In designing a class on computer technology, we felt that the two most important educational principles were for the students to learn by doing, i.e. hands-on experience, and that every student should be able to successfully complete a computer project. We felt that exploring the Internet through Mosaic would be exciting for the students and decided that their projects would be to create their own Mosaic home pages. In the process, they would learn computing and communication skills, including the preparation of documents and linking together text and image information.
Class 1: We started with a lecture/demo class introducing the concept of the Information Superhighway (the National Information Infrastructure), the Internet, the World Wide Web, and Mosaic.
Class 2: Before the class, Mosaic was set running at the homepage for their program on all the workstations, using guest accounts. The students were shown how to get started using Mosaic by learning to click on links to navigate the Web. We prepared a page of Internet resources that we thought would be of interest to eighth graders, and they were shown how to use that page to find information. To get them interested in using Mosaic, we allowed them to roam wherever they wished on the Web, including "fun" sites with topics like sports and music. Popular Web resources included MPEG movies, pictures of the solar system, fractal images, World Cup soccer, basketball players, and rap music, especially song lyrics (which some students enjoyed singing along to!). Tops on the list of popular Web personalities were Tony Meola, Alonzo Mourning, Charles Barkley, Mariah Carey and Janet Jackson. The students were very pleased at being given some some printed hard copies of pictures and lyrics that they found on the Web.
Class 3: This included logging in to their own computer accounts, prepared as standard student accounts by the university academic computing center, and setting up their passwords. We prepared a script that started Mosaic with Home set to the homepage for their program, so that when the students logged in, they just had to type the name of the script (which unfortunately for technical reasons we couldn't call Mosaic, so we called it run). The students explored more of the Internet and learned to use the Mosaic Hotlist to record interesting places. We set the students an assignment to visit 10 different areas on the Web and write some notes on what they found there, to encourage them to visit the science-related sites.
Class 4: They learned the PINE text editor and typed in a story or autobiographical piece. The text editor was chosen for its simplicity and the fact that its interface always keeps a list of commands on the bottom banner so the students don't have to remember them. The Unix directory was explained at a simple level and a minimal number of Unix commands (ls,cp) introduced.
Class 5: We introduced them to HyperText Markup Language (HTML), and they started preparing their own home pages using our tutorial on preparing hypertext pages. On this first day, they typed short introductions to themselves and formatted them using HTML, creating lists of their friends and interests. Meanwhile, we used an Apple QuickTake digital camera to take pictures of each student and of the groups. This was very popular with the students, and the first thing they would do in every class was to check the new photographs that had been downloaded. Because we were not using a Mac cluster, we could not immediately download and display the images, so this had to be done after class.
Class 6: They worked more on developing their home pages. Around this time in the program, the Shoemaker-Levy comet was colliding with Jupiter. We prepared a local cache of the better images of the collisions that were on the Web, and this page on the Jupiter comet collisions was quite popular.
Class 7: We had scanned in some fractal images that the students made in Math class, and downloaded the stories they wrote in Writing class. They finished their homepages by copying their individual photos, stories, and fractals to their home directories and linking them to their homepages.
Class 8: We had planned that students would go on to include in their homepages information on a particular subject that they had researched on the Web, and include links to other sites on their homepages, but the previous classes had run longer than expected and so we were unable were to complete this last part.
1. Unix is not for real people.
If you're unfamiliar
with Unix commands, those cryptic 2 letter combinations are hard to remember -
ls, cd, cp - or how about chmod? We attempted to shield the students from
Unix as much as possible, but in some cases it came down to a choice between
teaching them how to copy various files to their own directories, or else
spending many hours (since there were 40 separate students accounts to
deal with) doing this ourselves offline.
2. Eighth graders can't type.
Hunt and peck is it. The combination
of 1. and 2. leads to:
2'. Eighth graders can't type apparent nonsense. Here is
an example:
After we took all their pictures, we asked each student to copy their
own picture into their home directory.
We told them to type the following command exactly as
it appears, except to substitute their own first name for the name "jamal":
cp ~pdcoddin/jamal.gif myphoto.gif
This took most students several tries, with many students making the following errors:
2''. Eighth graders can't type initial passwords assigned by a computing center.
3. An eighth grader can't remember any password approved by the
password safety program, even though he or she made it up.
We found that the idea that the individual student is responsible
for the security of their own account just didn't work.
Even though we asked the students to make up a password they would remember,
and to write it down somewhere just in case they forgot it, so many students
forgot and lost their new passwords that we gave up and made a list of them
all. This also made it easier for us to fix directory problems off-line.
