Education Innovation

Okay, welcome. I'm going to be talking tonight, my time, about educational innovation. And I'm now going to switch to my notebook so you can see it rectors at the Wolfram Summer School. And what I'm going to be talking about is the Educational Innovation Track and the Wolfram Summer School a little bit. Because to do educational innovation you need a number of things. And I think the Wolfram Summer School is a great place to learn many of those topics. And if you're trying to do an educational innovation with new technologies, then a couple of things you need, you may need more orphan language knowledge, ways of computational thinking and how to teach people that. What you get at the Wolfram Summer School is mentoring by educational technology experts. And I think it'll allow you to develop in an accelerated fashion educational tools. And I've just mentioned, of course, unless you've been living under a rock, you would know about ChatGPT and all of the new technologies, particularly those that are coupled into the Wolfram language, for example, the Wolfram plugin to ChatGPT. So these new generative AI tools. And there's a link there which you can follow downloading the notebook. There is now a prompt repository and I'll talk about that just a tiny bit later. So the point is Wolfram Research have gone from 0 to 100 very quickly with the connection of new technologies such as large language models such as chat, GPT, generative AI tools and combine them into the Wolfram language. Another attractive aspect of the Wolfram Summer School is you get to work with like minded educators and a bunch of highly motivated students and professors. And Stephen Wolfram is actively involved in the Wolfram Summer School, attends it basically every day and meets with every student and the mentors. And so it's a very positive environment for very quickly implementing and developing ideas. And particularly if you want to do educational innovation, you are at the right place. And just to follow some of those links, the first link takes you to the educational Innovation track at the Wolfram Summer School. And you can see the basis, the basic program is outlined there. And I'll come back to talk a bit more about some other aspects of that in a second. So what is the goal and the focus of the Educational Innovation Track at the Wolfram Summer School? Well, the general goal of the Wolfram Summer School is to quickly develop tools using Wolfram technologies. And of course the focus of this track is on educational tools. My own personal focus is, is a belief that we need to integrate technology more tightly into our teaching. And I've been a lecturer for 30 years. So the focus of many of the projects is to change the way people learn and teach. For example, creating tools for students, such as, for example, with the new generative AI systems, the ability to create Personas and to use those as tutors is a very important thing. Developing your own management platforms for teachers and so on is another tool. But in particular the major focus is to change the way people learn and teach. So what is the format of the school? Well, as you can imagine in in 2020 and 2021 due to Covid, the school was fully virtual, which worked reasonably well, but wasn't as exciting or good as the fully interactive school. In 2022 there was a hybrid format. There were some virtual attendees, many in person. And this year the school returned to Bentley University and my expectation is it'll be there again next summer in the northern hemisphere back at Bentley University for next year's summer school. So that's the school format. It's run over a three week period with intensive lectures and meetings with mentors to develop something. So what are the outcomes of the school? So what do you do at the school? What are the student outputs? Well, there are a few things you are expected to produce. One is writing a computational essay which is a notebook that explains your research topic in the first week and it's done to see the that the project is feasible and that you have a good plan for executing the project. Many of the projects lead to repository submissions and I've listed a few of them here but I'll come back to this. The function repository, packlet repository notebook archives and also sometimes people are creating demonstrations. So depending on the type of project you may be submitting something to one of the repositories and importantly you end up writing a blog on your project describing it and you publish this on the Wolfram community. So let me. I'll give you some examples of this so you can see what happens. But a good way to view the outputs from all of the tracks is on Tumblr. So I'll just transfer to that screen here. So. If you go to that link you get projects from the Wolfram summer school and these were the ones from the most recent summer school. So as you can see these are automatically generated from people's notebooks and they provide links to the Wolfram community post. I just going to present focus on two of those which I thought were interesting. One was a student, Hassan Aniba that I co mentored with Craig Carter from mit. And basically this was a project about using Prompt engineering basically Personas within ChatGPT OpenAI systems to. To improve education. And so this, you can read this for yourself. But this is the Wolf from Community