Efforts in the US to promote learning about computer science and computational thinking emphasize the vocational benefits. Research on end-user programming suggests that for every professional software developer in the United States, there are four more professionals who program as part of doing their job. Efforts in other countries (UK, Denmark, New Zealand) instead emphasize the value of computing as a rigorous discipline providing insight into our world. We offer a third motivation: computing as a powerful medium for creative expression. We have used computational media to motivate children to study computing, to go beyond thinking about “geeks” in computing. We use media computation to encourage teachers and introductory students at college. The approach draws in a different audience than we normally get in computer science The BS in Computational Media at Georgia Tech is the most gender-balanced, ABET-accredited undergraduate computing degree in the United States. We use these examples to paint a picture of using creative expression to motivate interest in computing.

1. Creative Expression to Motivate Interest in
Computing
Mark Guzdial & Barbara Ericson
School of Interactive Computing

2. Story
• Programming is hard:
Need motivation to get there
• Rigor, Jobs, Creative Expression
• Media Computation
• Example Lesson with Media Computation
• Along the Pipeline:
From Elementary Students to Teachers

3. The Rainfall Problem
• Problem: Read in integers that represent
daily rainfall, and printout the average daily
rainfall.
• If the input value of rainfall is less than zero,
prompt the user for a new rainfall amount.
• When you read in 99999, print out the
average of the positive integers that were
input other than 99999.

4. Results at Yale in Pascal in 1983
% of Students who got
it right
Novices (3/4 through first
course)
14%
Intermediates (3/4
through second course)
36%
Advanced (Jrs and Srs in
Systems Programming)
69%

5. Programming is hard
• Elliot Soloway and his students replicated this
study several times.
• Others have used this same problem with similar
results (Most recently: Venable, Tan, and Lister,
2009)
• 2001: McCracken Working Group Study
• The first of several Multi-Institutional, Multi-National
(MIMN) studies of CS education
• Out of a possible 110 points, average score was 22.89.
• 2004 Lister Group; 2010 Allison Elliot Tew

6. "There are three things to
emphasize in teaching: The first is
motivation,
the second is motivation,
and the third is (you guessed it)
motivation."
- Terrel H. Bell, U.S. Secretary of Education,
1981–1985 (Bell, 1995)

7. So why study programming?
• In Europe and Australasia, Computer
Science is a discipline worthy of rigorous
study.
• In The United States, Computer Science is
about jobs.

8. Simon Peyton-Jones,
CAS

9. Emphasis in US: Jobs

10. 1.4M IT jobs in US
400K graduates
OCTOBER 5, 2012
Code.org

11. Why another motivation?
• Who is not motivated by the current
approach?
• Whose talents are we missing out on
because of this motivation?

12. Thanks
to Brian
Danielak

13. Media Computation:
A Context to Motivate Learning Computing
• Fall 1999:
All students at Georgia Tech must take a course
in computer science.
• Considered part of General Education, like
mathematics, social science, humanities…
• 1999-2003: Only one course met the requirement.
• Shackelford’s pseudocode approach in 1999
• Later Scheme: How to Design Programs (MIT Press)
• Less than half of students in Liberal Arts, Architecture,
or Business passed this course.

14. Contextualized Computing Education
• What’s going on?
• Research results: Computing is
“tedious, boring, irrelevant”
• Since Spring 2003, Georgia Tech
teaches three introductory CS
courses.
• Based on Margolis and Fisher’s
“alternative paths”
• Each course introduces computing
using a context (examples,
homework assignments, lecture
discussion) relevant to majors.
• Make computing relevant by teaching it
in terms of what computers are good for
(from the students’ perspective)

15. Media Computation:
A Context of Digital Expression
• Programming across
data abstractions
• Iteration as creating
negative and grayscale
images
• Indexing in a range as
removing redeye
• Algorithms for blending
both images and sounds
• Information encodings as
sound visualizations
15

16. def clearRed(picture):
for pixel in getPixels(picture):
setRed(pixel,0)
def greyscale(picture):
for p in getPixels(picture):
redness=getRed(p)
greenness=getGreen(p)
blueness=getBlue(p)
luminance=(redness+blueness+greenness)/3
setColor(p, makeColor(luminance,luminance,luminance))
def negative(picture):
for px in getPixels(picture):
red=getRed(px)
green=getGreen(px)
blue=getBlue(px)
negColor=makeColor(255-red,255-green,255-blue)
setColor(px,negColor)

17. 17
Open-ended, contextualized homework
in Media Computation CS1 & CS2
Sound collage
Linked list
as canon

18. Flags
Your assignment is to write a function that will create a
collage of pictures. Your collage will be made by
copying at least 3 pictures onto a blank canvas. You
must use at least 3 different pictures. When finished,
your collage should look like the flag of a country.

