Rowan CS4HS: Introducing K-12 Teachers to Robot Programming

This web page is for those who are interested in finding more out about the background behind Rowan's CS4HS program. If you're interested in participating in one of our free on-line courses, please visit the Rowan CS4HS Home Page.

Quick Links

• I want to make my own MOOC ... can you tell me how you made yours?

• How did you make the videos? 
• Do you have any other suggestions for making videos?
• How did you edit the videos?
• Did you build the MOOC yourself or use your campus on-line course platform?
• What are the costs involved in making a MOOC?
• How long did it take you to make your MOOC?

• Tell me more about the Rowan CS4HS Program
  Some of the material in this section is excerpted from the Rowan Press Release.
  See also the Philadelphia Inquirer Article about Dr. Kay and Her Work
  

• The Rowan CS4HS home page
• The Rowan CS4HS timeline
  
• About Dr. Kay
• Why Educational Robots for Absolute Beginners?
• General Information
• Dr. Kay's Motivation
  
• More Detail - Why it's important for EVERYONE to learn Computer Science
  
• Overview of the on-line courses
• About Google's CS4HS program
• Our past experience with CS4HS
• Evaluating our work
• Raw Numbers - How many participants? How many complete?

How did you make the videos?

My videos were a combination of powerpoint slides, screencasts (on my Mac using Quicktime - more info below), and live videos. I used I am very fortunate that Rowan has a Radio/TV/Film department, and so we taped our videos in RTF studio 2 on professional equipment.

Do you have any other suggestions for making videos?

I make a lot of videos for my classes - most of them screencaptures (for example, here's one introducing BlueJ)- at my office desk. On a PC I use BB Flashback Express because it's free and does everything I need. I know many people also like Camtasia, but it's not free and I've never needed anything beyond what the BB software can give me. I've also made a number of pencasts for my students using a livescribe smartpen,  for example, here's one that's teaches about how to use the pumping lemma to prove that languages aren't regular,  I liked the smartpen a lot, but it was  before I had an iPad - now that I have an iPad I suspect I could do something similar on that. On a Mac I use quicktime player (yeah, player - the one that came free with my Mac) to do screencast recording. Here are some instructions on how to do that.

At the Learning@Scale Conference, Dan Garcia and Michael Ball demoed a fantastic system for making videos that allows you to do live integration of slides and human video using a greenscreen. I've never tried it before, but it looked great! Here are their slides and here's more details. You could use this, for example, to create lessons for a MOOC while teaching a live class in the classroom.

Another good resource is this Berkeley MOOCLab page on Capturing a MOOC

How Did you Edit the Videos?

Mostly I had RTF students do so. They used Final Cut Pro 7 (which is no longer in production) and swore that the newer version of Final Cut Pro wasn't any good. I've tried Final Cut Pro X and it seemed fine to me, but what do I know... I've also used iMovie on the Mac to do simple editing.

Did you build the MOOC yourself or use your campus on-line course platform?

I made videos and questions and then used Google's coursebuilder platform to run my MOOC.

What are the costs involved in making a MOOC?

Beyond vast quantities of time for writing scripts, recording and editing video, the big cost is hosting your MOOC. Coursebuilder uses Google appengine. At peak we probably spent about $5-$10 a day, here is the app-engine pricing information and some more info about Coursebuilder and google appengine.

How long did it take you to make your MOOC?

Much longer than we expected. Plan for a LOT more time. Every step of the way - script writing, videoing, editing, etc. took much longer than we thought it would. We started work on our first MOOC in March/April, planned on deploying in July, and eventually deployed in November.

The Rowan CS4HS Timeline

• Spring 2011: Dr. Kay receives a grant from Google CS4HS to run an in-person summer course for K-12 teachers on NXT robot programming
• 3 Day course in June 2011
• Spring 2012: Dr. Kay receives a grant from Google CS4HS to run an in-person summer course for K-12 teachers on NXT robot programming
• 3 Day course in June 2012
• Spring 2013: Dr. Kay receives a grant from Google CS4HS to create a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) for K-12 teachers on NXT robot programming
• MOOC opens in November 2013
• As of Sept 2014, over 3200 individuals have participated in our MOOC!
• Spring 2014: Dr. Kay receives a grant from Google CS4HS to create a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) for K-12 teachers on EV3 robot programming
• MOOC scheduled to open in October 2014
• Fall 2014: Dr. Kay receives a grant from Google CS4HS to support a research study on the effectiveness of both MOOCs
  

