My Project Proposal
For our last week of formal instruction before we begin final projects, we covered Data Science. First, we explored various uses of data and created a survey for students to collect, store, and analyze responses. Next, we showed students how to analyze a dataset of tweets by studying its sentiment score and word associations, and then create visualizations to represent the results. After, we had students select their own data set, which they used to create a project of their choice. As students analyzed their data sets, we encouraged them to consider how biases in the data might skew the results. We challenged them to plan how they prevent these biases if they had collected their own data. At first the freedom in the projects intimidated me as an instructor, however I ended up loving how the girls' personalities and interests showed as they picked their data set, research question, and display graph. It was a fitting warm up for group projects, which we begin next week. Finally, we studied the balance of user interest and privacy that companies must consider in their own data collection. We discussed the preventative steps both companies and individuals should be taking against hackers. Overall, this unit is very relevant to today's technology world, and the girls were really able to see the impact of data on their own lives.
Just as the students are heading into their final projects next week, I too have begun to plan for my own. I want to compare what I have learned from teaching coding to high school girls with digital humanities perspectives on teaching coding to non-computer science college students. I am hoping that my experience as a teacher's assistant provides insight into how coding can be made accessible to a wider group of students. Specifically in this project, I will be considering how the content of units and specifics of particular lesson elements impacted our students' interest, understanding, and confidence in programming.
I will be creating a website to present my project. I know I have the tendency to get easily distracted by small details during creative projects. A Warner Brother's Web Designer spoke to our class last week, and challenged us to not overlook keeping our websites' designs informative and practical (easy and intuitive to navigate). I've been inspired by her, and as I create content and prototypes of my final version I plan to constantly re-evaluate my website to ensure that it represents these two qualities along with being aesthetically pleasing.
The first component of my project will be a brief review of each unit we covered. I will explain the importance of each topic and the advantage of using it in an introductory course. Additionally, I will describe which fundamental programming skills each unit aimed to teach or reinforce. To connect with what I have been learned about digital humanities, I will compare what contexts to teach these fundamental programming skills is suggested by digital humanities pedagogy research and incorporated by Girls Who Code.
The second component of my project will be a more in-depth study of the particular teaching techniques used in delivering lessons. I will provide examples of lesson portions that worked very well for our students and are recognized by digital humanities pedagogy. I will also provide examples of how our teaching team modified aspects of lessons to better fit the learning style of our particular students. Hopefully the lessons that we learned in doing so can provide further insight into practices that most successfully create a supportive, inspiring, and effective introductory coding class.
