Gosh I must keep this blog more up to date!

I'd like to capture my journey, and my thoughts, through unplugged computing and what's led me to want to study this at a doctoral level. I say the word unplugged computing but actually I think unplugged-ish is possibly more accurate for my own thought processes. There is the assumption, generally speaking, that unplugged computing means no computers at all, while I've found that some unplugged-focused activities can still make use of computing devices in an effective manner without losing the power of it being unplugged, An example could include some links to YouTube videos or similar as useful for presenting activities which are otherwise primarily in-person. I'll expand upon this.

I guess I kind of fell into bits of unplugged computing. I realised this during my teaching career. When I first introduced the A-level computer science course, I wanted to try and think of new ways of making the course interesting and exciting, rather than just sitting at computers. The very first session I delivered was introducing variables and variable manipulation. I didn't want to just say "create a variable in Pascal", so instead I got a load of cheap casino chips and I gave the students activities for managing faculty points using these chips. I had a coloured bowl for each faculty and various varieties of chips. In the scenario given, if the blue faculty won a match, they might gain 50 points and therefore £50 worth of chips. So I had my students managing and manipulating variables, adding and subtracting and reviewing them, which was a completely unplugged activity without really thinking about it as such a thing.

I also hated seeing teachers teaching search and sorting techniques in what is probably the classic method: getting students lined up along a wall and being sorted into height order. While in itself that is an unplugged activity, it's something that doesn't work for me personally. I find that the only student who really learns much from that is the student doing the searching or sorting. Students who are being searched or sorted tend to just spend their time comparing themselves to people next to them and they don't look at the overall algorithm.

So I first of all got some giant kind of building blocks (I had a small child at the time) and wrote letters and numbers on them. To be able to scale that up (since the manufacturer of the building blocks didn't answer my begging e-mails), I bought a load of plain white matchboxes from eBay, wrote numbers on them, and put them into sets to enable students to search and sort those. I've seen people do similar things with playing cards. It let every student (or small group of students) learn equally.

I was kind of doing this without really realising it was a thing, a pedagogical concept. It wasn't until I came across Professor Paul Curzon at Queen Mary University of London that I started learning more about this as an actual idea. The first time I came across Paul was at a Computing at Cchool conference in Birmingham. He had a whole bunch of computing teachers in a room, and he had us following through trying to move a chess knight around a cross-shaped board to visit every single square of the board once, not repeating anything, and getting it back at the start. We tried to capture this as an algorithm or set of instructions, which was really hard. He then introduced us to the concept of a tour around a city, London say, which had a very nicely drawn map in a very simple kind of concentric hexagonal  shape, and it was a very simple activity. He then introduced the concept of graph theory and the fact that these were actually both the same problem represented in different ways, which was fascinating and opened up some really interesting concepts. And it was completely unplugged.

The second time I met Paul, he actually came at my request to deliver some CPD for the Harris Federation. He ran some training with us, and one of the things was a concept I was really struggling with at the time, the merge sort. I couldn't quite get my head around it for some reason. He had us moving our way backwards through sequences of chairs in the room, following instruction and organising ourselves. By us looking at the algorithm physically and moving ourselves through it, it really fell into place. I fell in love with what Paul was doing and have used an awful lot of his teaching material since.

Another aspect that I found interesting and useful for my own practice was when I was tasked with leading my own CPD day for the Harris Federation. We were given pretty free reign so I decided to take my colleagues to Bletchley Park. It wasn't until about two weeks beforehand when they rang up and said we've only got two hours of sessions at Bletchley - and I panicked. I said, sorry, two hours? We're driving all the way from South London to Milton Keynes and you only give us two hours. We're not getting a full day?

I first of all called up a pub nearby, the Bell Inn, and they agreed to let us use their lounge all day as long as we agreed to buy food and drink while there. I set up what I refer to as "CPD in a box". By this time I'd been running a fair bit of training for Philip Allen (part of Hodder), so I was used to running CPD, but I was used to standing up and delivering it to people of the same kind of position, same level of understanding. My colleagues from Harris were in very different places in their careers and experiences. I also didn't want to stand up in a pub and talk to them for three or four hours.

