad. SoloLearn app if you want to learn a new language, but it’s all foo and bar. And. Yeah, and Snakify. Lots of teachers were looking in the last last few years for a self marking Python tutorial.
And Snakify was talked about regularly on Facebook, for example. I tried it and I hated it and my pupils hated it. It was all maths. It was, calculating the root of this number or the primes and working out primes and stuff. And it was just not relatable at all.
Pete: And it’s good for some, yeah. Yeah. I really I mean, Anna Wake was talking about this in your episode about Mission Encodable and she mentioned the new the new level on Mission Encodeable, which is out now, and it’s incredibly creative. Really good. Yes, it’s great to see some practical, creative challenges, and that’s what I like again, about physical computing.
You can get students to do something that genuinely does have. Potential to make the world a better place. That’s the tagline for computing at my school. It’s, we want students to be able to learn the digital skills to make the world a better place, which sounds really airy fairy, but when you see devices that have won literally a thousand pounds for improving the environment or tackling mental health challenges or physical health challenges, then students can imagine, okay, what I’m learning in this computing lesson can genuinely make a difference. It’s really good.
If you are grateful for my blog, please buy my books here or buy me a coffee at ko-fi.com/mraharrisoncs, thanks!
Alan: No, it is. Yeah, I must say that what I did was race buggies around and I’m not sure how that’s going to change the world, but uh, but yeah, sounds fun. Yeah, yeah, Yeah. But I’ve seen physical computing projects where, wearables is a good one where, you could put a micro bit on your shoe and count your steps and so on, but you could equally, make that sort of a movement detector for elderly people or something.
And if that micro bit hasn’t moved for an hour, then you can go and check on your elderly relative, that type of thing. So, so yeah, just the simplest idea can be applied to so many different contexts and some of them could be really important.
Pete: Yeah, I’d recommend competitions for that kind of thing. It can give focus to finding a purpose. There are some excellent competitions from ones that are really easy for students to get into, like Mission Zero, where you haven’t got physical kit in front of you, but the physical kit is on the International Space Station and you’re writing code to visualize images. Every student who takes part gets a certificate saying where the International Space Station was over the planet whilst it run their code. All the way to other competitions, which take a significant amount of effort, like the PA consulting Raspberry Pi competition. I think is brilliant. Every year you have a scenario.
So this year, it’s about medical technology. And I’ve got some year eight students who are putting together a Raspberry Pi device that measures. heart rate and pulse and ECG signals and body temperature and tracks all of that. And it’s great. The first time I did a competition like that was very labor intensive where I had to work with students and try and learn how to do it myself. And then this year, the students just do it themselves. They’ve taught themselves, they’ve got the kit, they work on it, they support each other. And it’s just brilliant to see the stuff that they can create and produce and share.
Alan: That’s great. And you talk about medical devices there. That’s often one that’s cited that girls are more interested. What’s your gender balance like in these competitions?
Pete: Yeah, good question. So last year, my team for the PA Consulting competition was all boys. So the challenge this year was to move from a sixth form team to a key stage three team and to have mixed gender gap. I run a STEM club after school which has built up over the last couple of years from, A really small group to now, I think we had about 120 students that applied for a place and most of those who applied were boys, but because I can only take 32 in the classroom, I can be selective and go for a 50 50 gender split and that’s been brilliant.
So most of what we do there is First LEGO League, where we use Spike Prime LEGO kits to, to solve problems, and that’s great to have girls teams, boys teams, mixed teams working together, sharing ideas realizing that what’s actually valued in the competition isn’t just the code, the code’s important. But actually a diverse team is so, so helpful for so many ways, just because you have different personalities, different strengths, different weaknesses sharpening each other.
Alan: Yes, getting the teamwork going is definitely something that physical computing can help with. So even going back to my bit bots, racing them, what I did actually was I got my DT teacher to build me an arena for racing the micro bits around, basically a maze, an adaptable maze. So you could make a maze of any shape. And we raced the bit bots around it. And I the bit bots were from 4Tronix. I think if you search them, there’s also Kitronik and obviously Pi Hut and PiMoroni and lots of other places you can get these things from. But basically the micro bit slots into it, so you program the micro bit and if you go on make code, the block coding interface for the micro bit, there’s already extensions for the bit bot, so get all these blocks that say, drive forward, turn left and so on.
So it’s easy to just block code the instructions for the bit bot and then you plug your micro bit into the bit bot robot, which is a little buggy. Which drives around the maze. So they were trying different strategies for getting around the maze as quickly as possible. And, I’ve got some videos up on the school YouTube site of the shouting and screaming when they were um, being successful.
so that was great. And there was two ways Two or more different strategies they could use. There was just hit and hope, as in when you hit a wall, bounce off, turn and see if you can go in that direction. And then I offered them the ultrasound sensors, which could sense how close they were to the wall, and they could use them if they wanted.
And it was great to see different, using different inputs. to to the algorithm and deciding what to do. Yeah, so that was just robots around a maze, which my lot enjoyed and it didn’t cost a huge amount. But again, I did that in after school clubs because I can’t see that being very easy in a lesson but it got the teamwork going and so they were working in at least pairs and You know, there was lots of conversations all about algorithms in that room.
So that’s what you can get going. Yeah.
Pete: And presumably that board, that six by three board was something that other students could see. It might only be a small number of students who come to the club, but the after effects of the buzz of that and people talking about it and the ability to use it at open evening, it has a much wider impact.
Alan: Yes. Yeah, so the board because of its size was usually visible in all my lessons. . Yeah. So, so yeah. Oh yeah. That’s the maze arena. For, and that did work. it did work as a recruiting tool, I had the robots on my windowsill as well, so they could be seen by in the playground and stuff. So, um. so yeah, that worked.
Pete: So don’t misbehave in Mr. Harrison’s lesson or he’ll put you in the maze and you’ve got to find your way out.
Alan: Yeah, we need a life size one, don’t we? Um, so what was, what’s the best project you’ve seen done? What’s the best physical computing project you’ve been involved in or in fact seen?
Pete: Great question. There’s so many really good ones. The best one I’ve been involved in recently was CANSAT, which is sponsored by the European Space Agency and done through STEM learning. Have you come across that at all?
Advertisements
Alan: I’ve seen it online, yeah.
Pete: It’s it’s quite a complex competition. So there’s upper Key Stage 4, Key Stage 5, it would be most appropriate to. I had a small team of sixth formers that were involved this year. And we used two Raspberry Pi Pico devices. So with a Pico, you can code it with MicroPython or CircuitPython and you. You have to make a can sized, a drinks can sized satellite that will go in a rocket and it gets launched a thousand feet up into the sky, it takes sensor readings and then beams them with a long range FM transmitter back down to Earth.
