Computational Literacies Lab

The Computational Literacies Lab and friends are well-represented at ISLS 2023; if you are in Montreal this week please join us at some of these talks and presentations.

Monday, June 12

ICLS-SYMP18 / Moving Towards Critical Pedagogy for Transformative Action: Learnings from Research Partnerships

• (8:30 AM – 10:00 AM) John Molson 1.210
• Sameer Honwad, Shakuntala Devi Gopal, Akshay Kedari, Chris Hoadley

S-CS1 - Cultivating Equitable Computing Identities

• (3:00 PM–4:30 PM) John Molson 9 Room A
• “Growing as a person”: Authoring Identity Across Formal CS Education and Everyday Computing Contexts, Jacob Wolf and Chris Proctor, authors.
• Preschoolers’ Embodied and Shared Self-Regulation through Computational Thinking, X. Christine Wang, Virginia Flood, and Grace Yaxin Xing

Tuesday, June 13

S-PLAY2 - Game-Based Learning: Curriculum, Literacy, and Collaboration

• (8:30 AM–10:00 AM) John Molson 3.445
• How Kinetically-Held Gestures Support Collaborative Problem Solving in Physics, Virginia Flood

L-CS3 - Computational Literacy, Engagement, and Assessment

• (2:30 PM–4:00 PM) John Molson 3.445
• Chris Proctor, long paper session chair

Wednesday, June 14

ICLS-SYMP13 / Computation within and beyond Disciplinary Communities: Learnings from K-12 In-School-Time Studies

• (10:30 AM–12:00 PM) John Molson 3.210
• Dave Jackson, symposium chair; Chris Proctor, participant.

Interactive Tools and Demos - Multimodal interaction / XR / Embodiment

• (4:30 PM – 6:00 PM) John Molson 9 Room BC
• MultiMod: A platform for qualitative analysis of multimodal learning analytics, Chris Proctor and Dave Mawer

Our third CMLC workshop is coming up this week! Please RSVP.

The Computational Literacies Lab held our first official lab meeting on February 22nd, 2023. We had an astonishing three attendees! While attendance may have been rather lackluster, it gave those of us there an opportunity to share more deeply what we had been working on and start a larger conversation about things which have historically been reserved for one on one advisor advisee meetings. As one might imagine, both Dave and myself were interested in each other's work and I can honestly say that our mutual engagement with each others’ work was not forced, but natural and authentic. I’m calling it a successful dry run in a low pressure environment.

As far as announcements go, Finn set up an HTC Vive in the Learning Sciences Lab which is open to use by anyone. Right now it is installed on one specific PC in the lab under his account, so if you have any use for VR, contact Finn (or if you just want to play some flashy videogames, BeatSaber party anyone?). Finn is also going to be using the Lab from 4:00-8:30 on Friday afternoons this semester to host his competitive math clubs for students grades 7-12 and also the his new project, the Gifted Math Program Open Lab Time. The next lab meeting will contain a brainstorming and feedback session to help Finn flesh out what exactly it will look like. Meanwhile,

Chris is planning on finishing a review paper of languages and interfaces for learning programming and is largely focussed on launching the Computer Science course in Lockport, starting on February 8th. Finn is preoccupied with the success of his Open Lab Time project and spring also marks the main season for competitive math and he will be traveling around the state on various weekends for the next few months for various contests his students are competing in. Dave is engaged in collaborative study involves P5js and is in a data collection stage.

We also decided not to share our meeting notes publicly, nor our whitepapers, as they are by definition not in publishable form, but instead opted to publish these summaries as blog posts. Chris needs to work on getting the website ported to zola and will be hopefully demoing it for us this coming lab meeting. Remember that if you would like feedback, whitepapers should be between one and two pages long and be sent out to the lab members at least 24 hours in advance so we all have ample chance to read them.

Hope to see more faces next week!

For Spring 2023, Computational Literacies lab meetings will be held on Thursdays at 4pm. Please contact Finn if you can't be there in person; we can zoom you in.

The Computational Media Literacies Collaboratory’s second event will be held Tuesday, November 15 from 6:30–8:30pm in 218 Baldy on North Campus. This will be a game design workshop led by DMS MFA Candidate Famous Clark with DMS faculty member Cody Mejeur as a respondent. Please RSVP.

We are happy to introduce the first event put on by a new group at UB, the Computational Media Literacies Collaboratory! Coordinated by faculty members in the Learning and Instruction and Media Study departments, the CMLC will offer workshops on emerging computational technologies in dialogue across theory and practice.

Our first meeting will be an exploration of augmented reality by David Mawer (CISL PhD Candidate) with a discussion/response from Andrew Lison (Assistant Professor of Media Study). It will take place from 6:30–8:30pm on Wednesday, October 19 in the Learning Sciences Lab, Baldy 218.

We ask that you RSVP to the event so that we know how many people to expect.

Chris was honored to have another article featured on Jared O'Leary's CS K-8 Podcast. Our paper, Defining and designing computer science education in a K12 public school district, followed a school district's three-year process of designing their K12 CS curriculum. The challenges they encountered where the genesis of our new NSF grant studying community-based, justice-oriented approaches to designing K12 CS.

The first paper from the Minecraft Utopia project, "Joint visual attention and collaboration in Minecraft" by Dr. Chris Proctor and Dr. Dalia Antonia Caraballo Muller, received a Best Paper nomination at the Computer Supported Collaborative Learning Conference.

Dr. Chris Proctor joined the University at Buffalo's Department of Learning and Instruction in fall 2020 as an assistant professor of Learning Sciences. Read more about Chris's research at chrisproctor.net.