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MCVT (Making Computing Visible and Tangible) Cards are a toolkit of paper-based computing cards intended for use in the codesign of inclusive computing education. Working with groups of teachers and students over multiple design sessions, we share our toolkit, design drivers and material considerations; and use cases drawn from a week-long codesign workshop where seven teachers made and adapted cards for their future classroom facilitation. Our findings suggest that teachers valued the MCVT toolkit as a resource for their own learning and perceived the cards to be useful for supporting new computational practices, specifically for learning through making and connecting to examples of everyday computing. Critically reviewed by teachers during codesign workshops, the toolkit however posed some implementation challenges and constraints for learning through making and troubleshooting circuitry. From teacher surveys, interviews, workshop video recordings, and teacher-constructed projects, we show how teachers codesigned new design prototypes and pedagogical activities while also adapting and extending paper-based computing materials so their students could take advantage of the unique technical and expressive affordances of MCVT Cards. Our design research contributes a new perspective on using interactive paper computing cards as a medium for instructional materials development to support more inclusive computing education.
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Value Cards: An Educational Toolkit for Teaching Social Impacts of Machine Learning through Deliberation
Recently, there have been increasing calls for computer science curricula to complement existing technical training with topics related to Fairness, Accountability, Transparency and Ethics (FATE). In this paper, we present Value Cards, an educational toolkit to inform students and practitioners the social impacts of different machine learning models via deliberation. This paper presents an early use of our approach in a college-level computer science course. Through an in-class activity, we report empirical data for the initial effectiveness of our approach. Our results suggest that the use of the Value Cards toolkit can improve students' understanding of both the technical definitions and trade-offs of performance metrics and apply them in real-world contexts, help them recognize the significance of considering diverse social values in the development and deployment of algorithmic systems, and enable them to communicate, negotiate and synthesize the perspectives of diverse stakeholders. Our study also demonstrates a number of caveats we need to consider when using the different variants of the Value Cards toolkit. Finally, we discuss the challenges as well as future applications of our approach.
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- PAR ID:
- 10283269
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- FAccT '21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 850 to 861
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445971
