Stitching the Loop with Electronic Textiles
In this episode I unpack Kafai et al.’s (2019) publication titled “Stitching the loop with electronic textiles: Promoting equity in high school students’ competencies and perceptions of computer science,” which explores the impact of an electronic textiles unit on high school students’ understandings of computer science.
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Welcome back to another episode of the CSK8 podcast.
My name is Jared O'Leary.
Each week of this podcast is either a solo episode where unpacks
some scholarship or an episode where I interview a guest or multiple guests
to talk about perspectives and experiences in computer science education.
In this week's episode, I am unpacking a paper
titled Stitching the Loop with Electronic textiles promoting equity
in high school students, competencies and Perceptions of Computer Science.
This paper was written by Yasmin B, by Deborah Fields,
Deborah Louis Justice T Walker, Maya, Asha Gaither, Jaya Thu,
Tomoko Nakajima, Joanna Goode and Michael Jang.
Apologies if I mispronounce any names.
And here's the abstract from the paper.
Quote Many efforts of curricular design have concentrated on expanding
participation in K-12 education by introducing innovative approaches,
but few have focused on addressing longstanding equity issues
through their choices of culturally relevant materials and activities.
In this paper, we describe our efforts in using electronic textiles,
which include Arduino
based microcontrollers that are sewn with conductive thread on fabrics
to connect actuators and sensors and create interactive wearables.
We report on the implementation of an electronic textiles curricular unit
exploring computer science introductory computing course
in 13 high schools involving 272 high school students,
largely from underrepresented groups and a major metropolitan school district.
We examine two issues relevant to broadening equitable participation in CSE.
One Students change perception of computing and two students
depth of learning of computing circuitry and crafting in the final project.
Pre-Post surveys on students perceptions of computing showed positive
significant gains in students and self-confidence in solving C
as problems, fascination with computing and ability to be creative with computing.
Teacher evaluations of students.
As final projects revealed robust learning in the areas of basic
programing and computational circuitry, as well as strong learning
across more challenging computation concepts.
With Room for Growth, we discussed factors that impacted
student outcome and outlined steps for further analysis.
All right.
If I were to summarize this particular study into a single sentence,
I would say that this study explores the impact of an electronic textiles
unit on high school students understandings of computer science.
As always,
I include a link to this paper in the show notes,
which you can find at Jared O'Leary WSJ.com,
or by clicking the link in the app that you're listening to the song.
You can also click on the author last names
to go to each one of their Google Scholar profiles.
So you can check out more publications by these authors
While you're checking out these show notes on my website,
make sure to check out the other links that are on my website too, to hundreds,
if not thousands of free resources for computer science educators,
including the link to Buddha PD dot org, which is the nonprofit that I work for.
All right.
So if you have never seen
electronic textiles before, think of maybe like a sweater.
And on the sweater there are different parts of it
where you can like,
touch it with your hand and it will like light up your sweater or something.
So I've seen some people do this with, like ugly sweater competitions,
like during holiday seasons where like when you touch
somebody on the shoulder, then it will like light up a reindeers nose.
And then if you touch like on the other shoulder,
then maybe it will light up like a Christmas tree or something.
Some other really
cool things you can end up doing is I've seen some people create some gloves
so that when you touch different fingers
to the thumb, it will like do different things on your computer.
So basically acts as a controller.
I've also seen some people add in some LED screens onto like some attire
that they're wearing or even make it so that the shoes light up, things like that.
These are all examples of like electronic textiles
and you're able to control them usually through
like some kind of a microcontroller, like an Arduino,
and then using stuff like the conductive thread,
which makes it so that you can touch different parts of the thread
and then it will do something, maybe even make music.
I don't know. All right.
So this particular unit in this study is a part of the larger
exploring computer science curriculum.
And if you haven't checked out
the podcasts that I've done on exploring computer science
or the interview that I did with Joanna Goode,
I highly recommend checking this out and I will link to those in the show notes
for this particular study.
They looked at 15 different classrooms in 13 schools
with 272 high school students, and the research questions were
to what degree was there
equity in changing perceptions of CSE across students and to what
degree did all students demonstrate depth of competence in computing circuitry
and crafting and finishing the final and most challenging project at the unit?