So I came up with this concept of CPD box. I referred to it as unplugged-ish because I didn't want to use computers (and we didn't all have laptops) but I wanted them to be able to see and hear some instructional material that I wasn't going to deliver directly because I had four or five groups at a time. So I included some QR codes linked directly to specific YouTube videos which was part of the instruction. Each box had a flip-book of instruction, very simple instructions to go through the CPD. Where I wanted them to see things done, which ordinarily the teacher in an unplugged activity might demonstrate, I had them watch videos on their phones instead because I didn't want to run around delivering teaching materials to five different groups at five different times. It would be chaotic. And this worked really, really well.

The idea was that each box, an ordinary file box (just over A4 and about 3-4" thick), would be a mini-CPD course on a very particular topic—be it graph theory, be it compression, images and sounds, whatever. And within the box I put everything that we needed for that CPD. It was primarily unplugged stuff.

I'd have laminated cards and dry-erase markers so they could colour or draw or write. I had answer sheets that they could write on. We had some hexaflexagons, which were a concept invented by Paul. We had printouts of the Knight's Tour from the chess puzzle and then the Tour of the City. We had some dice, we had some of the variable casino chips and some bowls to do the variable exercises. Each one was an interesting thing. The day was really popular with the colleagues.

Another opportunity, something I did before the time in Bletchley but led into that, was what I refer to as the Paul Curzon Honorary Brown Cox Computer, which shows how much influence Paul has had on my thought processes. This came about completely accidentally. We had an inset day and I was given, as head of department, free reign to do what I wanted to do for my own professional development. All the staff were given this one day to figure out ways to upskill themselves. I jumped on Facebook Marketplace and someone had just bought a bed. I drove up in the school minibus to Croydon, picked up the boxes from this person whose bed had been delivered, and brought them back.

I got my craft knife out and cut the boxes down to about the size of a person and put some slots in them. I decided that each one of these boxes was a subroutine. I should probably say as an aside that this idea actually led from a conversation with a trainee teacher who asked me what was the hardest thing I was teaching at the moment. At the time it was the concept of subroutines being functions and procedures, with variables having different internal names as arguments and parameters, the idea of internal values - it was a real pain.

So each one of these boxes was a subroutine. I stuck on the inside a human readable algorithm and I put slots in it. There was one slot for a return value. And then I had one or more slots for the arguments. On both the inside and the outside was the name of the argument: "A", "B", "number 1", whatever made sense.

I designed this initially around Pythagorean Theorem. So we had a subroutine that did squaring, we had a subroutine that did square root, we had a subroutine that did addition. And then we had a main program, and each of these were laminated algorithms in pseudocode. I had some laminated A4 sheets with some flaps folded over, which we could then hook through the slots so that we could pass a value in as an argument. The student inside the box, because I put students inside the box to "be" the subroutines, would follow the instructions and then pass the result out and hang it on the return slot. This worked really well.

One student would be the main program, and the only way to communicate with the subroutines was by passing data in and getting the answer back out. It had some real bonuses. For the square root algorithm, I had a very slow algorithm for them to do it manually. Then I changed that and swapped it for something done with the calculator and showed that as long as you've got the interface correct, the actual implementation of the algorithm becomes a black box. You can take out one implementation, put another implementation in that may be better without having to change the actual main program, without having to change the interface.

It's really a physical way of doing things while we're also getting kids who can't sit still into a box and out of the way :)  It was a really nice way of doing things. And it can be expanded by actually having spare boxes so the students themselves can take the problem, break it down into chunks and subroutines. They can do the decomposition, design the interfaces, and design what each of those boxes is going to do, adding in the algorithms themselves.