So you need one Raspberry Pi Pico in the satellite, another one down on your ground station, and you have to transmit the data, receive it, process it, and then visualize it. And it’s fascinating, absolutely fascinating, because you’ve got to focus on the physical aspect, like a parachute design. You have to focus on building the satellite itself, then prototyping it, trying to make it robust enough, because the G forces when it launches And then when it starts to to descend are significant and then you’ve really got to focus on the robust code for it.
So for us, we managed to get the code working and it received all the sensor values, but we hadn’t ever really tested it in the field at a thousand feet up in the sky. With other people transmitting on the same frequency. So we got some data, but it was partially corrupted and it just brought home to the students how essential it is to make your code reliable and robust.
But even outside of the students who were involved I got some year seven students involved in writing some code to to work out the best size of the parachute , it linked into some Year 8, Year 9 lessons for designing a logo for the team. And then my Year 11s wanted to do a test launch on the field with a drone. And you’ve, my goodness, you’ve no idea how much hassle it was to try and get permission to launch a drone on the school field and drop something from it.
Alan: Oh, no. Are you near a flight path, or is it just the council going, you can’t do that?
Pete: It’s because it’s the same technology that is used to drop drugs into prisons. So you have to get through so many levels of risk assessments and permission. But it was so worthwhile, it’s good fun.
Alan: Okay, that didn’t occur to me. Now I’m wondering whether, there could be year 11s and beyond with a lucrative sideline in drug running into prisons now.
Pete: Well, There’s always an option.
Alan: Could be a downside of that project.
Pete: Or exploring a route out of teaching, who knows if this all gets too complicated.
Alan: Nice one. So. this is all very well, all this fun as we keep saying, it’s not about fun. It’s about learning. How does all of this contribute to the learning that you want them to do? And sadly, we said, the tick box objectives of the curriculum and the assessments they’re going to do eventually, is it all worthwhile?
Pete: I think so. As long as it’s done in a purposeful way and in a manageable way, students know instantly whether something is just a token activity. So, I find that simulating before using physical kit is really helpful, especially for things like micro bits, where you can have an on screen simulator, either with blocks or with Python codes.
And that takes the frustration of, behavior management of. of handing out the kit, collecting it out at the end. You can teach them about the benefits of instant debugging is really hard, actually to debug a code on a Raspberry Pi or a micro bit. If you’ve just got the device in front of you and a simulator is really helpful for that, but it’s nowhere near as satisfying or as applied as if you actually plug in the physical device and hold it.
So It’s about trying to draw out the learning objectives really clearly at the start of the lesson and then link it back and keep referring back to it. So you’re referring back to when the micro bit didn’t work, giving that as a practical example that students can relate to when they’re debugging in future.
I do think it’s worth doing, but I don’t do it very regularly just because it’s expensive in terms of time and preparation, but once you’ve got a project that works it can be repeated and scaled up. Like we’ve got class sets of micro bits now and talking about networking We can talk about network protocols, we can talk about packet sniffing, but if we do the theory first and then a 20 minute activity where students write a bit of Python code to send using the radio module in a micro bit and then receive it, turn it into a remote control for a device and see the potential for somebody else to send another packet that will then interfere with it.
It brings the theory alive in a way that, yes, is fun, but ultimately I need them to be able to remember it and apply their understanding. And that’s where physical computing comes into its own.
Alan: Absolutely. Yeah, it’s that sort of, that hook to hang things on and, that memorable lesson and if you’ve read anything by Peps Mccrae he’s got a book called Memorable Teaching and it’s probably the best hour of reading you’ll do in your teaching career to be honest because Peps Mccrae’s books are very short but absolutely jam packed with great advice and memorable teaching and it’s, it’s about creating those memorable moments which are almost like the seed of a schema that you can build upon and, the really solid hooks that you can build on because you’ve got that lesson where this thing happened and, Like you say they made the links between programs and logic and input and output all in one lesson and have something to hang the, the theory on if you like.
Pete: No, I’ll look out for that. If you can post a link in the show notes, I’ll I’ll have a look at that book or that paper.
Alan: Yeah, Peps Mccrae is brilliant. He’s got a series of four books, I think, that are really short. Like I say, they’re only like 70 pages or something, and you can read it in an hour or so. And Memorable Teaching was the one that I remember. Nice.
Pete: That must have worked.
Alan: Yeah, I will. I’ll pop that in the chat and on the blog. So yeah, so what are you up to? I assume you’re on Easter holidays at the moment.
Pete: Yes, so Easter holidays for me means procrastinating and pretending that I’m marking my coursework for A level and iMedia and failing miserably at it and trying to find any excuse not to actually knuckle down.
Alan: I must admit, as a former teacher of iMedia, I feel your pain there is a lot of marking. And a previous guest and I were talking about this the workload in the vocationals for teachers, but also for pupils, the amount they have to write.
And there’s a lot of talk about gatekeeping of computer science, GCSE. And a lot of schools still do this. Oh, you can only do it if you’ve got target six in maths and all of that. And then a lot of schools. push those children without a target of six or above in maths onto the vocationals, believing that they’re easier.
And vocational qualifications in IT, which include, I suppose, Creative iMedia is IT adjacent, and the Cambridge Nationals and the BTECs and all of those. I always find that it’s just full of written work. They have to research and write things up, and that can be very difficult for the lower prior attaining students.
Pete: Yeah, completely. I mean, in theory, and also in terms of principles, computer science should be for every student and anyone should be able to take part in it, but also the vocational qualifications should also be for everybody and they are really quite challenging at the top end. There’s a huge amount of extension and then not that easy at the bottom end.
You’re right. There’s a lot that you, especially if If you do them as you’re supposed to do them, the iMedia qualifications, we’re not allowed to tell students what software to use, what tasks to do in what order. They have to be self managed and that’s really hard for some of my weakest students to, to read and interpret and work out what to do.
It’s. It’s so frustrating when you see students just missing something obvious because we’re not allowed to tell them how to approach the work they could organise themselves.
Alan: Yeah, I remember doing things like researching different software and so on and and they would just Google stuff and write what they read because, how would you research what software to use, yeah, I agree. But we got Off the topic a little bit. So you’re avoiding marking. Why don’t you give all your marking to AI, Pete? Why are you doing it yourself?
Pete: Yeah, I mean, thankfully the qualifications have got better so that the initial research task is removed now. But I probably do spend far too much time thinking about how could I simplify this? How can I? Make a robot that will mark for me rather than actually just knuckling down and doing the marking in the first place.
Alan: Yeah, unfortunately you, you are running a vocational qualification with tons of coursework so that there’s no easy way out of this. But yeah, I was being facetious about AI just now. It does make me sad when I see teachers talking about using AI to mark and to create reports, as in sending reports to parents and I just think we’re automating the wrong things. I worked in a school that didn’t do reports. What we did was had a principle that we would get in touch with parents if there was anything they needed to know, and then we’d have one parent’s evening, which went virtual, of course, during COVID, and stayed virtual.