About Dr. Kay

Jennifer S. Kay is a Professor of Computer Science at Rowan University and Director of the Rowan University Laboratory for Educational Robotics (RULER). She holds M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, as well as a B.A. in Mathematics and a B.S.E. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Kay was the 2013 recipient of the Lindback Distinguished Teaching Award, Rowan University's highest teaching honor. At Rowan, Dr. Kay teaches courses across the Computer Science curriculum, from introductory classes for non-majors, to classes at all levels of the B.S. and M.S. in computer science. She has run numerous workshops on LEGO robotics for K-12 teachers, co-chaired the "Robot Rodeo" and "Experience It" educational robotics events for computer science faculty and teachers at the SIGCSE Symposia, and co-chairs the annual Rowan University First State FIRST LEGO League Qualifier.

Dr. Kay was the primary developer for all of the curricular materials for this MOOC, and oversaw all aspects of its development.

Why Educational Robots for Absolute Beginners?

General Information

The state of computer science education in US schools is depressingly inadequate though it is improving.

Back in 2010, the Association for Computing Machinery and the Computer Science Teachers Association put out an astonishing report: Running on Empty: The Failure to Teach K-12 Computer Science in the Digital Age. Here is their 2010 call to action:

No other subject will open as many doors in the 21st Century, regardless of a student's ultimate field of study or occupation, as computer science. At a time when computing is driving job growth and new scientific discovery, it is unacceptable that roughly two-thirds of the entire country has few computer science standards for secondary school education, K-8 computer science standards are deeply confused, few states count computer science as a core academic subject for graduation, and computer science teacher certification is deeply flawed. These are national failings and ones that we can ill afford in this digital age.

Parents must ask difficult questions about how computer science is being introduced to their children in K-12 education and demand that schools move beyond the current basic technology literacy curriculum. Policy makers at all levels need to review how computer science is treated within existing policy frameworks and schools, and ensure that engaging computer science courses based on fundamental principles of the discipline are part of the core curriculum. Now is the time to revitalize K-12 computer science education and ensure universal access to computer science courses by making it one of the core academic subjects students require to succeed in the 21st Century.

• 90% of parents want their kids to study CS, but only 40% of US schools teach CS
• 71% of all new jobs in STEM are in computing but only 8% of STEM graduates are CS
• Diversity problem starts in K-12:
  
• Women who try AP CS in high school are 10 times more likely to major in it in college
• Black & Hispanic students are 7 times more likely
• Only 7 states have K-12 CS standards. We're lucky - NJ is one of them!
• 32 states plus DC CS can count as math or science high school graduation requirements (up from only 12 in 2013)
  

Dr. Kay's Motivation

"My goal is to teach robot programming to middle and high school teachers, so that they will bring it into their classrooms," Kay said. "There is a desperate need for more computer science in schools to give students the essential skills they need to succeed in today's world. I see this as a way to help get both teachers and kids excited about computer science in general and programming in particular as well as to inspire some of those students to see computer science as a future career path." 

Kay is pragmatic about the onsite and MOOC programs and their trickle-down effect on today's K-12 students. Not everyone, she knows, will become a computer science major in college or work in the technology realm. But, she firmly believes, everyone needs to master the basics of computer technology. "All of these kids, whether or not they become computer science majors, whether or not they have an interest in computer science, their whole lives are going to be spent using computers and interacting with people who use computers. It's really important that they have a fundamental knowledge of the field," she said. "My standard catchphrase is, 'If somebody says to you the computer can't do that, I want you to at least have the confidence to ask why not?'"

There are not the same type of K-12 common core standards for computer science as there are for Math and Language Arts. Kay wants to see students develop basic computer science skills so that they understand topics such as what an app is and how computers work. She also said it is crucial they learn computational thinking skills. "Computational thinking skills are important in everyday life. When you study computational thinking, you learn things like how to think logically, how to begin with the big picture and break it into smaller parts or how to find different solutions for the same problem and compare them," she said.

More detail - why it's important that everyone learn Computer Science

Here are some great links that you might want to visit:

• Code.org and their amazing video starring Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, will.i.am, and more.
• Yevgeniy Brikman's blog post "Don't learn to code. Learn to think." which was inspired by Simon Peyton Jones' Ted Talk Teaching Creative Computer Science.
  

About the On-line Courses

In 2013, Kay used the Google award to develop a Massively Open Online Course (MOOC), an Internet-based offering that teachers anywhere - indeed anyone, anywhere - can tap into. The course was been developed specifically for K-12 teachers, though it is free and open to anyone who is interested. Participants learn how to program LEGO NXT robots with the hope that they will bring their knowledge back into their classrooms and in after school robotics courses.

