Event overview
Ben Shapiro (ATLAS Institute) on how building computer music instruments for group performance can help teenagers to learn about synchronizing parallel processes.
Most young people in Britain and the USA use a multitude of networked devices - and many make surprisingly nuanced decisions about how to use these technologies to protect their privacy, manage relationships, and explore alternative identities. But while these technology platforms offer users some choice about how to enact use them, none are flexible enough to let us easily construct new networked technologies of our own designs.
Meanwhile, new generations of programmers are increasingly under pressure to learn how to correctly implement concurrent algorithms and protocols, and to reason about complex, interconnected systems. CS education research has not kept pace with the need for learning about these topics in computing; we know little about how people learn these skills and concepts.
Ben Shapiro's lab has been developing constructionist learning approaches that allow diverse populations of students to learn about concurrency by designing and building new networked devices for communication and play. They use learning sciences theories and Design-based Research methods to design new programmable toolkits for learning and to investigate the development of student thinking in computer science through the use of these tools.
Ben presents one strand of this work: how building tangible computer music instruments for use in group performance can create a natural context for middle-school age youth to learn about synchronizing parallel processes. He will show how we can create new frameworks for learning about concurrency by combining programming environment design with analysis of student discourse, program code, and cognitive clinical interviews in order to understand students’ emergent thinking about computing concepts, and how that emergence is anchored in prior student interests and knowledge.
BIOGRAPHY
Ben Shapiro is an Assistant Professor in the ATLAS Institute, the Department of Computer Science, and (by courtesy) the School of Education at the University of Colorado Boulder.
His research focuses on the design of creative, playful, and constructionist learning environments for youth. Prior to being faculty at Colorado, he was the McDonnell Family Professor of Engineering Education at Tufts University and a postdoc at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. He received his PhD in Learning Sciences from Northwestern University.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 23 Nov 2015 | 5:00pm - 6:00pm |
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