When Professor Katrina Falkner was creating animations and artworks using computer coding as a teenager, little did she realise that a couple of decades later she would utterly transform how tens of thousands of Australian teachers perceive and teach coding. “That creativity, that ability to create with coding has really stuck with me my whole life. But like most women in my field, I was also struck by the lack of diversity in computer classes,” Falkner told the Brilliant.
Her love of coding began when her older sister would visit during summer holidays and create coding challenges for her on the family’s first computer. That interest kindled then never waned. “I felt like I could create a whole new world,” says Falkner.
However during her PhD studies in the early 2000s, Falkner kept reading papers about gender and diversity in computer studies. “People were talking about the issue and the need for diversity,” she says. “But it was the same papers basically being written all the time, and we weren’t making any noticeable shifts,” she said.
While the proposed introduction of the Digital Technologies Curriculum in 2013 was welcomed, around 95% of current teachers had no training or education in computer science. And while that was a problem for all students, the impact on girls would be greater.
I knew that from my reading around mathematics education and gender diversity, that there was a significant risk of young women disengaging, picking up on teachers’ anxiety and nervousness and taking that onboard for themselves,” says Falkner.
This is no trivial matter. The most recent Australian Computer Society and Deloitte Access Economics report on Australia’s Digital Pulse predicts that Australia will need at least 792,000 digital workers by 2024 – 100,000 more than were available in 2019.That gap can only be bridged if teachers can get their students — girls included — excited about coding and other digital skills.
But Falkner realised that normal professional development channels weren’t giving teachers the skills they needed. As the then Head of the School of Computer Science at the University of Adelaide, she decided to do something about it. She met with Sally Ann Williams, then an engineering program manager at Google to discuss her thoughts around developing curriculum resources to help teachers.
It was a meeting of the minds.
Sally Ann, who had long-standing experience with scalable education and professional development at Google, saw an even bigger potential for Falkner’s vision. “I said, ‘that’s great. I love it. But what I really want is a course that enables teachers, wherever they are in Australia, to be up-skilled in the digital technologies curriculum free of charge, and to get the confidence that they need to be able to start implementing it in the classroom. Do you want to do that with me?’” says Williams.
Together, they came up with the idea of building a free course for teachers from kindergarten through to Year 10.
Williams connected Falkner and her Adelaide University colleagues with many of the computer science teachers Williams had worked with over the years. That teacher collaboration was critical. Says Falkner, “It wasn’t going to be about us as computer science educators, telling teachers how to teach computer science. It was going to be about us helping give a voice to teachers who knew how to do that, so that it could be amplified for everyone else. We saw our role as helping clarify the computer science elements, and working with teachers to help them find a pathway through the resources that could help them just start teaching.”
Falkner and Williams, along with their partner in crime Rebecca Vivian, realised the course needed to fit what teachers were already doing, because asking overworked teachers to learn new skills was unrealistic. They also decided to use the ‘train the trainer’ model, where one teacher would learn the skills and then pass them on to the next.
“We always wanted it to be open source. And everything had to be shared and open to people,” says Falkner. “We didn’t want teachers to have to reinvent things.”
Fortunately, Professor Tim Bell at Canterbury University in New Zealand had already created computer science teaching resources that, paradoxically, didn’t require a computer to use. Falkner also wanted to add material specific to Australia and brought her research skills to bear on designing the course. She also did a deep dive into best practice teaching.
Launched in December 2014, the Computer Science Education Research Group Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) is free to both teachers and the community at large. Based on rigorous research, its lessons can be folded into existing classroom teaching, and it can be done when and where it suits the people using it. Participants include trainee teachers all the way through to tertiary educators.
Initially, some teachers hesitated to share ideas, but after a few jumped in, others followed. Soon, teachers were banding together to study in small groups. “People in leadership positions would get their colleagues together one night a week and have wine and cheese and do part of our course,” says Falkner.
The MOOC isn’t static but evolves with the community. “We share a bunch of videos and stories of people who have done amazing things with computer science in the community,” says Falkner. “That really opens peoples’ minds.” She says people have stereotypical ideas of what a computer scientist looks like, so when teachers can see ordinary people solving complex problems that really matter to people, “they get excited”.
Teachers are also modifying the material to suit their own classroom. “What a lot of teachers are realising is they can teach it with mathematics, they can teach it with English or with sports. They can blend in computer science foundations and just have a lot of fun.” Better yet, the MOOC can be mailed on a USB to teachers in remote areas, who can then connect virtually with peers elsewhere.
Falkner admits that getting the teachers on board was only half the challenge – the other was developing a program that could engage both five-year olds and teenagers. And then she found the Jam Sandwich video, which opened her eyes to a workable approach. “There’s a teacher who is acting as the robot and the kids have to write instructions for the teacher to make a jam sandwich,” she says. “They start off with things like ‘pick up the slice of bread. Pick up the knife. Butter the bread’ and the knife and the bread go flying.” The lesson is that the students must give extremely accurate instructions. “Computer science is all about computers following instructions and it’s the accuracy and deliberate nature of those instructions that trip you up when you’re programming.”
It turns out, says Falkner, that even small children grasp this concept. After all, as soon as they get to school, they have to learn to put their hands up, then down. They understand instructions. Now, “we have little kids running around talking about the algorithms they’ve developed”.
By 2018, the MOOC was in use across Australia. Some of the courses are suited to teachers getting into the subject for the first time, while others are for more advanced teachers. One of the courses is divided into several streams, encompassing robotics, app developments, digital games and data visualisation. The CSER Group, with the support of Digital Careers, the Federal Department of Education and Training, AustCyber and Google, has since launched other MOOCs for different age groups and for different specialist topics such as AI and CyberSecurity
Today, more than 45,000 teachers across Australia have used the Digital Technologies MOOC and subsequently taught their students – well over a million and counting – everything from programming to robotics to creating mobile apps and games. The Federal government also funds a lending library so that remote schools have access to the robotics and other equipment they require.
Using AI, Falkner and the team have been able to analyse the speech pattern of participants. Over the course of the program they found that that teachers went from using tentative language like “could” and “perhaps” to confidently talking about how they teach computer science in the classroom. Says Williams, “That’s the game-changer”.
So successful is the MOOC that the Federal government has funded Falkner and her team to create a similar MOOC for maths.
But inside all of these numbers are the stories of individual lives changed.
Williams says she was at a STEM conference when a woman came up and asked to hug her. “She started tearing up.”
When she could speak, the woman explained why she was so emotional. “I’ve been teaching for 20 or 30 years,” Williams recalls her saying. “My boss told me I would have to teach the digital technologies curriculum, and I didn’t want to do it. I hate technology. I don’t even have a smartphone.” The teacher thought her only option was to leave the classroom – to retire.
Then came the MOOC.
“I haven’t quit my job,” the teacher went on. “I’m now the ICT (Information and Communication Technology) teacher in my primary school and I’m doing robotics. I know how to use everything, and I teach other teachers how to do this.”
Williams says that’s exactly what she and Falkner set out to do. She also says the current message that everybody needs to be a great adopter of technology, is wrong. “Actually, everybody should be a great creator.”
There are 100,000 great creators required by 2024. It’s a tall order – but with more than 45,000 teachers on the case, and with both girls and boys getting into digital from their first days at school, that number now looks possible.
Follow Kat Falkner on Twitter
Article by Kylie Ahern
Photo Supplied