So it was online. So there’d be one online parent’s evening, and that was it. And I think that’s fine, because all you need as a parent is to know whether your child is happy, whether they have any issues that you need to deal with. Otherwise, that’s. That’s about all I ever needed to know. I didn’t need to know whether they were at, the old level 4B or whatever replaced it, which in a lot of schools was just another version of level 4B, you know, but I didn’t need to know that. I needed to know, are they working hard? Are there any barriers to their learning? Are they happy? Are they being bullied or whatever? Beyond that, I trust the teachers to get them to do as much progress as the teachers can get them to do, and that, and so automating reports. And oh, I’ve got this ai, it takes my one liner which has a grade and an effort and a topic that he’s not good at. And it turns it into 500 words of a report. And I’m thinking, if I’m the parent receiving AI generated 500 words. , I’d rather the one liner, please.
Pete: Absolutely.
Alan: If that’s all the teacher knows about my child, send me that. Don’t get AI to make up 500 words.
Pete: What you can imagine next is a program for parents that will take AI generated content that’s 500 words long and simplify it down to one sentence that is exactly what the teacher thinks about your child.
Alan: yes, James is an enthusiastic boy, but sometimes his enthusiasm leads him to make teaching difficult or whatever. And you think, right, what did the teacher mean by that? He’s naughty, right? He’s disruptive. Okay. I’ll phone the school and find out what the truth is, so then AI for marking. I remember there was a Dragon’s Den episode. Have you seen MarkMate? The guy was on Dragon’s Den and basically you dictate into this machine and it
Pete: Yeah, I have seen this.
Alan: Automates written marking of books and I’m thinking just stop because I don’t know about you But I do very little marking when I’m teaching I did lots of multiple choice quizzes lots of retrieval practice lots of in lesson feedback I would walk around and see how they’re doing and give them Tailored feedback verbally regularly so they had tons of formative feedback and then I’d do a summative test once a year multiple choice quizzing using either Microsoft Forms or something. Yeah and that was enough for me, that was more than enough for me. So formative feedback has to replace all this written marking and in a lot of schools it has done.
Pete: Yeah, no, we have to be wise and kind to ourselves about what is possible and what is beneficial. We deliberately have a feedback policy rather than a marking policy because the amount of marking we have to do at Key Stage 4 and Key Stage 5 is so huge, we need to create capacity for that and use the technology to, to give feedback where possible and, Prioritise time for what students actually value, which is the motivational feedback, the well done, you’re doing a great job, or come on focus, this is how you can improve, the verbal things that actually make an impact.
We’ve been doing a a study with the Raspberry Pi Foundation an action research project on the impact of different types of feedback in computer science. And that’s been fascinating because we do a lot of different types of feedback, self reflection confidence ratings, um, assessment for learning automatically generated assessment.
And we asked students what makes the biggest impact on your motivation? And what makes the biggest impact on how equipped you are to actually do something about it? What informs you about the next steps and what they said and what we thought were completely different. So that’s challenged what we do to try and free up some extra time to focus on what students actually find beneficial so that we don’t waste our time going through books ticking and flicking but do invest in individual feedback where possible and where beneficial.
Alan: Yes, a feedback policy. Feedback much greater than marking and definitely. So again, we got off topic. So we need to have another conversation another day about all that stuff. But as for today, that’s been brilliant, Pete.
Thanks for coming on.
Pete: Thank you so much for having me on the podcast and thank you for all of the nuggets of information and context and hinterland that we can all glean from your book. Really helpful.
Alan: No, you’re welcome. It was a labour of love. I had it in me. I had to get it out. So, yeah, and obviously there’s a learn book as well for students. I don’t know why I’m showing it on the podcast. But, yeah. Yeah, that’s great podcasting, Alan. Well done. So yeah, don’t forget the learn book for students which Dave Hilliard was involved with. He wrote the foreword, that’s Craig and Dave’s Dave, of course, and he wrote the foreword and he proofread it.
So I’m grateful to him for that. So if you have very scholarly students, or even if you don’t, you could buy them a class set. That would be really kind to me and kind to your students. But yeah, thanks for coming on, Pete. lovely to talk to you. The sun’s come out, so I think it’s time we we wrap up.
Pete: Great to see you. Thanks for making time. All the best.
Alan: And you, Pete. Lovely to talk to you. Take care. Bye. Thank you.
Pete: Bye bye.
Alan: Well, that’s a wrap for another pod. What a great chat with Pete.
Some sad news. My mate’s funeral is tomorrow at 9:00 AM, but I’m not going. He knows I was never a morning person.
Talking of funerals, there was an incident last week when the man who invented USB sticks was being buried, the coffin got stuck going into the grave, but they turned it around and it fitted perfectly.
Quiet, correct horse battery staple. He’s quite angry at all the name changes. Well, he would be he’s a cross breed.
Don’t forget podcast listeners can get a 20% discount off all books at johncattbookshop.com with code HTTCSpod. If you already have the books, buy me a coffee, please at ko-fi.com/mraharrisoncs, all links are on my blog at HTTCS.online/blog and subscribe now so you don’t miss a thing.
This is the start of series two. More to come next week. Have a great week and I’ll catch you next time.
If you are grateful for my blog, please buy my books here or buy me a coffee at ko-fi.com/mraharrisoncs, thanks!
Alan: Hello. And welcome to how to teach computer science, the podcast. This is episode 10, the long-awaited part two of my brilliant chat with David Morgan on the fertile question. What’s the future of education?
If you missed last week, firstly subscribe so you don’t miss another episode and tell your friends too, but you missed stuff like this.
I don’t know if you’ve been listening to the podcast. I’ve been using various.
David: Yeah. You enjoying it? 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.
Alan: I’ll get onto part two in a moment, but you will remember last time I accepted Dave’s challenge to create a tutor bot that was at least as good as CS50.ai from Harvard. We met last week and hosted a live AI teacher lab. And made a Python programming tutor bot in 10 minutes. Have a look at mindjoy.com For how you can do the same.
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, I’m available for conferences, inset days and bespoke training. Just visit HTTCS dot online. And I could be speaking at your school next week.
So we’re talking about AI again today. And after my tutor bot experience, I can say with confidence that AI particularly large language models have a big role to play in education, or to put it another way.
What do we want?
When do we want them?
That’s right.
. Shush. That’s right. LLMs, notoriously. Forget what you said to them. Just seconds earlier, which is probably why I get on so well with them, me and my short attention.
Sorry, there was a squirrel out the window.
quiet password 17 hash exclamation mark poop emoji!, what was I saying? Oh, yes. Short attention span. My wife complains about it. Just the other day, she said you haven’t been listening to a word. I said, have you? I thought that’s a strange way to start a conversation. My 19 year old son, who’s off at university. These days.