In quote us from page 1177, which is also a PDF page too.
So in the background section of this paper, they're basically saying
that they developed these units to try and reach a broader range of students
who might be more interested in the crafting and making aspects
of computer science rather than just simply software development here.
Here's a quote from page 1177.
It says, quote,
We wondered if the introduction of personalized handcrafts in conjunction
with electronics and academic
science classes within schools that serve marginalized populations would help
broaden students interests and perspectives about science and crafts.
Practices are more inclusive of gendered and indigenous influences
and help students strengthen connection to history and cultures
and can be linked to content knowledge in school.
Although such work has been long considered vocational, nonacademic
and low tech in contrast to most CSE activities that require
programing, engineering skills and high tech tools, their inclusion
diversifies materials and practices to promote interest in an application.
Furthermore, designing open ended projects with textiles is unlike
the more constrained design of robotics or games in other ECS
units and allows students to personalize their designs.
That's an excellent point.
If I actually go back into the classroom, which was heavily focused on software
development and we used a little bit of making Mickeys and Arduino
and whatnot, I would definitely expand to include more electronic textiles.
Had some kids who did create some light gloves and created some stuff
to make like their own dance stance or evolution pad,
But it was pretty limiting and the materials that we were able to use.
So to be able to expand it to include more options for textiles,
like making music, making light up stuff, maybe even LEDs displays on different
attire like choose clothing and whatnot.
Like that would be really cool.
And I think it would engage a lot of students
who might not be as interested
in some of the other options, like creating games and whatnot.
All right.
So the next section of this paper I'll go over pretty quickly.
So was talking about the methods.
So they discuss what is in the curriculum content,
they discuss who the participants were, and they discuss the data collection.
And in particular the data collection included some like pre and post surveys
of students as well as a grading rubric for the teacher.
And then they did data analysis where they looked
at the pre and post scores in relation to student demographics
as well as the grading rubric in relation to demographics,
which leads us into the findings for this particular study.
So here's a quote from page 1179 quote The self confidence outcome suggests
that overall students perceive themselves as more confident in solving CC
related technical problems or challenges after participating in the textiles
activity, the fascination outcome suggests that students reported being more
interested in learning about computer science
after having participated in the e textiles activity.
The CSA expression outcome suggests that students felt that they could engage
with activities that are of personal interest in computer science.
However, there was no change in student response
about their perceived value of computer science for future endeavors.
Now, just a note that these changes were statistically significant,
and three out of the four at the very last one, however, they were pretty small,
like less than a point difference in terms of a scoring difference.
Now, another interesting thing that they're going to unpack
a little bit more is the there was no demographic differences
among the confidence, the fascination or the expression.
However, there was a demographic difference among gender
in terms of like the value in these activities,
which we'll talk about a little bit more.
All right.
So on page 1180, they talk about students, C's competence.
And so the basically kind of outline here is where people scored
in terms of how high they scored on different categories on the rubric.
But one really interesting finding is that only 28.2% of the students
scored high in commenting code,
whereas 69.5% of students did not comment their code at all.
So here's a quote from page 1188.
While commenting is considered a fundamental skill
in collaborative and large scale software development, students
perhaps felt less interested in doing so for the human center project
since they were working alone.
Similarly, they may also have prioritized completion over comments
focusing more on completing the actual code
rather than leaving comments for others to decipher, end quote.
So that's a really important thing to note.
When students have a limited amount of time to work on something,
they have to complete something within a certain deadline.
They might be more interested in like improving the quality of their code
and their project rather than focusing on the comments that they're adding into it.
In addition, many kids just don't really see the benefit of adding
in comments into their code because they can visually scan
their function or program as a whole and be able to go,
Oh yeah, that's what this is, that's what this chunk of code is, etc.
I at least found that to be the case for many elementary students
because most of their projects were not super complex
and if they were creating functions then they had some kind of a name for it.
And so it was player controls.
Okay, well, I know exactly what this is going to do,
and I don't necessarily need to write a comment
because I know it's doing the player controls, which might just be up or down,
left, right, that's easily decipherable within the code.
