I spent the last three days at a Teachers Workshop in the Maine School District on a pedagogical tool, problem based learning (PBL). Those of us in higher education (especially engineers) are familiar with the subject, although you probably call it something else. Briefly, the concept is: teach some material by presenting a “messy” problem to students. This provides motivation and you can build lessons and discussions around the subjects they “need to know” to attack the problem.
This pedagogical tool is popular in engineering schools but often poorly implemented. The first course that comes to mind, for me, is a course on algorithms. At the beginning of a semester, give the students a setting where the solution is an NP-Hard algorithm. Most of the students will probably struggle with the problem, until you cover basic complexity and approximation algorithms. Perhaps they could use a randomized algorithm to attack the problem. This may motivate them to pull up conference proceedings and read more about the problem and approximations. You could pick a problem like the “School Timetable” problem or Multi-Commodity Flow. With undergraduates, you want to help them avoid this problem with their future employer [ From the Garey Complexity Book ]
On a slightly unrelated topic – at the end of the workshop, one of the facilitators played a video clip I have seen at least 2 times before in class at Michigan’s School of Information. You can watch the video below:
In the context of talking about problem based learning, I can understand why the video is interesting. If wepropose open-ended messy problems (like Ideo’s shopping cart problem) to students, we can motivate them to think abstractly and creatively about problem solving.
I do have a problem when people show this video to students, especially undergraduate and/or high school students to motivate them to become engineers, designers, and/or researchers. My problem is this: with high probability they won’t be working at Ideo or a company that designs like Ideo. If they go into engineering, they’ll be working for an {engineering/IT/manufacturing} firm, a start-up, or a University. General Motors or Google probably won’t let you have an airplane wing above your cubicle or let you hang your bike from the ceiling. The design process is more measured and your research/lit review/observations take far longer than a day. But it may still be an interesting, demanding, and creative process. Then, when these students start working at these companies or work towards a degree, they’re going to be disappointed when it is not as sexy as we told them it was.
Let’s not lie to our potential future engineers, we’re just going to disappoint them. There are lots of really cool engineers and projects out there that are not as sexy as Ideo but require the same tools. How about one of the engineers that designed the Chevy Volt? What about a Professor that works on a Cyclotron or the CERN project? Lets get students involved in engineering and design for the right reasons – not because it is sexy.
Recently, I have been thinking about education. Not just pedagogical stuff — how to teach or how students learn — but more general philosophical thoughts about education and the future of education. At Michigan, I took a course on Open Educational Resources with Joseph Hardin. Michigan has a large group of people, including Hardin and James Duderstadt who think and publish about open education related topics. We even constructed an OER wiki for the course (I wrote a couple of the pages – peer production and open access). More recently, I read DIY U by Anya Kamenetz, she pitches the case for the changing future of education and I attended the GK12 conference last week where we were paired with a teacher fellow (you can find a picture of me by clicking Graduate Fellows on the linked page!). This was topped off by reading a startling but inspiring (and I think accurate) graduation speech by a valedictorian, Erica Goldson. She writes:
When I leave educational institutionalism, will I be successful or forever lost? I have no clue about what I want to do with my life; I have no interests because I saw every subject of study as work, and I excelled at every subject just for the purpose of excelling, not learning. And quite frankly, now I’m scared.
I’ve always had an interest in education, not just because I’d like to be a tenure track professor, which includes teaching, but I would like to know more about how I learn and how I can develop better skills to access and parse information. I usually did well in school, I always found it easy to jump through hoops. Almost randomly, I’d find moments of inspiration and I would turn in assignments late because I’d be investigating some tangent or doing some interesting independent research. I had this moment a few times in my undergraduate days at Michigan State and a few more during my Masters program at Michigan. These moments, which usually had very little to do with formal education, are what inspired me to stay with academia and do original research. Things are more intense here at Northwestern and I’m passing my classes. However, I find that I can learn phenomenally more independently – with my own self-driven questions to answer. I feel like I am developing more as a researcher and teacher when I am not in classes then when I am, which on the surface, seems contradictory.
In a few weeks from now, I’ll be working with High School students. Next year, I’ll be back to working with undergraduates, so I have been thinking a lot about how to inspire and motivate others to think critically and be vested in their own education, like I wasn’t most of the time. I don’t know if I necessarily have an answer yet, though. There are so many resources out there for individuals to do self-driven research but motivating them to do so, from the head of a classroom sounds intimidating. If I think to my high school or undergraduate self, I can think of two topics that would have self-motivated me:
Video Games – I always enjoyed playing “sim” games, so when I discovered agent-based modeling in my Masters program, I found all sorts of interesting questions.
Computers – I’ve been a bit of a geek my entire life but left my undergraduate CS program because the material didn’t inspire me (sitting in the lab writing backgammon programs all night is hardly inspiring). I found my own way into computer science now and am absolutely happy here. How can I prevent future smart kids from running away from the field because it looks boring at first?
So, I don’t really necessarily have an end to this post. Hopefully, over the course of the next 12 months, I’ll be able to develop some resources to help others and maybe a few lesson plans or two I can post on here. I think all of the people I mention earlier make valid points about education and the future of education but I can’t yet distill all of these topics into a single goal or unified plan. This bugs me, so we’ll see how things go.
This evening, I had a chance to go do some work with the Meaningful Science Consortium. The consortium is a group out of a few Chicago-based Universities that advocates teaching more science in inner-city Chicago schools. My task this afternoon was to grade some of the student projects, which were assigned in advance. For the chemistry project, they were tasked with inventing some kind of board game to help other students learn about the periodic table. For the physics project, they were to design a roller coaster and calculate the requisite numbers (i.e. velocity, kinetic energy, etc). The project that I didn’t grade but was the most excited about with the 9th grade biology project.
Their project was to design a school building in Florida, with certain guidelines (had to be three buildings, you have a predesigned plot of land, etc). Their primary constraint, was to not kill off a specific tortoise species that existed on this plot of land. The tortoise existed in a complex food network. The student’s goal was to place the buildings in such a way as to maintain the ecosystem while still constructing a functional campus. They had to develop an objective along with more “constraints” and “considerations”. Further, there were some additional tasks which are now escaping me. Basically, they couldn’t just drain the swamp and build the school.
My immediate response: Awesome! This is a computer science / operations research problem! Essentially, the students were tasked with writing a linear program; maximize some objective function with respect to (binding) constraints. Even more interestingly, their constraint involved a graph! With node dependencies! This is the kind of program that researchers who work in algorithm design or optimization struggle with every day — how can we design better algorithms and solution concepts for these problems? Even better, this is an interesting and applied problem that includes finding ways to protect the environment with human considerations. Academics sometimes forget the reason that they consider these problems in the first place; focusing on making “the numbers work” and forget about the interesting ways this research can improve the human condition.
I hope stuff like this inspires a new generation of students interesting in questions of optimization, algorithm design, and similar topics. We need more people thinking about these kinds of problems and developing new approaches.