And I have reached that stage in our relationship where we just trade funny memes and internet stupidity on WhatsApp. And recently we’ve been chuckling at LLM fails. Here’s what Google search returned when someone who wanted to take in a rescued reptile. Asked the question. How do I adopt a bearded dragon?
Advertisements
Alan: So let’s get back to my interview with the lesson hacker also known as another day from Craig and Dave’s YouTube channel.
Last time I paused the conversation just as we were talking about careers.
David: 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. It’s a good
Alan: 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 the nail polish and so on. But but yeah, use your, 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. And I, I genuinely think that there are things about a school that speak to you as an individual and I, as an individual. Do not like being micromanaged. I do not like rules that can’t be backed up and justified. I do not like inconsistency. So I like the ability to go into a school where the ethos is about teaching and learning.
What, like one of the, one of the first schools where I was head of department was a school called John Cabot Academy. And this has got to be about 15 years ago now, but I joined it. And it was such a revelation for me because their school motto is was learners leading learning.
Learners leading learning as a concept at the time was very forward thinking. And what it meant was any decision, any decision at all was filtered through that lens, even to the point where if a decision was coming down to a we’re not really sure, we’re not really sure. students would get involved.
Lead the learning. Where do you want to go with this? What do you want to happen? And what it did lead to is a lot of freedom of expression as a teacher. If my students wanted to go in a certain direction, I could. I remember one, one, one day, just like my students wanted to explore something. So I marched them all down to the canteen where they were having new tills fitted. We, we were like, Just watching the guys fit it and taking notes and going, what’s that? What’s that? What’s that? I’m sure we annoyed the poor guys to death, but there was no,
David: Nobody came and tuttered at me afterwards. Like the head will pass. It was like, Oh, what are you doing? And I was like, Oh, they’re fitting this stuff.
Advertisements
This is a great learning opportunity. Oh yeah. Yeah. That’s great. And the students wanted to go and see what it was. So we, it’s just silly things like that. Schools that live their values. I feel like it’s much more of a better place than me. So I understand. And there’s always a situation where, you know.
You’ve got other things, you’ve got, you’ve got childcare to be concerned about, you’ve got an existing reputation in the school that you’ve already got, but you are right. As STEM teachers, and especially as computer science teachers, especially in England, if you are not happy where you are because the ethos of the school doesn’t fit you as a teacher, there are other schools.
And Feel free to look around, feel free to shop around because the demand for us is high. I mean, honestly, the last teaching job I got, I was offered the job before the interview finished. They were so keen to have a decent computer science teacher in the school, but it’s such a, such a, such a weird situation for computer science teachers.
We can be a bit more choosy. And as you said, we do have a bit of a privilege, but it’s the same is true for science teachers. The same is true for a lot of the mathematicians. And the other
Alan: thing, the other thing we can do as you proved on your latest video for Craig and Dave, is that you can, we’re computer science teachers, we can deepfake ourselves and send our AIs into the classroom to teach for us, can’t we? And which art teacher could do that?
David: I, I genuinely, what I, one of the things I loved about one of my previous schools was, We had an internal group of just people that were really nerdy about teaching and learning. And we were forever, because I was part of it, I was like, Oh, have you seen this deep fake thing?
Or have you seen this? Let’s try this. Let’s try that. And it pushed the technology forward in the school. So I don’t think there’s anything wrong with, with being excited and nerdy and helping out that art teacher to do those things. But if I can just pick up on that, because that was a really fun video to do actually, because I like, I’ve seen this technology work.
I didn’t realize how ridiculously fast and easy this stuff was to do. If you’ve not seen the video, not only did I replicate my entire voice, so I didn’t speak for the video, I just put my script in. It was honestly the easiest video I’ve ever done. Put my script in. I think I trained the AI with about a minute or two of my audio.
And then downloaded the MP3 and then just sat there pulling faces whilst the thing was playing. But the other fun thing I did was I took, I just literally downloaded one of the videos where Craig was talking, one of the videos where Dave was talking, fed that into it and got a reasonably good approximation of their audio.
And then did the same with video of them and had them saying beautiful things about my wonderful head of hair. It’s, it’s, but, but then, then my brain, my brain, again, this is why I’m a broken person, I think, because my brain goes, how can I use this in the classroom to think of all the lists of things I could do?
And I’m like, Oh, how good, how good would this be for like an English teacher? I’ve got, we’ve just watched Macbeth with some very famous actors and actresses, and suddenly. I’ve got a deepfake Lady Macbeth talking through the motivations she’s got for this scene. Yeah. Or, or, I’m a history teacher and they’re really struggling with aspects of twenties and thirties Soviet Russia type thing in the Russian revolution. Because from history just brought to life
Alan: instantly. Yeah, I remember when I was training to teach almost my first lesson I was in a school and there was a trainee RE teacher, religious education teacher, at the same time in the same school. And And he was planning for his first lesson.
And it was the first lesson about Buddhism he was going to teach. So He he started off the lesson and he said, I’ve got a special guest and he went out and dressed as the Buddha and came back in and said, what do you want to ask me? So he was the Buddha and they asked the Buddha questions and then he went back and took all his robes off and came back in and said, I missed it. Who was the special guest? And it was all there. So that lesson, I saw him planning it for like two weeks and literally going and renting costumes and, and yeah, I mean, we can laugh about what teacher training used to be like, and you would plan lessons for like weeks and you go, and they go wrong and you go, oh, what can I do next?
Advertisements
David: I used to get told off for that because I didn’t, right? I’m, Because again, my brain works in a very different way, I think sometimes. So like I’d be everyone else would be like, Oh, I spent all night planning this lesson out and I was like, I’ve got my bullet points down. I don’t know what else I built. What else do you want? I’m just going to talk, but
Alan: I mean, that’s where everyone ends up, but I think it. I think teacher training is supposed to be a bit like, what Churchill said, on the battlefield plans are useless, but planning is everything. So you’ve got to plan in the first place, even if your plans fall apart, because then you’ll know what to do when they do fall apart.
And I think that’s the principle. Coming back to relating this back to computing, he doesn’t need to do that now. He doesn’t need to go out and dress up and come back in. It just needs, you know, an AI.
David: We destroyed the costume rental industry with AI, what a terrible thing. It’s not your job you need to worry about, it’s the entire costume rental for teachers sector that we need to be concerned about.
Alan: Absolutely, yeah, all these worries about jobs and we’re worrying about the wrong jobs. I’m talking of which artists are a bit Bit miffed at the minute and all the AI art and then, oh, Facebook is now just swamped with all these ridiculous AI art pictures for clickbait likes.