19. Study-Abroad
CS

21. Results:CS1“Media Computation”
Change in Success rates in CS1 “Media
Computation” from Spring 2003 to Fall 2005
(Overall 85%)
Architecture 46.7% 85.7%
Biology 64.4% 90.4%
Economics 54.5% 92.0%
History 46.5% 67.6%
Management 48.5% 87.8%
Public Policy 47.9% 85.4%

22. We have sustained that pace
Table 1: Ret ent ion dat a for Geor gia Tech’s M edia-
Comp cour se f r om Fal l 2006–Fal l 2012
Female M ale Tot al
Passing grades 2102 1659 3761
Fai l ing grades 208 235 443
Withdraw 30 46 76
DFW Total 238 281 519
% DFW-total 5.5% 6.5% 12%
% DFW-set 10.1% 14.5% 12%
that we were wrong. Whatever incites plagiarism, Media-
Comp does not seem to impact plagiarism.
3. THE RETENTION HYPOTHESIS

23. UCSD’s PI+PP+MediaComp Experiment (SIGCSE 2013)
• UCSD changed CS1
(quarter system) in
2008 to:
• Peer Instruction
• Pair Programming
• Media Computation
• Tracking students
since 2001.
• Increase retention of CS
majors into second year
by 30% (from 51% to
81%)

24. BS in Computational Media
• Joint between School
of Literature, Media,
and Communications
(Liberal Arts) and
Computing.
• 45% Female
• Most gender-balanced
ABET-accredited
computing program in
US

25. A Sample Lesson

26. How sound works:
Acoustics, the physics of sound

27. Digitizing Sound: How do
we get that into bytes?
• Remember in
calculus,
estimating the
curve by
creating
rectangles?
• We can do the
same to
estimate the
sound curve
with samples.

32. Now let’s talk about information

33. • Get a sound and make an empty picture.
• For each pixel in empty picture,
• Get the next sample from the sound.
• If the value is less than -2000,
make the pixel blue.
• if the value is greater than 2000,
make the pixel red.
• Otherwise, make the pixel green

36. Beyond Undergrad
• Using creative expression to motivate
elementary and secondary students.
• And teachers.

37. AP CS A
Picture Lab - Lots of Fun
We just completed the Picture Lab and I wanted to take a moment to thank
Barbara Ericson for all her hard work on such an engaging unit. We had a lot of
fun working through the exercises. And there were plenty of interesting
peripheral concepts that could be explored to whatever depth felt right.
We worked in groups of 3 students. For each set of exercises, students could
choose one problem to tackle. When they were done, they shared their solutions
with the other 2. For an added challenge at the very end, I had them choose
between the Green Screen, Hidden Message, and Pesky Tourist problems.
Has anyone else worked though the unit and have any ideas to share?
--Tonya Herron
Anderson High School
Cincinnati, Ohio

38. Summer Camp Collages

39. Summer Camp Collages

40. Summer Camp Collages

41. Summer Camp Green Screen

42. Summer Camp Green Screen

43. Teacher Collages

44. Teacher Collages

45. Teacher Collages

46. Teacher Green Screen

47. Other Creative Tools for K-12
• Scratch
• Alice
• LEGO Robots
• Artbotics
• EarSketch
• Writing programs to remix music

48. Scratch – Elementary School

49. Scratch – Middle School

50. Alice – High School

51. Alice – High School

52. WeDo Spin Art

53. Drawing with Robots

54. ArtBotics
• Use LEGO NXT and EV3 to make art
• http://artbotics.cs.uml.edu/wordpress/?page_id
=177
• https://www.youtube.com/user/Artbotics

55. EarSketch
• Write programs to remix music
• http://earsketch.gatech.edu

56. With thanks to our supporters
• US National Science Foundation
• Statewide BPC Alliance: Project “Georgia Computes!”
http://www.gacomputes.org
• Expanding Computing Education Pathways Alliance,
http://expandingcomputing.org
• CCLI and CPATH Grants, and now CE21 to produce new media
• Georgia’s Department of Education
• GVU Center, and Institute for People and
Technology (iPaT) at Georgia Tech

57. Thank you!
• http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~mark.guzdial
http://home.cc.gatech.edu/csl
• http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/ice-gt
For more on MediaComp:
• http://www.mediacomputation.org