Can Computer Coding Be Used to Teach Values? This Scholar Thinks So (Opinion)

In the new ebook Past Coding: How Kids Understand Human Values Via Programming, Tufts professor Marina Umaschi Bers argues that schools can train laptop coding in techniques that develop character as well as technical competencies. Umaschi Bers, the director of Tuft’s interdisciplinary DevTech Research Team, penned the book through the pandemic. She states that the disruptions of COVID-19 ended up a stark reminder of how crucial it is that engineering be approached with respect for connection, neighborhood, and generosity.

—Rick

Rick: Your new e book tackles a subject matter that may perhaps strike some audience as surprising—namely, how young children find out values through laptop or computer coding. Can you describe what you have in intellect?

Marina: Any time we interact in an action, we are expressing our values. We do this knowingly or unknowingly. The activity of coding is not distinct. In the e book, I propose 10 various values—such as persistence, curiosity, and generosity—that enjoy out while understanding how to system tasks that are personally significant to the coder. I use the metaphor of a “palette of virtues” to explain these values. The palette of virtues, significantly like the painter’s palette, is dynamic and can transform in accordance to context and target. For example, by engaging young children in a workforce coding setting, it invites them to be generous with each and every other by means of sharing complex expertise and challenge fixing with each other, or when factors in the code do not perform, it produces options to find out to be individual and to persevere. Studying how to code, in which difficulty fixing is at the heart of the action, gives a great opportunity to check out moral and personalized values, considering that there are not only cognitive dimensions, but also social and psychological features.

Rick: How did you arrive to this as a focal issue in your function?

Marina: My doctoral thesis, back again in 2001 at the MIT Media Lab, was currently focused on how new technologies could assistance youngsters discover and express individual and ethical values. I established Zora, a 3-dimensional digital metropolis for young children to style and design figures and then tell tales to individuals characters. Individuals tales and interactions had been guided by personal and ethical values. Around time, I realized that it is not only via a specifically made tech environment, this sort of as Zora, that we can take a look at values in an intentional and purposeful way, but we can also have this form of exploration additional frequently, by means of the exercise of producing with, and by, systems.

Rick: In the guide, you draw a direct url amongst programming and ethical advancement. Can you say a bit about this link?

Marina: It all goes again to intentionality. What is the intention of a trainer who delivers robotics to her kindergarten college students? Is it only to train specialized skills so kids grow up to turn out to be engineers? Or is it also to have interaction them in acquiring social expertise, good attitudes, and to assistance their emotional development? The coding “playground,” as I call this mastering natural environment, gives superb chances for equally. For example, children master how to invent new online games and respect guidelines, how to clear up social conflicts, and how to preserve seeking when matters do not perform out. At the very same time, it also engages little ones in computational wondering, dilemma resolving, engineering, and programming.

Rick: You’ve created previously about the big difference involving imagining about resourceful “playgrounds” compared to restricted “playpens” when it will come to studying. In this ebook, you advise that coding can be a dynamic playground. What do you necessarily mean by this?

Marina: Playgrounds invite fantasy participate in and involve conflict resolution with tiny adult supervision. In contrast to playgrounds, playpens express a deficiency of independence to experiment, absence of autonomy for exploration, lack of inventive prospects, and absence of taking risks. Playpens are confined confined spaces with couple choices for youngsters to make their personal possibilities. Whilst playpens are safer, playgrounds provide infinite choices for advancement and discovering. In the playground, the little one learns about the social environment by negotiating for their most loved toys in the sandbox, about their personal feelings when they wrestle to hold up with other individuals on the monkey bars, and about ethical options and effects when they are confronted with the problem to wait around politely for their switch on the swing or to slash the line. In the playground, the child is encountering the a number of proportions of human enhancement. Even so, she is executing it in a safe and sound house, a spot exactly where she can make problems and attempt all over again. Programming languages, these kinds of as KIBO and ScratchJr, are coding playgrounds in which small children have liberty to generate jobs to express their thinking and to talk who they are and what they adore. For illustration, they can make an interactive birthday card for mom or father with ScratchJr or program a KIBO robot to dance the salsa.

Rick: You advise that it’s helpful to believe about coding as if college students are discovering a second language. What does this suggest for how we assume about and educate computer capabilities?

Marina: I propose that learning laptop or computer programming lets children to achieve an alternate kind of literacy that is necessary in the 21st century. Nonetheless, my rationale for supporting the introduction of laptop science and computational wondering beginning in kindergarten is not the creation of the long run workforce but the future citizenry. Most people know that looking through and writing are applications for interpretation and have the probable to be resources of electrical power. Echoing Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, literacy is a instrument for important comprehension, for being familiar with the environment, and for actively transforming it. This is the similar with coding. Devoid of comprehending the fundamentals of what an algorithm is and how it functions, people today may possibly not recognize why and how certain data is exhibited and turn into illiterate in the facts age when so substantially of what we consume is managed by algorithms.

Rick: In 2019, you introduced the Outside of STEM system, functioning with kindergarten instructors and university directors in Boston and Buenos Aires. Can you say a bit about that do the job and what’s forward for it?

Marina: As a result of this task, we brought KIBO robots, an age-correct robot that can be programmed with wood blocks instead of screens, to kindergartners and their instructors in spiritual and secular schools, in Buenos Aires and Boston. Together, we explored questions such as how can we instruct human values by way of computer programming that stand for the two common and specific perspectives? Can coding aid character progress? How does a robotics-based mostly plan not only advertise the acquisition of technological expertise but also enable small children come to be better citizens and human beings? Can coding serve as a bridge by supplying another language to get to know other people who are different from us? Lecturers attending the robotics instruction came with unique ranges of KIBO information, but they all still left with technical techniques and a palette of virtues that allowed them to bring robotics lessons to their early-childhood lecture rooms. Just about every faculty worked to create a tale employing KIBO robots that would spotlight the values of their faculty and shared the robots with the other collaborating schools in their place and also with their intercontinental counterparts via a virtual portal. In the long run, we hope to continue this do the job by delivering extra opportunities—face-to-experience workshops and digital interactions—for persons from various cultures and ethnicities, religions and nations around the world, and who talk distinct languages to get to know every other by engaging in the shared, universal language of coding.

Rick: Alright, final considered. If you had a person piece of tips for educators and mothers and fathers hoping to assistance young children interact with engineering in a generous, moral vogue, what would it be?

Marina: My assistance is to appear at your individual palette of virtues very first and request by yourself these really hard thoughts: Are your very own values exercised or exhibited in your use of technologies? Are you regular in what you think is superior and poor in your own behaviors? For most of us, the remedy is commonly “no.” For case in point, we care about family members time, but our phone sits with us for the duration of foods. We very value confidentiality, but we ahead email messages. Our youngsters are constantly observing us, so in advance of we stress about them, we will need to appear at our personal behaviors. Due to the fact like it or not, we are position models. And we must be intentional about what form of modeling we are accomplishing.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.