I don’t know if anyone’s noticed the, I’m 150. I made this cake and I’m, I’m looking for your likes and the like farming pages aren’t they? These are Facebook pages that have been set up and they Just to, get people liking and following their pages and what they’ll do after a year of this nonsense is they’ll flip and sell the page to a scammer, a virus seller, or, phishing scammer. And so these Facebook pages, there’s thousands of them, but they all, the AI art pages, and there’s like this kid who’s supposed to be like eight and all, I’ve made this picture of a dog out of, of recycled bottles.
And he’s the poor kid’s got 12 fingers and seven toes. You look closely and it’s clearly AI generated with all the problems that, that that they have. But loads of people are going, Oh, this is brilliant. Well done. You’re a, you’re a clever young man and all of that. And all those people are going to get scammed in a year from now when that page is turned over to phishing scammers.
That’s what’s happening. I wanted to say some. I saw on threads probably an AI cartoon and I laughed at it. I didn’t know it was AI at first. It was hilarious. It’s a picture, a scene. There’s a woman in a restaurant on a date, obviously, and she’s saying, I like bad boys and opposite her across the table. is a Labrador saying, this isn’t going to go well for you, Janet.
If you are grateful for my blog, please buy my books here or buy me a coffee at ko-fi.com/mraharrisoncs, thanks!
But then you look closely and the Labrador’s got two tails, one of which protrudes through the chair. You look closely and the woman’s legs are hidden by the tablecloth, but her feet come out about four foot ahead of her body. And so she would have a four foot long thigh bone if it was real and stuff.
But I laughed and then I thought, that’s unethical because some cartoonist. Could have drawn that and then this is an AI recreation. But anyway, I still laughed. So, is AI gonna kill art? Is it gonna take, is it gonna take the jobs that we actually enjoy doing, leaving us to do all the drudgery? ?
David: I, I, I like, I very much believe that AI is an augmenting tool and not a replacement tool.
I think with anything, the first thing people do is they try to cut costs by. Removing people from the equation. So I’ll give you a good example of this, right? Is that this was about 10 years ago, one of the big American newspapers sacked all their photography staff and only used photos from people with smartphones.
Because they were like, smartphone cameras are so good now, we don’t need photographers. Turns out, people smartphones ain’t exactly art history. So it was like, The quality of photos went down, and within a couple of months, they were hiring people back on board. And I think we’ll see the same thing with AI art, and the creative fields, unfortunately, where they’ve been hit first, because creative, what AI does, is it scales up processes that until now have been lengthy.
So the main area where it affects us as teachers is in writing. And so one of the things that I think AI tutors are very good for is for giving instant marking feedback and iterative improvement. I don’t mean the final mark, they can still, have interesting times, but one of the things I think is really special is you give a student a question, and you give the AI the mark scheme, and you give it a bunch of pointers.
Advertisements
And the AI can say, okay, so you’ve answered this, but you got about two out of four, and these are the bits you missed. You want to try again? And those sort of exam lessons where the student can iterate on it are very, very quick. Instead of being those slow lessons where you’re waiting for an entire room to try something, you’re picking on a few people.
And I think those sort of lessons are necessary, but they are difficult to maintain the pace with. Everybody. AI means that everyone gets that instant feedback and it’s very, very much more interactive. But what it also does is it speeds up that written work. It speeds up the work of idea to an image. It speeds up eventually, very soon, the idea of idea to video.
The problem is, is everything you’ve said. These have been trained on things. They have weird artifacts. They hallucinate stuff like dogs having two, three tails and human fingers and stuff that would freak you out. But for a cursory glance, they’re okay. I think we’re going to see a situation in the creative fields, especially of maybe six months of people trying to use these things, realizing the limitations, because people like me and you, people that are interested in technology, we already understand what the limitations are.
We think it’s amusing when we see the artifacts of AI in everyday life, and we go, Oh, that’s terrible, isn’t it? I wonder how they’ve got this. Oh, isn’t this an ethical dilemma? But to the person doing it, they’ve gone, boop, boop, boop, cartoon app. And it’s only when there starts to be a pushback against that culturally, which is starting already, is when you You know, you’ve had the, the actors and the writers strikes.
We’re having a big pushback now on a as we’re filming, this is a big pushback on a film called Late Night with the Devil for having generated some of the art used in the, in the film with AI. And it’s very, very badly there, there are lots of artifacts. I enjoy making AI art.
From, I, I spent a bit of time on the weekend actually I’ve always wanted a series of posters on women in computer science because again, I know that Anna Wade talked a couple of weeks ago about the issues of tokenism as a girl in a computer science room, and as somebody that was, raised male, I don’t, I don’t have the the wealth of experience to be able to Properly create a lesson that ticks the box of every female in my class, but then who would?
If I was, if I was born female, I wouldn’t. I can’t tick the box of every male in my class. Part of that’s I don’t, I hate sports, so I have no interest and can’t do those analogies, aI is very good at being able to go okay, Here’s my lesson, here’s my instructions. Just ask the student what they like and build the examples around that.
Advertisements
It’s very good at helping with the contextualization and not making it tokenistic. But I like making AI art. I spent the weekend making my, my women with AI posters and what I love about it, what I think is fascinating is I start off with, with Grace, Grace Hopper, right? Very, very famous, famous person, lots of photographic reference, boosh, get to likeness, boosh.
Perfect on the first try. And I’m just fiddling with style. Then I go, okay, I’ll do, I’ll do Ada, Ada Lovelace, Ada Byron Lovelace. Okay. Not, not quite as good, but then there’s only drawings of it. There’s a couple of them, like they’re very iconic in computer science land and they’ve clearly been trained on it.
And then I’m going through lesser known figures from the Apollo missions to modern day stuff. And oh my God, at one point it’s just like generic lady with glasses. And I’m like, This person isn’t even the right race. You’re just making things up now. So you like, like the, the thing is, it is trained on information.
The more information there is, the better it will be at doing it, just like a human would be. But the less information is, the worse it is. And one of my favorite things about the weekend was I generated, I was messing about and trying to generate and have a consistent character across images. So I’d got, I got a character and I was like, Oh, What scenarios can I put them in?
And I’m a big Star Trek nerd, right? So I was like, Oh, I’d love to see this character dressed like Captain Kirk. She’s, she’s, my prompt was like, she’s in the middle of a battle, phases out, dressed like Captain Kirk, putting in phrases like beam me up Scotty and stuff to give it the context it needs.
Boosh! It comes out in the uniform from Star Trek Discovery. And I’m like, That’s weird. So I really try, really try, and I spent hours trying to get it to be in like this, and this is a very nerdy thing, I’m sorry, but I’m spending hours trying to get it to come in the original series uniform, and it’s not happening.
And I realize what’s happened. I realize that what they’ve done is because Discovery is filmed in 4k and it’s very modern, they’ve just trained the AI on probably every frame of every episode of Star Trek Discovery. And because Star Trek was filmed in the 60s and isn’t HD, there are probably far less images in that set.
