22 May

The Atlantic Live: Technologies in Education Forum

Posted by Max Goldstein in Education, FIRST, Games.

The Atlantic hosted a series of panels today in Washington. Panelists were drawn from government, higher education and nonprofit organizations. The topic was twofold: STEM education, and STEM in education. The first is how to improve our education learn science and math, the second is to use science and math to improve how our children learn.

The Khan Academy was brought up a few times in passing, and I have blogged about it and TED-Ed on this blog before. In short, online videos are an innovative (or at least new – don’t confuse the two) distribution method, but the pedagogy remains rooted in the lecture and standardized testing. Khan in particular is old wine in a new bottle. For further criticism, I direct you to Frank Noschese. High school physics teachers like him were conspicuously absent from the panel, along with actual programmers, mathematicians, and engineers.

Most of the discussion focussed on video games, both as a means of conveying information and a tool to teach programming. While there is some semblance of content in educational games, the real learning occurs only for the game maker, not the game player. Some panelists even advocated non-educational games. Joel Levin of TeacherGaming LLC talked about a version of Minecraft marketed towards the education market. He discussed how issues of digital citizenship and law emerged from the game’s cooperative construction mechanic. Most panelists agreed that the games did not foster these positive experiences without the involvement of a trained teacher, and would otherwise devolve into a “Lord of the Flies scenario”.

What I see is the separation of the many good elements we want to teach our children, falling roughly in to two camps. Videos like Khan’s presents advanced content, and videos prompt individual contemplation and mechanistic skills. Games like Levin’s promote problem solving, critical thinking, social interaction, and motivation. Each side lacks the qualities of the other. Physics in games is incorrect; physics in videos is boring. Games inspire; videos empower.

Is there anything that can bridge this gap? Indeed there is, and I did not see it mentioned at the conference. FIRST is a robotics program for children that is as motivating as it is educational. There are multiple leagues for different ages and budgets, but the one I’m familiar presents high school students with a non-trivial (real-world) game, almost a sport, with a field and game pieces. Six weeks later, they are expected to ship a robot that plays that game. In between, they must analyze the game, critically assessing possible strategies. Unlike student project video games, there is enough work for a dozens of kids, facilitating teamwork and organization. But there’s plenty of practical knowledge to be learned and used: everything from mechanical engineering and computer programming to machine shop skills and accounting. Of particular interest is that although the panelists extolled the internet’s ability to distribute and equalize information, and as a platform for games and simulations, FIRST takes place in the real, physical world. FIRST is not a simulation of an engineering project, it is an engineering project, complete with deadlines, budgets, height and weight limits, industrial materials, a difficult challenge.

I’ve written related posts, one on adaptive learning technologies, games, and FIRST, and another on what I really learned from a video game.

20 May

Connectionless Protocols

Posted by Max Goldstein in Computer Science, Culture, Communication, ACM.

The post originally appeared on the Tufts ACM blog. 

It’s a common joke among computer scientists to liken themselves to the machines they work with. While not as prevalent at Tufts as other schools, the language of memory errors or HTTP status codes creeps into our understanding of ourselves and of our social situations. It’s a whimsical combination of metaphor and geekery. ACK?

There are two primary protocols that computers use to communicate with each other across a network. The first is UDP, which is fast and lightweight. UDP is a single packet hurled across the Internet to whatever fate may befall it. TCP is a more sophisticated protocol that makes various guarantees about the message that it is sending.

For one, TCP is reliable, while UDP is not. The term “reliable” has a special meaning in this context: a reliable protocol ensures that the message will get there. TCP is courteous enough to ask for retransmission if it didn’t receive a packet it was expecting. I’d like to apply to term back to human beings talking to each other.

If we put more emphasis on reliable communication, we’d spend less of the conversation talking and more time listening, to make sure we understood everything that was said. If not, it’s as simple as asking “come again?”, and being patient enough to repeat yourself. Ensuring a reliable connection places value on what other people say, which will lead to more friendships and tolerance. Efficiency and courtesy go hand-in-hand.

Secondly, TCP is serialized, which means it tolerates packets coming in out of order. It puts them in the right order before handing them off to the program above it, say, your mail client. UDP is not serialized, so different parts of the same file can arrive out of order.

Relationships used to be serialized. Courtship rituals bare a striking resemblance to network protocols, algorithmic dances of identification, verification, and only then communication. Or something. Serialization has been left on the sticky concrete floor of the frat house basement. If you’ve spent most of your Saturday nights in Halligan, I should remind you that many of our classmates have the inscrutable tradition of making out before so much as exchanging first names. (It’s as insecure as it sounds.) We’ve lost the notion of “not on the first date”.

In fact, we’ve largely lost the notion of dating altogether. Like UDP, hookups are a connectionless protocol, something we do blindly and without preservation of state from one to the next. It would be awfully hard to have a friendship if every time you started talking you had to introduce yourselves. TCP’s solution is the abstraction of a two-way stream of data. This connection must be set up by hand-shaking, maintained while in use, and eventually torn down. Similarly, only by effort and memory can we form lasting relationships and “connections” to other people.

