Sub Ubi

Carrie and I are diligently working on baby names. (Toothpaste For Dinner)

Bugger-all that kind of legislation will do.

Whatever Senators were part of the introduction of that bill need to be voted out next term.

Freezepop on NPR!

Yeah. That’s right. I’m all on top of the electronic pop music scene. Where was zed=zee on that one?

[queue funny little dance]

Oh. I forgot… out snowboarding and having fun. Hm. Sounds… well, kinda nice. In a not-working-kinda-way. Wow.

Clearly, I’ve been working on course websites and writing up assignments for the past n days straight. The start of classes, at this point, will be a relief, just because it will break up the monotony of planning. Bring forth the chaos!

For your entertainment, the CES 2009 keynote about Microsoft’s Kodu game development environment, featuring “Sparrow,” an “actual 12-year-old-girl.”

This video is the most important video you can watch today if you are a computer science educator. Why? Because Sparrow might show up in your classroom someday. She’s 12 now. In five years, she’ll be looking at or applying to colleges. Now, it’s possible that she’ll become an English major, or perhaps she’ll join the newly formed Nanobiotechnology major that all the kids are excited to get into. But, it’s also possible that she’ll double-major in English and Computing, because she is excited about the role of story-telling in this new media. (Nod to Geoff there.)

Now, she shows up in a typical first-semester course in computing. Here, she might be introduced to the Linux command line, the Java programming language (or Python, or Scheme, or C… I don’t really care). And, do you know what? Sparrow won’t care either. Just how many weeks is she going to show up to your classroom, listen to you lecture about variables and objects and their location in memory, and actually want to show up? She’s been writing games using tools like Kudu for the past five years. And now, you’re the poor sap whose job it is to stand in front of the room and motivate her to print rectangles on the screen using System.out.print and a for-loop in Java?

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That scene isn’t a hypothetical situation: it’s where we are today.No one really knows why students are less and less interested in computing as a major at the college level, but I’m prepared to claim that it has to do with the massive disconnect between (the vast majority of) the introductory course experience and what students see in the world of computing today. For example, we can pull one of the more popular computer science textbooks, Java Software Solutions by Lewis and Loftus, and find the problem I’ve just described in it. How popular is the text? It currently sits around 9000 in the Amazon sales rank (it was higher last week), meaning they sell around 10-20 copies per week right now. (This is probably a start-of-semester bloom, but still… it’s a popular text.) Not surprisingly, John Lewis has diversified his authoring portfolio, and along with colleague Peter DePasquale has written a book about programming in Alice. (All of these texts costs too much, but that’s another rant for another day.)

Environments like StarLogo:TNG and Alice, and now Kodu, are what our students will be familiar with. They’ll come to our classroom and expect to be able to do at least that much. When we throw them into introductory Java, or a first-year experience in Python, and it isn’t engaging in some way, they… well, they disengage. Why should they care? What motivation is there for deep learning, as opposed to doing enough to pass the course? My students today are accustomed to science-fiction-like technologies (the iPhone, iPod Touch, the PS3, Wii, and Nintendo DS, etc.), and we given them beige boxes with command lines?

This second video goes into a bit more detail regarding Kodu. When your students are accustomed to “writing” behavioral code for agents acting in a real-time, parallel environment… what do you teach them first when you get them in the classroom? All of the traditional assumptions—parallel is too hard, behavioral control is too hard, objects are too hard—go right out the window. If it is so hard, how come Microsoft turned it into a kids toy?

You tell me if this floats: “Hey kids, look at this triangle I just printed using a for loop and some asterisks! Isn’t that rad!?”

Er.

No.

Caution, meet wind. The times, they are a changin’.

I really believe that we should be putting programmable devices in the hands of students studying computing. Or, if you prefer “Why we’re still teaching programming for desktop-class devices?!?” The desktop is complex, uninteresting, and lacks relevance in a highly mobile and connected world.

I look at magazines like MAKE, or the Arduino project, or (especially) Bug Labs, and think that every undergraduate CS student should be doing projects on this kind of hardware. Ten years ago, there were no affordable and open options for doing cool stuff in computing. The Mindstorms RCX was the closest thing, and it certainly wasn’t “open”.

Today, $20 gets you a programmable, open-source embedded controller, a complete programming environment (and documentation), and an entire community of people to go with it. It is called the Arduino. The hardware is cheaper than a text book, and our students could be doing incredible things with it. Fortunately, to transform our students’ classroom experiences, all we have to do is overcome institutionalized resistance to change…

If you’re willing to spend a bit more money, the Bug Labs platform provides you with a $250, ARM-based, open-hardware Linux machine with a host of discrete, pluggable modules. This is really, really slick shiznit. This (CC licensed) video does a good job of explaining the base:

Modules that can be snapped into the base now include an LCD screen, a GPS unit, a 3G GSM module (yes, cellular connectivity!), WiFi/Bluetooth, and the von Hippel module, which provides connectivity and breakout over a wide variety of GPIO and serial protocols. While this is a more expensive way to get hardware into the classroom than an Arduino, it is open, looks robust, and is built on and using tools students will see for many years to come: Linux, Java, and Eclipse. (I wonder how hard it would be to integrate into BlueJ…)

It isn’t so much that I think students of computing should become “makers.” I do think that students of computing need to be engaging in authentic activities. I will claim that our students are most likely to encounter “interesting” problems in the realm of mobile embedded systems. Given the rapid proliferation of wireless devices (mobile phones, the iPod Touch, Android-powered devices, etc.), students of computing are almost certain to find themselves programming in these environments in the coming decade. (To this end, web services and distributed computing are also places where our students need exposure, given that the edge device is almost certainly going to interact with some kind of service.)

Perhaps I can get a BugBase and a student for a summer, and see what can be done with these toys. Finding a student who wanted to go exploring might be the harder part.

The von Hippel module. I love the braille…

Last October I bought my first “real” pair of running shoes. They were Brooks Trance 7’s.

Today I received a package from eBay: another pair of Trance 7’s! I figure that if the last model year was good enough for me last year, then last model year must be good enough for me this year. That, and I’d rather pay $67 for my running shoes than $135, which is what a new pair of Trance 8’s cost.

And they’re just as comfy as the last pair.

UPDATE 20090107 20:35: Mike points out that these could make a good “non-shoe” alternative. The Vibram Five Fingers.

I’m afraid someone will have to send me a comp pair, though, or I’ll have to wear out the new pair of Trance 7s. The VFFs have a bit of a cost, and a car seat is slated to be the next big purchase.

Fred Benson on the CC Blog pointed to the fact that NIN’s “Ghosts I – IV” was the best-selling MP3 album at Amazon for 2008. This is remarkable in no small part because “Ghosts” is an album that you can legally download from the Internets for free. The Creative Commons license on the work allows you to share and remix the work in non-commercial contexts.

As it happens, I had a $5 credit at the Amazon MP3 store, which sells DRM-free MP3 tracks that can be played on any MP3 player. The album costs $5, and a significant percentage of that goes directly to the artist. Seemed like a good use of the promo credit… assuming the artist gets a cut when the promo credit is used that way. (Woot! It downloaded before I could finish writing the post.)

I’ll have to say more about open content at some later point… it’s brewing in the background as part of my long-time desire to see more ebooks in the classroom and fewer $100, six-ton texts in my students’ bags.