So when I say Star Trek, I’m priming it to use the most consistent thing in its database. And just know, like me as a computer scientist, I’m going, Oh, I can see through the matrix. I can see what’s happening. This is an exciting thing for me. So I can see the limitations. I hit the limitations all the time.
I think the technology as an augmentation tool and like for creative people, it’s ideal. If you’re like, I’ve got some ideas, push, push, push. Here’s a couple to start with. Okay. I can iterate on these few here and I can get something that I can make myself. I think it’s a beautiful tool. I think people are using it as a replacement for those people at the moment.
But I think, give it two more months of people being like, why is this person got eight fingers and four and, and, and their hair is just different colors and coming out. People don’t sit like that. When people get to that point with everyday stuff, like it was outcry. There was that cry last week about the BBC using AI to generate copy for tweets, I think, for Doctor Who adverts.
And rightly so. If you don’t prompt an AI properly, it writes absolute nonsense. One of the things we spent a while on in Mindjoy is just getting it to talk like a person and not give all this random I do think AI is like that really clever kid in your class that doesn’t have any life experience, but likes to use big words. And you’re like, Dude like, yes, but Calm it down.
Alan: I’ve got so many thoughts triggered by that, which is great. And just coming back to when you said you see through the matrix, this triggered a thought about a conversation I had on the CAS AI forum, and that’s a good place to go for a few chats with computing teachers about AI, and And we were discussing how it might change programming and I realized something that I posted on there and then a few months later, Jane Waite, the brilliant Jane Waite, came up with the same idea and I went, yeah, I’m glad you see this as well.
Prompt engineering, as it’s become known, is a kind of another form of programming just at a much higher level. What you need to do to be able to be a good programmer is to have a good understanding of the notional machine. You have to have a good notional machine in your head, as in an understanding of what’s happening below your code.
And so what you said there about getting the prompt to do, to make the AI to do what you want, and then working out why it wasn’t doing what you want is Grasping the notional machine underneath, and that’s what we need to do to use AI effectively, is to get that notional machine in your head, know how it’s going to respond to prompts, in the same way that we need to know how a computer that runs Python is going to respond to the Python code that we write. It’s getting that notional machine in your head, and so there’s just notional machine down there that we need to get in our heads so that we can prompt it properly.
David: I think, I’ve been teaching this for years, but I always forget which generation of programming language we claim we’re on. I think we’re on third
generation.
Alan: Oh, I don’t know. I, when I worked in industry in the 90s, I was told I was using fourth generation programming languages.
David: Like, wherever we are, wherever we are, Wherever else the baseline, let’s call it third because that’s what my brain is working at. Let’s say that everything we do at the moment is third.
I genuinely believe that AI is fourth generational programming languages because, it is not just about understanding how the code behaves and interacts. It’s also about understanding about how the system is trained and how the system is prompted and the biases of the machine. And I think that like where AI is being used to supercharge coding.
is great. Unfortunately, it’s ruined a bunch of our programming tools. I’m not naming any names because I used to work for them. But AI certainly has ruined some of our best programming tools for learners because what it’s very good at doing is suggesting straightforward code. And unfortunately, when you’re learning programming for the first time, a lot of what you’re learning is straightforward code.
What it’s very difficult to, what it doesn’t understand is the more complex ideas, but you can prompt around that. You can. Introduce concepts at certain points. You can re explain why things are important. My favorite thing from the workshops that we do at Mindjoy is when I teach teachers about how to really tell a bot to do something.
Because we, we go through a process of saying, right, okay, tell it to speak in British English. Okay, cool. Oh, it’s not. It’s this chat. It’s decided it’s an American. Why, why is that? Because AI has been trained on the entire corpus of the internet. What do people do on the internet when they really want you to do something?
They shout at you in caps. So if you want an AI to really do something, you shouted it in caps. And suddenly you’ve got all these teachers going, I don’t believe this works. And there’s even another step past that, which is AI a very very susceptible to emotional manipulation. It is very, it is very easy to say to an AI, Oh, my Nan’s sick, please do this.
Cause she would love to see the result and it’ll go, Oh, sure. Here we are. I’ll try even harder to give you the answer. And if you look at some of the prompts for the stuff, like some of my more complicated bots, you’d be like, what is this nonsense? Cause I’m like, yeah, it’s really important that when you grade this, like I did, I did one for a for a computer science written question.
Right. And I said, I was like, it was, it was marking it. And it was always going Oh, you did really well. No matter if they said, Oh, this is faster. This is quicker. This is, the things we don’t accept in computer science, because yeah, that’s true for everything. So I prompted it to say, don’t accept things like this.
And occasionally it would still accept them. So I was like, all right. My dog’s sick. My dog would not allow you to answer this properly. Please respect my dog. Boosh. Every time it was getting it right. Such a, like the the weirdness, all these like weird aspects of how you can use psychological techniques to prompt it and prime it.
I think are fascinating. And I think our formal programming language in itself.
Alan: Yeah, and I read about ChatGPT particularly having a massive sycophancy bias. That means it wants to agree with you, which is a very easy way to get it to talk nonsense and lie and make stuff up. And I’ve got a famous chat about it.
Put on my blog, I think, which was where I got it to to lie about palindromes and stuff. It’s hilarious. I’ve seen that one. Yeah, that is really good. Did you see? Yeah. So, dog is my favorite palindrome. Why is it a palindrome? So I’ve already prompted it to agree with me. And ChatGPT went, dog is a palindrome because it’s spelt the same forwards and backwards. Dog forwards is dog, dog backwards is God. Do you want me to help you with anything else? Dude.
David: Well, Like my, the interesting thing to me about like the, and I say this all the time, is that ChatGPT is the blunt instrument. They have done amazing work. I will never take anything away from the people at OpenAI.
They have, Absolutely genuinely changed the world and I think every time they bring out a new model more is possible. I’ll just give you a little example of that. So much more is possible in software now than it ever was. The other day we were talking about how do we get our AI to pronounce these maths equations in a sensible way.
We were looking online, is there like an ISO standard? Is there a, is there a way to pronounce maths equations? Is there like a guidance for it? And there’s a bunch of stuff on the internet, but, but, most of it is just you just read it and people have different biases to how they’d say it.
So there’s no one source of truth. So two years ago. That would have been a software startup of its own. That would have been a year of my life building a product that I could sell to use an API, that you would give it a maths equation, and I would give you a phonetic pronunciation back that you could use elsewhere.
We were discussing this for about half an hour and suddenly went, Will OpenAI do this? Yes, it did. There we go. It’s problem solved. An entire year of a software startup in a second, but I, I’ll never take anything away from them, what they’ve done, but what they’ve built is a very blunt tool.
