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Scaffolding to Support Liberal Arts Students Learning to Program on Photographs

Published: 29 June 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Digital photographs are part of liberal arts students' classes (e.g., art, history, and production classes in film and television) and their daily smartphone-based life, in apps like Instagram and Snapchat. Building image filters can be a relevant and engaging context into using computing for humanities students. We have designed a new course for introducing computing in terms of creative expression. We use a scaffolded sequence of programming languages and activities to explore computing on photographs: (a) a teaspoon language for generating image filters, (b) a set of custom Snap blocks for even more sophisticated image filters, and (c) an ebook activity for mapping from Snap to Python. Each stage takes less than 10 minutes to introduce, with a wide variety of possible student activities (for in-class active learning or for later homework). While the tools build on each other, the earliest stage (the teaspoon language) could be used within a single class session in other liberal arts courses.

References

[1]
Kathryn Cunningham, Barbara J. Ericson, Rahul Agrawal Bejarano, and Mark Guzdial. 2021. Avoiding the Turing Tarpit: Learning Conversational Programming by Starting from Code's Purpose. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445571
[2]
Barbara J. Ericson, Kantwon Rogers, Miranda Parker, Briana Morrison, and Mark Guzdial. 2016. Identifying Design Principles for CS Teacher Ebooks Through Design-Based Research. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research (Melbourne, VIC, Australia) (ICER '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 191--200. https://doi.org/10.1145/2960310.2960335
[3]
Dan Garcia, Michael Ball, and Yuan Garcia. 2022. Snap! 7 - Microworlds, Scenes, and Extensions!. In Proceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 2 (Providence, RI, USA) (SIGCSE 2022). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1179. https://doi.org/10.1145/3478432.3499266
[4]
Jamie Gorson and Eleanor O'Rourke. 2020. Why do CS1 Students Think They're Bad at Programming? Investigating Self-efficacy and Self-assessments at Three Universities. In Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research. 170--181.
[5]
Mark Guzdial. 2022a. Creating New Programming Experiences Inspired by Boxer to Develop Computationally Literate Society. In Companion Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on the Art, Science, and Engineering of Programming (Porto, Portugal) (Programming '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 67--69. https://doi.org/10.1145/3532512.3539663
[6]
Mark Guzdial. 2022b. Teaspoon Languages for Integrating Programming into Social Studies, Language Arts, and Mathematics Secondary Courses. In Proceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 2 (Providence, RI, USA) (SIGCSE 2022). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1027. https://doi.org/10.1145/3478432.3499240
[7]
Ethel Tshukudu and Quintin Cutts. 2020. Semantic Transfer in Programming Languages: Exploratory Study of Relative Novices. In Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education. 307--313.

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  1. Scaffolding to Support Liberal Arts Students Learning to Program on Photographs

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    ITiCSE 2023: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 2
    June 2023
    694 pages
    ISBN:9798400701399
    DOI:10.1145/3587103
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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    Published: 29 June 2023

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    Author Tags

    1. CS for all
    2. computational literacy
    3. computational thinking
    4. critical computing
    5. digital humanities
    6. digital photography
    7. image filters
    8. liberal arts and sciences

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