In the fall of 2015, I doffed an old worn-out hat and put two new ones on that I was not certain would fit: I left industry to become a K-8 computer science (CS) instructor at my daughter’s school and a researcher for a STEM+C National Science Foundation grant proposal. It was during this time of transition that I first encountered a handful of papers on the promise of e-textiles in education while searching for curricular resources and conducting a literature review for computational thinking in K-8.
Sewing? No thanks. And so I moved on.
In my first couple years of teaching, I had female students, who had never even had the option of taking a coding class and who furthermore had grown weary of the usual musical, theatrical, or artistic elective offerings, sign up en masse with each other. But the novelty eventually wore off, and fewer and fewer girls signed up for my coding classes. By the spring of 2020, I only had three girls spread out in each of the three classes I was teaching. My classes, viewed over time, with just the right music, could make for a sad movie montage.
This spring, in my master’s program in educational technology, we learned about Universal Design for Learning (UDL): a framework used by educators to ensure learning experiences are planned with multiple means of engagement, representation, and expression to give students with different backgrounds, interests, and skills an equal opportunity to learn (CAST, 2018). I was skeptical and overwhelmed. In theory, UDL was ideal; but in practice, it sounded like a ton of preparation for the occasional student who might never appear in the classroom. What overworked teacher could afford to put so much effort into what might result in so little return?
But, faced with a now severe deficit of girls in my classes, and having attended two recent conferences focused on equity in computer science, and tasked with experimenting with an innovative technology for one of my master’s courses, I had motivation in triplicate to search for those papers on e-textiles I had encountered five years ago.
Qiu, Buechley, Baafi, & Dubow (2013) described in detail a curriculum designed around e-textiles that I could easily adapt: students would learn the basics about circuits and computer science concepts while engaged in making an increasingly complex series of sewing projects. Female students who were not interested in making a video game or robotics would gravitate to the awesomeness of adding LEDs to sewing projects, subsequently giving them incentive to learn code for making more complex projects; sewing and coding would be two separate means of engagement in a single class.
Two of my classmates chose Breakout EDU to explore as their innovative technology and to serve as the basis for their UDL learning experience. In providing feedback on their learning experiences, both from a UDL and from an intersectionality point of view, I realized that the recommendations I gave them to support an imaginary student on the autism-spectrum, recommendations that would inform that student how to handle potentially awkward social situations or be considerate about unequal distribution of problem-solving or speaking time–those would be useful to all of the students in the classroom! I was so wrong about UDL being a waste of time!
The feedback I received from my classmates, especially regarding assessment, reminded me that students have an uncanny ability to complete maker projects without understanding the concepts behind them.
Constructionsim sometimes just leads to…construction with no understanding; so simply completing an e-textiles project would not be enough evidence of learning. Luckily, I was able to find some resources describing the use of sharing circuit diagrams (Hadad, Thomas, Kachovska, & Yin, 2020), and the use of individual white boards to assist in assessment in case students are uncomfortable showing their understanding–or misunderstanding–to the entire class (Mealy, 2016). Another common piece of helpful advice was to offer student multiple ways for students to present their projects which would adhere to UDL’s principle of multiple means of expression.
Overall, crafting this learning experience based on UDL, intersectionality, research, and peer feedback has been an extremely positive experience. So much so that I intend to use all these ideas in the design of an upcoming summer computational thinking PD for teachers in our local school districts. But most importantly, I expect to see significant increase in female students in my classes as well as better retention.
References
CAST (2018). Universal Design for Learning Guidelines version 2.2. Retrieved from http://udlguidelines.cast.org
Hadad, R., Thomas, K., Kachovska, M., Yin, Y. (2019). Practicing formative assessment for computational thinking in making environments. Journal of Science Education and Technology, 29, 161-172.
Mealy, N. (2016, November 15). Formative assessment [Blog post]. CS for All Teachers. https://www.csforallteachers.org/blog/formative-assessment
Qiu, K., Buechley, L., Baafi, E., Dubow, W. (2013). A curriculum for teaching computer science through computational textiles. In IDC ’13: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children, 20-27.
From Computer Programmer to CS Teacher 
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