Digital < Computational
In my essay, When You Wake Seymour Papert in the Middle of the Night, in the book Twenty Things to Do with a Computer Forward 50: Future Visions of Education Inspired by Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon’s Seminal Work, I discussed how computers may serve one of three constituencies; the system, teachers, or learners. That essay makes the case that the greatest return on investment is in using computers to empower learners as intellectual laboratories and vehicles for self-expression.
In our book, Invent To Learn – Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom, we explore how the maker movement made it possible to create things with bits and atoms. Alas, after a decade and a half of interest in makerspaces and making, we seem once again to have left the bits behind while lots of cardboard has been cut up. Despite the incredible affordances of computational technology and accessibility of computational software environments, the state-of-the-art leans towards digital macaroni necklaces or shoebox dioramas.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with arts and crafts, but we should be honest about what we are teaching and not teaching, while aspiring towards a world congruent with both available computational opportunities and the competence of learners.
(On a side note, relegating all creative activities to the computer lab or maker space only increases the drudgery of the remaining school day and frees teachers from their obligation to create interdisciplinary and multisensory learning experiences.)
What Does EdTech Mean?
Words matter. Edtech is a term that is increasingly meaningless. Without even an attempt at definition or moral clarity, the field has become rife with mediocrity, crappy products, terrible ideas, charlatans, superficial schtick, and padded CVs. Perhaps worst of all, the lack of an intellectual stance creates needless obstacles between learners and the remarkable potential afforded by computing.
It is increasingly difficult to defend the presence of computers in the lives of children when so little care is dedicated to illuminating the distinct ways in which such technology may be used. Too much of Edtech is passive, trivial, performative, manipulative, or worse, but that need not be the case.
Merely advocating for learners using computers is inadequate. We need more specificity in describing how computers might be used in the most educationally nutritious fashion. Therefore, I propose a new dichotomy for describing the learning potential of an activity using computers, even if the technology is used for creative purposes.
Digital vs. Computational
There are two categories of projects utilizing a consensus definition of “technology,” digital and computational. Digital projects are ones created with computers. The term, digital, tends to refer to the medium with which the object was created, not unlike using adjectives, such as, watercolor, sculptural, or photographic.
Videos, graphic images, non-interactive animations, web pages, presentations, word-processed documents, and photographs are examples of digital projects.
Such artifacts may be brilliant, beautiful, thoughtful, clever, or even profound. However, that leap requires an investment of talent, effort, and time rarely afforded children in school. Schoolwork tends to favor digital projects due to time constraints, teacher comfort, and their ease of sharing.
Here is an example of a popular form of a digital project created by a child. Claymation, stop-action video, and digital storytelling are all examples of digital projects. Such projects are fine and consistent with childhood. They can always benefit from more time, additional editing, the perspectives of others, or looking at the work product with fresh eyes.
The chaotic nature of school combined with typically low expectations for children result in a celebration of far too many mediocre projects. The quality of such projects is often marred by apathy, being rushed, or iteration and revision are skipped. Quality work takes time.
Computational projects
Digital projects rarely involve any computation or programming. Computational projects, on the other hand, require the act of computing.
When this kindergartener wanted to create a robot ballerina, computation was essential. While the ballerina itself was composed of a paper napkin, pipe cleaners, magic markers, and LEGO bricks, giving it life required computation.
Directing the ballerina’s movements with touch sensors, changing the direction of its motors, adjusting its speed, and even playing a musical accompaniment required the active “dance” of abstract and concrete reasoning, including programming and debugging – computation.
One could spend considerable time listing the educational objectives achieved by this little girl in a project wholly commensurate with her personality, playfulness, imagination, passion, perseverance, and ingenuity. The formal curricular expectations for a student of her age might be “knowing left from right.” Since the little girl taught those concepts formally to the computer via computation, she may now have a stronger understanding of that concept than her peers.
Educators should always be on the lookout for opportunities to take projects to the next level. Sometimes, all that is required is asking simple questions like, “Why does that fall down?” or “What would you like it to do next?” In other cases, wondrous new materials and computational environments emerge that makes it possible to do things unimaginable a short time ago. Increasingly, computational power matches the imagination of children. This in turn supercharges their projects and when simple things become easy to do, complexity becomes possible.
From digital to computational
A shortage of compelling computational possibilities makes the transition from digital to computational projects less likely. You simply cannot teach what you are not aware of or have not experienced yourself.
If your students have been making dinosaurs out of cereal boxes for ages, the potential exists today to make those dinosaurs, roar, dance, send a text message to your grandmother, or remind you to wear a sweater at recess. Given such a computational gift, why not give the kids an opportunity to “level-up?” This is the very definition of scaffolding; elevating a learner’s ability rather than approaching a finish line.
A classmate gave Theo a “graduation” gift from preschool. So, he set off to design, 3D print, and mass produce a rocket for all of his classmates using his iPad, Tinkercad, and 3D printer.
While a consensus definition of computation has yet to emerge, the process of using number, measurement, perspective, prediction, communicating formal expressions to a computing system, and debugging are elements of computation, certainly they represent computational making.
This rocket project is an example of how computation empowers even young children.
Computation is learning-by-doing’s secret sauce. For generations, we have known how to teach language arts, history, and even science in a hands-on, project-based fashion. Computation extends such playful, personal, meaningful learning experiences to “Math.” In this context, mathematical thinking not only becomes relevant and useful, it is essential to adding interactivity, intelligence, logic, or probabilistic phenomena to a project.
Computation is the rocket fuel that expands the breadth, depth, and range of project possibilities. If mathematical thinking, modeling, adding intelligence, or logic is needed, then computation is required.
In part 2, we will make the case for computation in education.