However, from an assessment standpoint, I was constantly going around
and asking questions like, Oh, what does this code do?
What does this function do, etc.
So I'd have them verbally
tell me what their code did so I at least could assess understanding
and make sure that they didn't just happen to have some kind of a happy accident.
And then I'd have students walk me through their project
and like what they created and what they learned
when they decided to turn in a project which, by the way,
wasn't on a fixed deadline,
even though I'd see kids for like three weeks straight each quarter
and I wouldn't see them again for like another six weeks,
they could work on their project for one week
or they could work on it for multiple years.
So because of that,
they had their time to kind of like sit with it and work on things.
But that being said, most students chose not to comment on their code.
All right.
So now I want to get into the discussion section
and there's three different sections on here,
and I'll kind of highlight a couple of things from each one of these.
So the first section in here is on broadening student perceptions
of computer science.
So here's an interesting quote from page 1181 Quote
Our analysis revealed no gender or other demographic differences.
All participants, including male high school students,
indicated a broaden CC interest after working with e
textiles, except in the area of future aspirations.
Though many prior studies have utilized e textiles to reach specifically to women
or to underrepresented ethnic groups, our study suggests that e textiles can be
an effective means to broaden interest in CSS for all students, end quote.
So when I first read this, I was like, Oh, that's interesting
because I, with my own biases,
had some gendered associations with electronic textiles.
But then when I was thinking of like the kids that I'd work with, like
boys were typically obsessed with shoes, and if they could find a way to like,
light up their shoes and make them make noise and stuff
when they moved in a specific way, they would have been totally into that.
So that actually makes sense to me.
It might be different articles of clothing that different demographics
and genders might be interested in augmenting in some way electronically.
But this at least demonstrates that if you are going to an e textiles
unit in your courses that you're going to work on,
you don't have to frame it as, Hey, this is just for the girls or whatever,
as it's likely that any kind of gender would be interested in this,
maybe for different reasons.
So the next section in the discussion
talks about deepening student learning of computer science.
So the authors mentioned that rather than giving a test at the high school level
or their course at the completion of it, they had a project at the end.
Here's a quote from 1181 quote, The focus on the final project limits
our understandings into the processes and problem solving students engaged in
during the unit.
To this end, in the future, we plan to examine students
reflective portfolios which have shown promise of evaluating
computational practices such as iteration, debugging and testing.
Such portfolios may also illuminate more about students a sense of creativity
within six, end quote.
I love this idea of creating a portfolio, so rather than just assessing
through a Scantron or open test or whatever,
having students create a portfolio throughout the year that kind of showcases
what they learn in their understandings,
this is a really neat idea that I think could be done with any kind of language
and platform that you're working on,
assuming that you're able to engage in project based kind of learning,
which if you haven't yet, I highly recommend
checking out the numerous episodes that I've done on project
based learning in the show notes that you can check out,
including an interview with Justin Kennedy specifically talks about project
based learning as well as others.
All right.
So the third area in
the discussion is on designing inclusive curriculum activities.
The authors note that, yes, it's important to focus on broadening
participation and perceptions of what computer sciences.
We also need to make sure that students
are learning computer science concepts, practices, standards, etc.
while they're engaging in these individually
or culturally relevant projects and in order to support this,
we have to have teachers who are using pedagogical approaches
that are conducive to this kind of learning.
And in order to support the teachers in those pedagogical practices,
it usually requires some kind of professional development
over the course of an extended period of time so teachers can try out
something in the classroom and then come back with some questions
or like the group in a PDF session or ELC or whatever.
All right.
So each one of these unpacking scholarship episodes, I like to think there
is some lingering questions or thoughts and share them on the podcast
that I already shared, that I had some gender biases
when it came to electronics, textiles, or at least some associations with it.
So one of the questions that I have is what kind of potentially inaccurate gender
associations and biases
do you have with different methods of engaging with computer science?
I think it's important for us as individuals and as a field
to think through these different biases and associations and challenge in
trying to figure out in what ways might they be inaccurate and what ways might
they be generalizable for most, but not for all, etc..
A question that I frequently ask in studies like this is, well,
if there was a gender association for male and female,
what about trans and non-binary individuals?