post by Hassan Hasan on that. Another project that I co mentored was an undergraduate student who is writing an economics textbook. And that is an unusual thing to do. Usually students don't write textbooks. But Carlos is a very bright student, but not only that hard working and motivated and believes that he could explain some of the concepts that were explained to him by his own lecturers in a better, more interactive way. So that was his project which you might want to read. So but whatever takes your interest. There are many, many more interesting projects here. Some of which were on the educational track, some were on other tracks. But I invite you to have a look through this and see what you find interesting. There's a lot of interesting projects there. So Tumblr gives you the overview of all those tracks and those presentations as interactive notebooks are published on the Wolfram community. And relevant to the school is the Wolfram Technology Conference. Because there are a number of sessions at this particular conference which this year have the future of Education label. In previous years they just used an education label. But this is Future of Education label. But the point is if you look at this year's technology conference or the proceedings from previous years and look for the education tracks, you'll find relevant ones. So if we go to. Don't have that page open, but yeah, under the Wolfram Technology Conference you will find for example, this is in the Tech consulting is one of the Future of Education tracks. And you can search for education in the list and you'll come up with relevant sessions there. So they're all worth attending for the educators that are here at the Wolfram Technology conference. So just as an aside, I just want to remind people of useful resources. If you're an educator and you're developing materials, you're trying to do some innovation. I think the first most important thing is to avoid reinvention. So one example of that. Let me just give you this one. You can now embed demonstrations directly into your notebooks. You could essentially could always do this, but I end up developing a little repository function. It's now in the function repository. It was actually written by. Rice wrote it, but wrote the original plan. I just tidied it up and made it into a repository item in for Function. And this is taking a little time to load. But the point is that if you use this repository function and you pick one of the demonstrations, what it does is it embeds it into your notebook with the title, a URL to that and the author as well as authority Live Demonstration so if you are writing a textbook and there are relevant demonstrations, you can immediately import them into your textbook and credit the author and provide a link back to the original source codes in a very straightforward way. So that's one resource. It was Kevin Rice that wrote the original version of this function that is very useful. So embedding demonstrations is one thing. There are ideas in the Computational Thinking Initiatives page, of course you can use WolframAlpha and MathWorld has many interactive demonstrations and many many other resources out there, but I've just highlighted a few of them. So the first thing as an educator avoid reinvention in terms of learning the Wolfram language and for your students. Many educators end up trying to write this first themselves. I would argue that again, avoid reinvention. There is the excellent book by Stephen Wolfram, elementary Introduction, which I believe that's all high school students should work through because it doesn't have any math and it doesn't have much programming at all in it. But if you already know a programming language, then I would use the fast introduction for programmers. The Documentation center is a great learning resource in itself. I just mentioned a few others Wolfram Challenges Programming Lab There's a screencast and video gallery. Wolfram you both worth these are links so you can follow them for yourself. And at Wolframu there are previous Wolfram summer school lectures. So if there's particular topic you're interested in, you can view it through Wolfram Yu so a bunch of learning resources that are all very helpful for doing educational innovation. There are also repositories and many of you, all of you I'm sure have looked at the demonstrations project. Most of you, or many of you will have submitted a demonstration, but there are many other topics there. I think the function repository is an excellent collection of functions. I've contributed just a few of those, but that's a very worthwhile exercise there. There is now the Packlet repository and one of the new repositories is the Wolfram Prompt repository and there is a talk about the Prompt repository at the tech conference this year. So if you're interested in that, that's one to to attend. And there are many other ways of disseminating your ideas and also getting feedback and help with things that you are trying to implement. Wolfram Community particularly the staff Picks page, the Wolfram blog and there's a link here to more resources. So a number of Resources to help you develop innovative educational technologies. I just want to mention about each year, just to give you an idea, there's about 60 to 70 students that go through the school in the educational innovation track. A smaller number