What Humanities Scholars Want Students to Know About the Internet

What Humanities Scholars Want Students To Know About the Internet: Alternative Paths for Alternative Endpoints

July 17, 2023 at 7:00 am

After we got the go-ahead to start developing PCAS (see an update on PCAS here), I had meetings with a wide range of liberal arts and sciences faculty. I’d ask faculty how they used computing in their work and what they wanted their students to know about computing. Some faculty had suggested that I talk to history professor, LaKisha Michelle Simmons. I met with her in January 2023, and she changed how I thought about what we were doing in PCAS.

I told her that I’d heard that she built websites to explain history research to the general public, and she stopped me. “No, no —- my students build websites. I don’t built websites.” I asked her what she would like her students to know about the Internet. “I could teach them about how the Internet works with packets and IP addresses. I could explain about servers and domain names.”

She said no. She was less interested in how the Internet worked. She had three specific things she wanted me to teach students.

1. She wanted students to know that there are things called databases.
2. That databases, if they are designed well, are easy to index and to find information in.
3. Databases could be used to automatically generate Web pages.
   

Her list explains a huge part of the Web, but was completely orthogonal to what I was thinking about teaching. She wasn’t asking me to teach tools. She wanted me to teach fundamental concepts. She wanted students to have understanding about a set of technologies and ideas, and the students really didn’t need IP addresses and packets to understand them.

The important insight for me was that the computing that she was asking for was a reasonable set, but different from what we normally teach. These are advanced CS ideas in most undergraduate programs, typically coming after a lot of data structures and algorithms. From her perspective, these were fundamental ideas. She didn’t see the need for the stuff we normally teach first.

I put learning objectives related to her points on the whiteboards in my participatory design sessions. This showed up in the upper-right hand corner of the Justice class whiteboard — the most important learning objective. LaKisha gave me the learning objectives, and the humanities scholars who advised me supported what she said. This became a top priority for our class Computing’s Impact on Justice: From Text to the Web.

Figuring out how

During the summer of 2022, a PhD student working with me, Tamara Nelson-Fromm, a group of undergraduate assistants, and I worked at figuring out how to achieve these goals. We had to figure out how to have students work with LaKisha’s three learning objectives, without complicated tools. We were committed to having students program and construct things — we didn’t want this to be a lecture and concepts-only class.

We were already planning on using Snap, and it has built-in support for working with CSV files. Undergraduate Fuchun Wang created a great set of blocks explicitly designed to look like SQL for manipulating CSV files. We used these blocks to talk about queries and database design in the class.

Tamara and I talked a lot about how to make the HTML part work. I had promised our advisors that we would not require LSA students to install anything on their computers in the intro courses. We talked about the possibility of building a teaspoon language for Web page development and for use as templating tool for databases, but I was worried that we were already throwing so many languages at the students.

Then it occurred to us that we could do this all with Snap. We built a set of blocks to represent the structure of an HTML page, like in this example. Since we could define our own control structures in HTML, we could present the pieces of a Web page nested inside other blocks, to mirror the nested structure of the tags.

Those last two blocks were key. The view webpage block displays in the stage the first 50 lines of the input HTML. That’s important so that students see the mapping from blocks to HTML. The open HTML page block opens a browser window and renders the HTML into it. (That was a tricky hack to get working.)

This was enough for us to talk about building Web pages in Snap, viewing the HTML, then rendering the HTML in the browser. Here’s a slide from the class. In deciding what computer science ideas to emphasize, I used the work of Tom Park who studied student errors in HTML and CSS, and found that ideas of hierarchy and encapsulation were a major source of error. Those are important ideas across computing, so I used those as themes across the CS instruction — and the structure we could build in the Snap block helped to present those ideas.

All of that together is enough to build Web pages from database queries. Here’s an example — querying the billionaires database from Forbes for those from Microsoft, then creating a Web page form letter asking them for money.

We use these blocks in both of our classes:

• In the Justice class, students use the HTML blocks to create a resume for a fictional or historical character in a homework assignment. In a bigger project, students design their own database of anything they want, then create two queries. One should return 1-3 items, and should generate a detail page for each of those items. The second query should return several items, and return an overview page for that set of items.
• In the Expression class, building an HTML page is the last homework. They use style rules and have to embed a Snap project so that there’s interactivity in the page. Here’s a slide from the class where we’re showing how adding style rules changes the look-and-feel of an HTML page.

Alternative Paths to Alternative Endpoints

Mike Tissenbaum, David Weintrop, Nathan Holbert, and Tammy Clegg have a paper that I really like called “The case for alternative endpoints in computing education” (BJET link, UIUC repository link). They argue “for why we need more and diverse endpoints to computing education. That many possible endpoints for computing education can be more inclusive, just and equitable than software engineering.” I strongly agree with them, but I learned from this process that there are also alternative paths.

Computer science sequences don’t usually start with databases, HTML, and building web pages from database queries, but that’s what my humanities scholars advisors wanted. Computer science usually starts from algorithms, data structures, and writing robust and secure code, which our scholars did not want. Our PCAS courses are certainly about alternative endpoints — we’re not preparing students to be professional software developers. We’re also showing that we can start from a different place, and introduce “advanced” ideas even in the first class. Computing education isn’t a sequence — it’s a network.

Entry filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: computing education, contextualized computing education, PCAS.

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