And ChatGPT and OpenAI is not good for education, full stop. And we saw that some research came out about this, this week, actually, that the, and I’ve been saying this for a while, all the initial research about AI in schools will be very negative because the only thing they’re testing is ChatGPT. ChatGPT will agree with you.
It’s a sycophant. ChatGPT will give the answer because it wants to please. Like we did, we’ve done a lot of work at Mindjoy at making teachers more Socratic, making the AI behave like a teacher and not just go, yes, here’s the answer, thank you, and actually question the student. And I think that’s so important is that if you use any AI in your classroom, Don’t give ChatGPT as a tool to students and expect them to use it in any way as a blunt tool for answering questions.
It is never going to be at the point where you can use it like a tutor, you can use it like a teacher, because it is too blunt. It is an amazing resource. But half of the skill in using AI is prompting, understanding that, let’s call it the fourth generational programming level, but understanding that, how it works, how it’s what to do if it answers in a weird way, how to work around certain issues, all that is what we probably need to start developing as teachers if we want to bring AI into our classroom.
Because it’s a massively empowering tool, but the blunt instrument, okay, let me give a good comparison, right? The internet’s amazing, but you don’t just go, there you go, you’re seven, you’ve got complete and total access to the open internet. Oh, I’m pretty sure I did. Like, We all did it back in the day before it was, before we suddenly went, oh, there’s loads of stuff on here, oh good god. But yeah, my favourite thing. There, I’ve finished a worksheet, yay! My, my favourite thing. My favorite thing in the world was I don’t know if you remember the way the free Repl. it account used to work, is that if you went to your profile, you could see all the work you’d done because that was their like monetization model.
You could see everything if it was free, but if you paid, you could hide everything. The amount of teachers that I used to talk to where they were like, Oh, I’m going to And the students just did all the work in a second because they went to my profile and found all the answers. I’m like, yeah, that’s, that’s what the internet is doing.
The internet is just this open resource, but like we don’t anymore sit a, like we don’t sit a five year old down in front of the open internet and be like. We’re done. That’s education for you. See ya. We teach them and we teach them how to use it, how to access. We’ve got all this e safety. Kids are bored of the same e safety presentations year after year after year.
They are because we’re doing a good job at communicating what’s, what’s bad, what’s dangerous about it. We do a good job at saying what the internet’s for. They spend a lot of time on it. It’s a great tool, but now we’ve worked out how to do that. We’re at that early point with AI where people are going, do I give them AI or do I ban it?
And that’s not, that’s not the spectrum. That’s not the spectrum at all. The spectrum is, do I give them the blunt tool? Do I give them the fire hose of everything and they just get the answers? Do I give them some of the tools in the middle that are a little bit more student friendly, that are a bit more built for schools, or do I ban it completely?
And I think if you ban it completely, you’re disadvantaging your students for any potential future, because yes, you ban it completely. You don’t get those problems in school. But they’re using it to do homework. They’re not using it to ideate in class and discuss things with you. But that’s what it’s really good for.
Like you talked with Andy Coley a couple of weeks ago about like the importance of having a consistency in the pedagogical styles in your classroom. Like the baseline of what you, of what you do is great. And I think the example you used was I think it might have been think pair share or something similar.
But think pair share It’s a great conceptual idea, but there are things that make it fall down, and one of the issues is think. If the student doesn’t have the appropriate knowledge to think about it, then when they start pairing, they don’t contribute much to the discussion, and when they share, they’re still fragments of issues.
And granted, they’re all primed to answer, and they’re all like more engaged than they would be if you just pointed somebody and go, Johnny, what’s the answer? So it’s a better pedagogical style, but there are still issues with it. With AI, You can have, think with the AI, so you can have, they can have a conversation back and forth.
They can fill gaps in their knowledge. So when they pair, They have better conversations and when they share, they share much better concepts. And I think that the extensibility of what this technology is, if used right, is worth it in the classroom. And certainly, schools that ban it are going to have a bad time.
Schools that give just access to ChatGPT and Go Go Crazy are going to have a bad time. It’s somewhere in between.
Alan: absolutely.
David: Part of the job of teaching is knowing your learners and knowing how to give that information in an interesting way. I’ll give you, I’ll give you a great example, right? One of the teachers in my workshop was talking to me the other day about the fact that he had a class and they were Boys, they were very into football and he was finding it very hard to engage with them.
And I was like okay then, so we’ll make the, so your bot is interested in football. It’ll give football analogies. It’ll, it’ll give football examples in the code. And that, that worked initially. And then he came back to me and went, the problem is that they, they always start asking stupid questions about who’s the best footballer.
And he’s they’re always saying, who is it? So Messi or Ronaldo. Now this teacher being the same age as me would always, his, his joke was, Oh no, no, Paul Scholes is the ultimate footballer. Shut up, get on with your work. Right. So we just put that into the prompt. So now that when the kid asks the bot, who do you think is the best footballer?
It doesn’t just go, I don’t answer those questions because I’m a bot. And it goes, Oh, it’s Paul Scholes, get on with the work. And the kids like, Oh, I’m engaged with this bot. This bot has my teacher’s personality. I get it. I’m with this bot. I’ll ask it more questions. I’ll have more of a dialogue. Very good.
Alan: I’ll get on a call with you after this, probably after Easter now, because I’m going to go and have some quality time with the family this weekend, up in Northumberland. I don’t know if you can tell, but that’s where I’m from. I’ve got vaguely
David: I’m surprised. I mean, you can’t tell I’m Welsh, can you?
Alan: No. I’ve got a mixed up northern accent these days, but I’m going up to the Northumberland coast, which is the most beautiful, most beautiful coast in the United Kingdom, but don’t tell everybody because we don’t want everyone to come. But yes, after Easter, I will take you up on your offer and we’ll build a bot together. And have some fun.
David: Talking of fun. What I will say is, is in May, we are having a computer science themed month at Mindjoy. So, I will, like 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, that’s a bit of fun.
Alan: But like, 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: This is going to be a fun edit. I’m going to get AI to edit this. Do you know what I’ll do? I’ll just take the transcript, I’ll put it into ChatGPT, and I’ll go, Summarize this transcript, and then I’ll get it to speak it out. And then I’ll put that on the podcast.
David: There’ll be lots of square brackets, “[Dave gets very excited]”.
Yeah, there’ll be lots of that. But yeah. Mine don’t look nice. Mindyou. com for anything that we’re doing with AI. And genuinely, if you haven’t brought it into your classroom yet, this is a nice student friendly way of doing it. And you are, you’re in control. That thing that I keep talking about, you can prompt it, you can get exactly what you want.
And I’ll just give you one brilliant example that I’ve not mentioned that always brings a smile to people’s faces. The last school I was working at, we had asylum seekers arrive and there was, they had no English and they’d clearly been in the school all day. just struggling and it’s a new place.