It is much better to have a group security system that the instructors are
in charge of. However using a secure password protected system is worth the
effort. It is useful for the students to learn how to use passwords, and
is also necessary - even with their files protected, we had a case where
a student went to another student's computer while he was away for a few
minutes, and changed his home page (adding "reading Playboy magazines"
to his list of interests!).
Setting up passwords was also complicated by the fact that unfortunately
the password server for the system was on a separate computer,
so we had to teach them how to remote login to another machine,
as well as how to change their passwords. This was very time-consuming.
4. When in doubt, just click the mouse somewhere.
The IBM windowing software was
not quite robust enough to stand up to random clicking, and would crash.
The students were also confused by the pine editor, which is not
mouse-based, and would try to click on the menu bar at the bottom of the
screen. Also, the choice of 3 mouse buttons led to great confusion, with
people clicking the wrong button and creating havoc (like many copies of
the Mosaic window).
5. Eighth graders have short attention spans.
Two hours was probably too long for each class, and interest tended to
wane after the first hour. An hour a day, rather than two hours on
alternate days, would probably have worked better.
Also, none of us like to wait for Mosaic to bring down big pictures
across the Internet, but it is especially
challenging to keep the interest of kids while they wait.
Some things like examples of MPEG movies were copied to our local server
to help reduce access times.
In our case, the situation was also helped by having an informal lab,
where students could chat while they waited and
observe each others' screens.
Of course this can also be a problem, as in the next item:
6. Eighth graders like to copy their peers.
If one student
finds a cool picture, then all of his or her neighbors want to click
on that picture, too, leading to stress on particular network servers!
7. Eighth graders need close guidance.
Most students could not use on-line tutorials - they needed a teacher to
tell them exactly what to do, and usually also needed to ask questions
and get help on doing it.
In general, we found that we needed 3 or 4 technically knowledgeable
people in the lab to answer questions and give help as the students
accomplished their tasks, i.e. about one demonstrator for every 5 students.
A major problem that we faced was the lack of a teaching station that could
project the teacher's computer screen so that it could be seen by the
whole class. We had to rely on prepared transparencies of screen dumps and
lots of pointing and hand waving.
8. Eighth graders have little or no computing experience.
Many students took a long time to understand even the basics, like logging in,
typing in different windows, moving and resizing windows, etc.
They got frustrated when things went wrong. Some students
had experience with using personal computers (usually from home) and picked
this up very easily, and in some cases helped out those having difficulties.
One even complained that "my computer at home is much easier to use than
this" (see point 1). Most students learned a lot about computers during
the program and had a good feel for using them at the end.
We also put the tutorials on-line during the classes. As we worked through the tutorials, which went at a fairly slow pace, we invited students to work ahead by reading the directions in the tutorial. We were surprised that very few students took advantage of this. One exception was a young man who started out as a problem. Initially, he would ask very stupid questions in a loud voice. This turned out to be a pose. Once he started creating his own home page, he would come eagerly into the lab, sit right down to log in and organize his windows in a useful working environment and start working from the tutorial.
Conclusions
As discussed above, it
is absolutely crucial to have enough knowledgeable people in the lab to
help answer students' questions and deal with their problems. We found
a ratio of about 1 staff to 5 students worked fairly well. Also, our
class size of 20 was probably an upper limit for effective teaching.
It is also crucial to have help from the system administrator if you are using Unix, so that any potential problems can be dealt with beforehand, such as setting appropriate read and write permissions for accounts, and finding workarounds for any strange "features" of the system - for example in our case the system didn't source the .login file(!) where the default path was set, and the password server was on a different machine. Ideally the teachers should have write permission for all the accounts, otherwise copying over needed files is extremely time consuming, especially for a large class of 40 students.
The biggest change that we would like to see in this program is to work harder at nurturing an atmosphere in which the kids feel it's O.K. to be smart and like science. Since we were not directly involved in planning the social environment, we didn't discuss that side of the program in this article. There were counsellors in the dorms and for recreational activities, but it appears to be particularly difficult to find just the right counsellors. The ideal one would be a minority college or grad student who is excited about math and science and has experience working with and motivating this age group.
Our experiences with this group confirmed that kids find it hard just to use the full Internet resources without appropriate screening. If you just search for information using available Web libraries or search engines, there is too much stuff that is not interesting for kids and they find it hard to judge what they should look at. In contrast to unscreened access, we had some success with our list of interesting places on the Internet; we would like to expand and refine this list into Kid's Web, a Web library for kids. We would be glad to hear from other people interested in this idea.
In addition, we found that the current Mosaic interface was too complicated for the kids to use very much. Although they were successful at following links, the menus were too long and made it hard for them to use the few items that would have been really useful for them, like the hotlist and displaying local files. So in addition to Kid's Web, we would recommend the development of Kid's Mosaic - a simpler interface.