Mar 24 2003
PhD Committee Meeting: What is your thesis?
Today was my first meeting with my full committee; here at UKC, we only have two other members on your committee (other than your supervisor). This is smaller than a committee you might typically encounter in the States, but I think that’s just fine. The conversation from the meeting I want to focus on for the moment centers on the question of “what is your thesis?”
I think this picture sums up how I see the (currently) predominant themes in my exploration coming together. At the core, I really like using the notion of little languages for little robots to drive the work forward. There are ideas contained in that work that are core to the discipline; we have effectively taken something quite advanced and moved it down to a more… introductory? … context, where students can play with ideas in programming languages. There is something contained in that idea that I feel is very powerful, and cannot be ignored.
I think LLLR is hard to research, though; or, I’m stuck on the idea that it is… I’ll come back to it. The other two arrows are the results of starting the lit review and continued discussion regarding compilation histories.
- “Motivation” keeps coming up in papers regarding robots in the classroom—yet noone cites any research about why students are motivated by these toys. Sorry—I think I’ll find some in the earlier literature, but current authors in the ACM and IEEE are just citing each-other for this information, and none of it is actually research (I’m painting in broad strokes here). Part of this is because you can’t just measure motivation. It is a difficult thing to get a handle on. That said, I think this should be addressed, since it is tied up in the why of using the LEGO Mindstorm.
- The compilation histories work can be expanded nicely to compare interaction patterns between two types of students: those playing with LEGO, and those programming “traditionally.” I think this is a clean and appropriate way to compare across the paradigms. That, and I’m not familiar with any research along these lines; we stand to find a lot of interesting things (in positive or negative results).
This brings me to a possible way to structure a dissertation. The work is motivated by some exploration of (adult) student motivation with respect to the use of toys in teaching computing; the core of the study is on student interactions with their code in traditional and LEGO contexts; then, we close with a case study on one or two more students designing languages for the Mindstorm. This last element is used as a solid foundation for future work (the “Future Work” section would be grounded in a small study, as opposed to being mostly speculative). So, in some respects, the LLLR stuff becomes both an endpoint and ties things up nicely as a “thematic driver.”
I may revise this later today. It’s time for lunch.
Hell, I may revise this again fifteen times in the next month. I’ll probably just write new posts, but still… this is evolution, right?
And, this is where I start to worry about some bastard running with my ideas, and writing a paper before me…
| I’m currently listening to Wicked Little Critta from the album “Mink Car” by They Might Be Giants (TMBG) |
2 Responses to “PhD Committee Meeting: What is your thesis?”
This really has nothing to do with your entry, but I did just get a lovely announcement from Noel Walsh about the next Scheme UK meeting. Imagine my surprise when your name popped up, and further to see that you managed to con yet another poor Indiana student into helping you write a Scheme compiler for the Legos. Do you have no shame?!
Well, OK, I’ll make this slightly on topic:
“And, this is where I start to worry about some bastard running with my ideas, and writing a paper before me…”
This is truly a pain in the ass. I published a paper in October — with thoughts to publish an expanded version later — and in February I discovered some people at Rice were doing the same thing.
Those were a tense few days until I got a draft of their work. Very similar, but with enough differences that we weren’t duplicating each other’s work. But hell those were some tense days, involving some heavy drinking. (”Please don’t take my thesis topic away from me, please don’t take my thesis topic away from me”)
Adam! Cool to hear from you.
You’ll be happy to know that I didn’t coast on the compiler; indeed, I’ve recently read through Appel’s Compiling with Continuations, and have been thinking about going through some of the other lit in this area and rewriting Scorth to follow this model… except I don’t really have time for plans like that. But, point being–I did manage to learn what I’m doing, and Brooke was just invaluable in the process, that’s all.
If you ever find yourself over on this side of the water, make sure that you drop a note; there’s some good people over here. Are you on the SchemeUK mailing list?
At the end of the day, I currently don’t really think someone is going to run with my ideas–besides, at some level, I consider the weblog a marker. It’s there. I have to admit I’d rather not test it, but it’s an experiment. I just hope it doesn’t cost me too much in the process…