between 5 and 10 each year. And many people come to the summer school and do a project in one of the other tracks and then end up in a different role. I'm just going to quote two former students that I know well. Mads Bahrami was at the 27 Summer School and he's now the manager of academic Innovation support at Wolfram Research. Well, you can ask him online and chat with him since he'll be at the Technical Technology conference this year. But a number of reasons things. For example, he liked a refresher of, you know, going back to university dorms. But I think his second point is also very important. That there was an international community of people interested in the Wolfram language with expert coders and I think what would you get out of it? Well, you improve your skills is one thing and in, in Matt's case it ended up changing his direction. So I think that was, was a positive thing. But I'll just mention Mads can talk about it for himself, but he's got interest in AI and particularly Quantum and he's giving a talk on the Quantum projects that he works on at this technology conference. And another student was John McNally was at the 2020 school. He's also in the same area at Wolfram Research. And a couple of his comments. I think this is the thing. I would definitely agree. The school is enjoyable because the people there all have a common goal which is to learn as much as they can, as quickly as they can and to implement things. And there's a range of very, very talented and interesting people. So it's, it's an enjoyable place. I think this is important. Many institutions will have, you know, an institutional inertia. You can overcome it. And I think the final point that he makes, he enjoyed the school so much he wanted to spread the word and so he's gone into a full time position to do that. I think the, as he says, the school really is, you know, program or sorry, problem or project based learning. It really is. I think this second point is true. We had to use Zoom and other technologies such as Big Marker for many, many things. They're not perfect and indeed, if you really want to have an engaging interactive discussion, still in person is better. And the collaborations that we had at the school are interdisciplinary and international as well. So I think that is another advantage of the school. And well, his project was very successful. He got good advice about the user interface design. And I think, you know, good question. How much Wolfram language is required? Well, if you have your own domain knowledge and you can couple that to Wolfram language, you can learn what you need at the school. So I think that was the final point there. So I'm near the end of the time. I'd like to leave time for discussion or for me to switch back and have a look at the chat session, see if there's any questions there. But what I'd like to hope that I've done is at least give you an idea that attending a Wolfram summer school could be fun. And I can tell you it is fun. It's also very useful. And just a few more comments about educational innovation. I spent my entire career trying to be innovative in way I approach education. I think I have succeeded to some extent. But what I can say, and anybody who has tried this will very likely agree, is that innovation is hard. And particularly educational innovation is hard. Many people, many countries, their educational focus is still chalk and talk when there are many other technologies that you can use to more quickly allow people to understand concepts. Of course there is a cost involved in that and your school or institution may not have the infrastructure required. Also, within your own institution, you need support from the institution to implement that innovation, whether it is monetary or time support or. Or staffing support. I was very fortunate that my institution, the University of Western Australia, was positive in that respect. And really I had a head of school who was very supportive. And because of those supports, I was allowed very much to plan out what I wanted to do and to implement it. But you do need that support. If you don't have that support, it's very difficult even saying that I had support from my head of school, but. But there were many other staff within my own institution that were also that were skeptical about what I was doing. And it took many years in many cases to convince some of those staff that what I was doing was a good approach. And indeed many of them actually changed their own ideas over the years and moved to teaching methodologies and technologies closer to what what I was using. I've got a link here to an interview that was done with me about 10 years ago, but was about how I used it in my own teaching, which was an immersive use of technology which I used in my lectures, lab classes and even in the exams, students in my exams. And this is 15 years ago, these labs were done in computer computer lab exams, the students were given two to three hours to implement something to answer questions that they hadn't seen before. They were allowed Internet access, access to the web, access to their notes, but if they didn't know what they were doing, they couldn't have achieved it. But there can be technical problems, such as when the entire network goes down while you're running your exam, which it did on one occasion. That can be problematic. But I would say