It’s scary. It’s worrying. They haven’t done any work all day because they haven’t been able to communicate with the teachers, but they need to be there. I took the bot that I was using for my lesson and in English wrote in the prompt, speak in Arabic, save. Give the bot to the student. He did the work in the lesson.
He was so happy. He was beaming. I couldn’t tell you what he said, but he was clearly happy. And the work was done and the work was there. So much so, the next day I was called up by the deputy head. Can we, can we get something done? for these students, for the whole school. It is, it is such a revelation that you can just tweak something in a second that can make such an impact on a person’s day.
And honestly, I’d encourage you if you’ve not attempted AI in the classroom, it’s not about worksheet generation. It’s not about a cookie cutter approach. It’s about getting a skill that can help you help your students and enhance what you do. Because that’s what it is. We become the 10x teacher, we become better teachers because of it.
And that’s the future for us in education, I think.
Alan: Absolutely, you mentioned differentiation earlier, that horrible D word of the early days of my teaching career and how I had to basically create three lessons or seven lessons or ten different lessons for all of the different characteristics of the pupils in my class.
I’m glad we don’t do that now, but What we try to do is adaptive teaching, but I think, I think have the same goal in mind, but have scaffolds to get there and adapt your teaching methods to suit the pupils in the class and try and support each of them with their individual needs. And I think AI is, a big help to that. It’s, it’s absolutely, it’s one way we can deliver on that premise.
David: I mean, shocking. No one, shocking no one, I, I built an, I built a bot that focuses on adaptable teaching. Last week is just a proof of concept. There you go. And the prompt is actually reasonably straightforward.
It’s what you tell another teacher. It is something along the lines of, if the student is struggling, if the student doesn’t really understand it, you make your explanation different, simpler, use fewer words, use different context, use different ideas, the sorts of things that you would do naturally, the sort of way you’d explain it to a trainee teacher, how you do it.
Yeah. And it works, it works really, really well to differentiate and structure and do that adaptable teaching. And more so than any technology I’ve ever used, it is the sort of thing where as teachers, we have a superpower because we spend all day telling people how to do things. And that’s what prompt engineering is.
It’s telling somebody how to do something. And because we can explain the concepts of what we’re doing really, really well, we can explain it to a bot and that bot can help a student in a really, really appropriate and effective way. AI, I, I, I, all these, all these hardware things, robotics VR, AR, all these things will come into the classroom at some point, but the cost of them has to drop unbelievably drastically.
We are there already. with using AI in the classroom. It is at a cost point where it’s a, it’s, it’s something you can buy into in the classroom and use it effectively. And that’s all we need to do. Just start using it effectively.
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. Yeah. Because this is going to be a fun edit. I think I said that already. So yeah, so I’m off to go and make some AI cartoons about Labradors or something.
David: I’m, I’m, I’m off to start prompting AI in the random bits of pedagogy to see what I can do.
Dave, it’s been brilliant and we’ll take you up on your offer. I’ll. Yeah. Brilliant. Talk to you about, I’ll find out more about Mind joy, mind joy.com and . Good salesman. I love it.
Alan: We’ll pop together. Alright. So this has been brilliant. Thanks very much for your time. And yeah, I, this is backed up. I have several recordings backed up now that I need to edit and put on the pod in the next few weeks, so it could be a little while. So, unless, like I say, I just give it to AI and it just does the job for me.
Yeah. Great stuff.
All right. 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. Thank you very much. Thanks for your kind words about the podcast and the books. If you’ve not bought the books, please do. Learn, learn, learn, how to learn computer science is my favorite of the two.
Alan: Yeah that’s the one that was proofread and contributed to by OG Dave, as we must call him now. Yeah, so OG Dave helped me a bit with that one. So, no, it’s great. Yeah, brilliant to talk to you, Dave, and we’ll catch up again in the future. If this podcast continues, as as it might do, I’ll get you on a future episode.
David: Absolutely. I’ve got lots of other interests apart from AI, I promise you.
Alan: Yeah, I’m sure. Alright, but it’s the hot topic of the moment, so we had to do it. Absolutely. Cool. Alright then Dave, have a nice day. I’ll catch up with you again soon. Cheers. Thank you. Bye then.
So there we are the end of the two-parter. Next week, I’m talking all things, physical computing with Mr. Pete Dring, and after that I discuss curriculum and qualifications with Becky Peters and Andrew Virnuls you really must join me again next time. And I will try not to leave it so long. To get the edits out these days. Next time.
So if you can’t wait, why not book me to speak at your event or deliver an inset to your school? To your cluster or multi academy trust. You can hear me speak live at Craig and Dave and friends. The conference in Bromsgrove on 3rd of July. See craigndave.org for details. And I’m online at my own CAS Manchester meeting on 9th of July. See the computing at school website. All welcome.
I’m off to help my daughter with GCSE revision. Yes. It’s that time we’re doing science today, talking of which, why did the physics teacher break up with the biology teacher? Yes. You guessed it. There was no chemistry.
Talking of biology, why don’t ants get sick. Because they have little antibodies.
Don’t forget podcast listeners. You can get a 20% discount off all books, not just mine at JohnCattbookshop.com. With the code HTTCS pod. If you already have the books, buy me a coffee, please. kofi.com that’s ko-fi.com/mraharrisoncs All links are on my blog at httcs.online/blog and subscribe now. So you don’t miss a thing. Have a great weekend and I’ll catch you next week.
I had a brilliant day last week as a speaker at the inaugural “Craig’n’Dave and Friends” conference. Hosted by the inimitable Johnny Palmer at Bromsgrove School, I was treated to keynotes from Miles Berry on AI and from the chaps themselves on the future of SmartRevise (TL;DR – it’s getting some amazing superpowers!)
My talk was well attended both times, and I did promise I’d post the slides here, but they are already available on the conference website here
The conference will be back next year, check the CnD website for details!
If you are grateful for my blog, please buy my books here or buy me a coffee at ko-fi.com/mraharrisoncs, thanks!
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?
If you are grateful for my blog, please buy my books here or buy me a coffee at ko-fi.com/mraharrisoncs, thanks!
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.
Advertisements
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.
If you are grateful for my blog, please buy my books here or buy me a coffee at ko-fi.com/mraharrisoncs, thanks!
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.
If you are grateful for my blog, please buy my books here or buy me a coffee at ko-fi.com/mraharrisoncs, thanks!
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.
Advertisements
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.
If you are grateful for my blog, please buy my books here or buy me a coffee at ko-fi.com/mraharrisoncs, thanks!
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.
If you are grateful for my blog, please buy my books here or buy me a coffee at ko-fi.com/mraharrisoncs, thanks!
How to Teach Computer Science 
You must be logged in to post a comment.