You may remember the final scene of The Social Network, where Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) lazily hits refresh to see if the woman he was dating at the start of the film has accepted his friend request. He has been trapped by his own creation. I think that computer scientists have a unique vantage point in our increasingly technologized world. By understanding the limitations of our machines, we are better equipped to, when necessary, put them aside and have a conversation with other human beings.

17 May

Look to the Heavens: a Parable

Posted by Max Goldstein in Computer Science, Startups.

“Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.”
— Edsger Dijkstra (possibly misattributed)

When I was young, I enjoyed looking at the stars. I remember tilting my head upward and seeing the universe unfold before me, untold wonders, billions of brilliant points of light. I would lie for hours on my back, letting the stars crawl across the sky, lost in the beauty of the world beyond me.

Later I would learn astrophysics, and study the fusion reactions in our sun, the main sequence, and life cycle of the stars. I was fascinated by how the first stars had fused hydrogen in to heavier elements and then exploded, propelling carbon and oxygen across the vast expanse to become part of planet earth. They left majestic dust clouds in their wake, reflecting the light of a thousand thousand solar furnaces. This light travelled across space and time, quantities that I could measure and calculate. My study of the stars served only to augment my wonder.

Slowly, at first, others began to take interest in my passion. They were enthralled by telescopes, which let them see the stars with increasing clarity and precision. My field was crowded with ever more telescopes and their advocates. Soon, an arms race began. Where once we had to manually position telescopes with sights and paper charts, new models were motorized and at the touch of a button would move themselves to view any star desired. Now even these are passé. The reigning champion is a device with a screen that, as it is moved in space, displays the stars on the other side overlaid with their names and constellations. The very act of using this device, however, obscures the stars themselves.

Astronomy became ever more popular. One January, an upstart startup declared it was Astro Year, and that everybody should learn how to operate a telescope. Everyone was claiming to have the Next Big Telescope that would simplify our lives. Startups promised telescope boot camps, bypassing the time and cost of a traditional college education. “Do you know that job openings for astronomers outnumber applicants 2.3 to one?” I was asked. I shrugged. I wouldn’t turn down a job, but that wasn’t the reason I was here. All I wanted to do was look up at the stars.

* * *

You walk into a small domed building on a mysterious island. There is a plush red chair in the middle of the room, reclined like one found in a dentist’s office. You sit down, and notice a black box overhead, within reach. There are sliders and a small screen that is dark. You move the sliders but nothing happens. You get up to leave, but you notice a light switch next to the door. You flip it, and the room darkens. On a hunch you lie back in the chair and begin to move the sliders. The screen comes to life with star patterns and a date. Moving the sliders, you are able to see a patch of sky for every night for several years.

The above is a scene from Myst, the 1993 exploration/puzzle video game. Today, it seems awfully quaint, to dedicate an entire building to a single-purpose computer. Indeed, the handheld planetarium described above is a free iPhone app. But there was a certain allure, a certain prominence of rarity, that once characterized both stargazing and computing. Now both have been cheapened by our ubiquitous devices, and the influx of uninspired practitioners. Once, before my time, we had to fight for time on a mainframe; now anyone can learn to code.

Yes, anyone can code, in the same way that anyone can operate a telescope. But can you look up at the stars and wonder? Can you explain the stars themselves, apart from the feeble and transient machines we use to view them? Do recursive algorithms and finite state machines keep you up at night, or only wake you in the morning? We don’t need more coders and we certainly don’t need more code. We need more computer scientists, who look look up to the stars, rather than down on their machines.

23 Apr

There’s not an app for that

Posted by Max Goldstein in ACM, Design, Startups.

The post originally appeared on the Tufts ACM blog. 

I was thrilled when I heard Tufts was hosting a hackathon, I was thrilled. A collaborative all-nighter coding with sponsorship and prizes from big-name companies in my backyard? It would be programming nirvana. Sign me up!

But when git push came to shove, most of the ideas were built on the “social, local, mobile” paradigm. That didn’t strike me as particularly innovative. We already have Facebook and the iPhone. I resisted the notion that everything is better as a mobile app.

I wanted an app that allows me to have more conversations. I brainstormed such an app with a colleague, which would have been called, “Get off your phone!”. It would serve up suggestions like “look up at the unique architecture” or “go talk to that person over there,” but we concluded that even if you put in a rating system it would just be a place for crude jokes and pickup lines. I abandoned the idea, along with hope in a hair-of-the-dog solution. I wound up working on a school project instead.

One of the things I love about computer science is how diverse its applications are. You can mine data for scientific research, or design a clean and functional website, or write utilities that help manage a company’s workflow, or make a video game, or just become more aware of the patterns and relations of the things around us. Not everything we build has to be a time-waster for rich people (and on the global scale, we are all rich people). In fact, to build only these apps is a shameful waste of the privileged position we occupy as educated people.

The future is here. We all carry devices in our pockets that can tell us anything, anywhere. We’re living the always-on dream, but it’s time to wake up. We have crises in real life to attend to, like feeding seven billion people while fighting climate change.

There are some things apps just can’t do, and I don’t mean solve the halting problem. Our devices have caused us to be less connected, not more. Put the toy technologies back in your pocket. Time to go do something else now. Have coffee with a good friend, perhaps. Or at least a Monster with a teammate.

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