In what ways do they lean?
Another question that I have for you is how might you incorporate
electronic textiles in your classroom or curriculum?
There's a lot of really cool
things that you can do, like there's entire books dedicated to this.
There's also websites like Instructables, even Pinterest, etc.
that can get you started with exploring electronic textiles.
You can simply search for the terms, eat textiles, DIY, and literally
find hundreds of different projects from simple to extremely complex.
So although this is a shorter episode, I hope you spend some time actually
exploring electronic textiles some more and check out some videos
because there's some really cool things
that you can do in this area of computer science.
I will include some links in the show notes
to some different websites that will help you get started with electronic textiles.
And again, you can find that at Jared O'Leary dot com.
But with that, that concludes this week's episode of the Season eight podcast.
I hope you consider sharing this with somebody else
who might be interested in learning more about electronic textiles.
Day two next week for another episode.
And until then, I hope you're all staying safe and are having a wonderful week.
Article
Kafai, Y. B., Fields, D. A., Lui, D. A., Walker, J. T., Shaw, M. S., Jayathirtha, G., Nakajima, T. M., Goode, J., & Giang, M. T. (2019). Stitching the loop with electronic textiles: Promoting equity in high school students’ competencies and perceptions of computer science. SIGCSE 2019 - Proceedings of the 50th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, 1176–1182.
Abstract
“Many efforts of curricula design have concentrated on expanding participation in K-12 CS education by introducing innovative approaches but few have focused on addressing longstanding equity issues through their choices of culturally relevant materials and activities. In this paper, we describe our efforts in using electronic textiles which include Arduino-based microcontrollers that are sewn with conductive thread on fabrics to connect actuators and sensors and create interactive wearables. We report on the implementation of an electronic textiles curricular unit in the Exploring Computer Science introductory computing course in 13 high schools involving 272 high school students largely from underrepresented groups in a major metropolitan school district. We examined two issues relevant to broadening equitable participation in CS: (1) students' changed perceptions of computing, and (2) students' depth of learning of computing, circuitry and crafting in the final project. Pre/post surveys on students' perceptions of computing showed positive, significant gains in students' self-confidence in solving CS problems, fascination with computing and ability to be creative with computing. Teacher evaluations of students' final projects revealed robust learning in the areas of basic programming and computational circuitry as well as strong learning across more challenging computational concepts, with room for growth. We discuss factors that impacted student outcomes and outline steps for further analysis.”
Author Keywords
High school computer science, electronic textiles, equity, computer science education, curriculum, exploring computer science, computer science attitudes
My One Sentence Summary
This stud explores the impact of an electronic textiles unit on high school students’ understandings of computer science
Some Of My Lingering Questions/Thoughts
What kind of potentially inaccurate gender associations and biases do you have with different methods of engaging with computer science?
How might you incorporate electronic textiles in your classroom or curricula?
Resources/Links Relevant to This Episode
Other podcasts relevant to this episode
Exploring Computer Science with Joanna Goode
In this interview with Joanna Goode, we discuss corporate influence through neoliberal practices in CS education, reflecting on engaging all students in CS programs, considerations around equity and inclusion in CS education, layers of curriculum design and implementation, discussing and problematizing integration, influences of policy and administrative support (or the lack of) on CS education, Joanna’s experience with developing Exploring Computer Science, and much more.
How to Get Started with Computer Science Education
In this episode I provide a framework for how districts and educators can get started with computer science education for free.
Project-based Learning in Computer Science with Justin Cannady
In this interview with Justin Cannady, we discuss project-based learning in CS, encouraging debugging and working through failure as students and teachers, considerations for integrating CS, lessons learned working on NMSI’s CS AlignEd, and much more.
The Effects of Providing Starter Projects in Open-ended Scratch Activities
In this episode I unpack Coenraad et al.’s (2021) publication titled “The effects of providing starter projects in open-ended Scratch activities,” which compares two groups of students to determine the impact of Scratch starter projects on student creativity.
Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy
In this episode I unpack Ladson-Billings’ (1995) seminal publication titled “Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy,” which influenced much of the discourse around culturally relevant pedagogy in computer science education.
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