that this idea, immersing the students in the technology, in every aspect of your lectures, lab classes and exams is a worthwhile experience. But it is hard work to do. And just a question, you know, in any course that you're teaching, how is it best or how. I name some good ways of implementing computational thinking in education. So that's the end of my presentation. I will just leave with a summary slide here, but I'm just going to switch back to the chat channel and to see. Okay, I'm just looking at the question, question and answer post. One of those is what is a computational essay? Well, in my notebook there's a link to it and it's one of Stephen Wolfram's blog posts. If you look up Stephen Wolfram and computational essay, it'll be one of the first things that will come up, if not the first thing. And it is a very good read what it is. And in fact all of my everything really on the Wolfram community is a computational essay. That is it. It integrates an essay but with computation. Now that second question, do you have materials and education for multi way causal graphs? Well, I don't, but I am sure that Jonathan Gorard will have such things. So I'll put you in touch or you can get in touch with Jonathan to answer that. Third question is from Angela Clark. Have you had input or participated in guiding districts or state education departments in in developing computer science courses or study or promoting computational thinking to be included in all content areas, particularly for secondary courses? Okay. In my own case, I have had some experience in working with a district or a state education department not in computer science courses, but in physics and math courses. That was in Australia. In Victoria, I gave some sessions to high school teachers who are implementing computational thinking in their high school courses. And so that's example. I think Angela, we can have a longer chat about this. I'm going to Japan later this month and I'm actually going to be talking to education. My educators there, who my principal contact at one university is about developing, wants to talk to me about developing computer science courses. So which is not my area, but it is her area and we'll be talking about that particular topic. But regarding promoting computational thinking, I would say that if you use it in all your lectures, as I did, I used Wolf Language Mathematica in all of my lectures, my first year undergraduate physics lectures. In that case, basically just using for demonstrations. In the second year there was more promotion of computational thinking. But I think, as you go on to say in the question, I think it's actually important. The tool is now and has been for a number of years a perfect tool for high schools. So I think we need to roll it out much more at high schools. Now, somebody who could talk to you better than I could about that is actually a student. I mentioned, a former Wolfram summer school student, John McNally, because he was a high school teacher and he could talk to you about that, as that's one of his goals there. So thank you. And who is building the history of computing into social sciences and 3D design and coding into math and science. So very good topics there, which I will have to follow up a bit later because there's quite a bit to answer. But I think we should definitely chat and as I said, have a chat with John McNally. Have a chat with. With Mads as well. There are people I don't know about an example of the history of computing in particular as a course, but I am sure that there will be some. And 3D design and coding into math and science. I'm aware of a number of places that do that, but I'd have to look up some links and that will take me a bit longer to. To get back and answer that properly. Ah, it's more question. Where do you find these chat messages? Well, I'm not sure I'm seeing a presenter screen. I'm not sure. I'm not sure whether you can. Yes, you should be able to see the screen under the Q and A question. The chat, I believe, is blocked, but the Q and A is where all these chat messages are. I'm not sure whether that answers John Erickson's question. Okay. And. Oh, it's very good. I see Peter Fallon, a former student of mine, is actually online. How you see the role for large language models in teaching computational thinking, such as in my computational physics course. Well, that's a very good question. I have been playing with particularly the ChatGPT connected to Wolfram, and I have been applying that to a number of questions in physics, computational physics, and some engineering ones which some colleagues have been working on and it has done a great job at answering the questions. Now, for a researcher, it's been a great tool, firstly, because you know whether it's making sense or not. And secondly, it can help you accelerate what you already know how to do for students. You've got to slow it down a bit and you've got to make it give more feedback. So you've got to develop a Persona which gives you more interaction in that way. And the student at the summer school, Hassan, basically did a project which was teaching his area was electromagnetism in engineering rather than computational physics. But I think some of his approaches there, where you develop a Persona which becomes an AI tutor, I think, is perhaps. Well, certainly one of the things that I think is worth working on.