The Educational Robots for Absolute Beginners MOOC offers five to 10 lessons a week. Each lesson includes a five- to 10-minute video as well as self-test questions that are graded automatically. Participants also will design and construct a robot themselves and complete a set of five "robot programming projects."

In March 2014 Dr. Kay received a new award from Google to develop another MOOC to introduce K-12 teachers to LEGO's new EV3 Robot platform. The course outline will be quite similar to the NXT course. We expect to open that course in Fall 2014.

About Google's CS4HS program

From the CS4HS web site:

CS4HS (Computer Science for High School) is an initiative sponsored by Google to promote Computer Science and Computational Thinking in high school and middle school curriculum. With a gift from Google's Education Group, universities develop 2-3 day workshops for local high school and middle school CS teachers. These workshops incorporate informational talks by industry leaders, and discussions on new and emerging CS curricula at the high school and middle school level.

In 2013, in addition to funding the in-person workshops, CS4HS funded 4 online workshops, one of which is Educational Robotics for Absolute Beginners. You can see a full list of the CS4HS on-line and in-person workshops here. We're proud to be in the company of so many important institutions around the world.

Our Past Experience with CS4HS

The 2014 grant is Dr. Kay's fourth grant through the CS4HS program. In addition to the 2013 MOOC, she ran in-person workshops in 2011 and 2012.  Each three-day workshop included 20 to 25 educators from New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware.

Useful links:

• 2013 On-Line Workshop Course Page
  
• Rowan CS4HS home page
• 2012 Workshop Home Page
• 2011 Workshop Home Page

Evaluating our work

New! In fall 2014 we have received additional funds from Google that will enable us to do a much more in-depth study of the effectiveness of our work. More info coming soon as we move forward with that work.

Evaluation results to date ...

• Preliminary "work in progress" paper about 2013 MOOC: Jennifer S. Kay and Tom McKlin, "The Challenges of Using a MOOC to Introduce 'Absolute Beginners' to Programming on Specialized Hardware", in the Proceedings of Learning @ Scale, March 2014.Locally Cached Copy 
• Also, see the poster from the WIP paper
  
• In June 2012 we had 22 teachers participate in a 3-day workshop. We did a more thorough evaluation of their reactions to the workshop and found statistically significant gains  in several areas. 
• Paper about the 2012 workshop: Jennifer S. Kay, Janet G. Moss, Shelly Engelman, and Tom McKlin, Sneaking In Through The Back Door: Introducing K-12 Teachers to Robot Programming," in the Proceedings of the 45th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, SIGCSE 2014, March 2014. Locally cached copy
• In June 2011 we had 20 teachers participate in my 3-day workshop. In March 2012 I sent the teachers a followup survey. Even though I only heard back from half of the teachers, those 10 teachers reported that they had already introduced the material to hundreds of their students.
• Paper about the 2011 workshop:  Jennifer S. Kay and Janet G. Moss, "Using Robots to Teach Programming to K-12 Teachers," Proceedings of FIE 2012, ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference <http://fie2012.org/>  October 2012. You can see a copy of the paper here: http://elvis.rowan.edu/~kay/papers/kay-moss-fie-2012.pdf

Raw Numbers - How many participants? How many complete?

People routinely ask the questions: "How many participants?" and "How many completers?" Before I answer that question, please read the following background:

MOOCs are notorious for having a low completion rate, for example, see this article from Inside Higher Ed and this article from Slate.

In this wonderful paper about evaluating the mapping with Google MOOC, Wilkowski, Deutsch, and Russell suggest that not everyone enrolls in a MOOC with the goal of completion. Indeed, I've enrolled in multiple MOOCs, and never finished one (other than my own). My personal reasons for enrolling in those MOOCs was typically more of a "let me see what others are doing" than a case of "I must get the certificate." I must admit that there was one course that I enrolled in that I was interested in "completing," but I didn't complete it because the homework assignments had deadlines and I had work related deadlines that had priority.

My MOOC is officially a 5-week course, but there are no deadlines for completion of assignments - if participants get busy and want to take a break they can return whenever they like. This might not work with a traditional "for credit" course, but since this is a course designed for teachers (and to get the certificate of completion they need to demonstrate their work to their principal), it works well.

So here are multiple snapshots of my MOOC with some information about completion. The dates vary because some of this data is easier to get than other data - I've updated the "easy to get" data, but not the "harder to figure out" data.

It's worth noting that in both tables the percentage of those who complete the course is increasing over time. Perhaps this is an argument that MOOCs have better completion when there are no fixed deadlines!