Stitching the Loop with Electronic Textiles

Stitching the Loop with Electronic Textiles
Jared O'Leary
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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.

  • 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.

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

More Content

Unpacking ScholarshipJared O'LearyCulturally-relevant pedagogy/curricula, Electronic textiles, Equity, CurriculumComment