For the CPD day in Bletchley, I wanted to be able to do this. I actually took these boxes up to a training day for a company in central London. It was a nightmare because it filled my car and I got a congestion charge ticket because half my vision was covered by these boxes and I missed the cameras. They weren't in any way mobile. They were big and hard to store. I tried using Velcro to make them flat-packable, but that wasn't working - it just came off. Nightmare.

So I invented what I refer to as the Paul Curzon Honorary Brown Box Computer  Laptop Edition or PCHBBCLTE. For this I used old toner boxes, cut in half, and instead of A4 sheets  I used post-it notes I could fold over and slide into the slot. You could then set them on a table and you could have people behind the box as well. And again, this worked really nicely within the concept of that kind of limited room space, and because of the way the boxes folded together they actually fitted within the CPD in a box.

At another point I was contracted to go and deliver some teacher training to a school in Dubai. One thing that Mark, a really nice chap heading the department, really wanted some support on was the concept of logic gates. These are generally taught on the board by drawing shapes and symbols. You can use something like logic.ly software which allows you to build these circuits on the computer screen. But I wanted to try and think, was there something different we could do?

So I built some really small circuits with transistors and resistors with wires coming in, wires going out, and put these inside some leftover white matchboxes and drew symbols on top. We could connect these boxes together to form circuits and with the power going through it, it will light up or not light up when you flick switches. Taking them through customs was scary!

I've actually got some circuits printed out that are programmable so you can change what gate it is depending on what you want it to do. I've got these circuits sitting in my garage somewhere, I was playing with them around the time COVID hit. I was struggling with the best way to power these things without having a bunch of extra wires running through them, removing the abstraction used in teaching. But it's a really interesting concept to be able to actually build a physical circuit without having to stress about wiring really complex things up. They were fun. The idea is that there should be literally just banana plugs or similar, one output from one gate to an input on another one without the stress of how do you power them, how do you give a positive and negative. It's a fun concept that one day I'd like to continue.

That took me up to when I left classroom teaching. I've always loved delivering CPD and teaching in this way, using unplugged approaches for things that are difficult to grasp physically. Now I'm not a classroom teacher, although I still teach in three separate ways.

  1. I teach webinars to trainee teachers through the National  Institute of Teacher Education. This is a group of people who are remote, with a camera, for one hour.
  2. I teach younger students at Wolsey Hall Oxford and it's completely asynchronous. These students are working normally on their own, anywhere in the world. So I would meet with the students between one and three times a year, for a 15-minute call to see how things are going. They do the work independently from the textbooks and lessons that we set, completely independently, and they send in assignments to be marked.
  3. The daily bread and butter, if you like, of my teaching is at the Open University. Because my students again are often independent, often completely alone, often completely asynchronous. But more so, I actually often don't teach them directly. At the Open University, academics such as myself produce the learning material primarily in terms of the VLE content and the assessments. The delivery is done by associate lecturers who actually tutor the students and they see them at webinars. The students are still doing most of their work completely independently on their own, asynchronously, primarily through VLE or similar material.

In all these cases, we've got a number of issues. First of all, I can't easily send physical materials to most of the students, particularly those from the Open University. We've got potentially a thousand students or even more in any one year's presentation on a single module. And they can be anywhere. The other institution students are less in number, but they can be anywhere in the world as well. It's time consuming to deliver things to, for example, New Zealand.

We also have the issue that so many of them are often alone. They don't have people to work with. So the problems we've got here are the lack of a group. A lot of the really effective unplugged computing is working together.

RQ1 Can unplugged(ish) teaching be done effectively when the learner is on their own? Or potentially can it be done effectively with one other person, be it a sibling, a parent, a partner, a child even? If you're a dad with your children, could it be something that is effective when done in pairs, where the other part of that pair is not at the same level?

RQ2 Can it be done at a distance, remotely instead of in the classroom or on the playground? With no teacher present and either self-collected props, or props which are cheap to post.

RQ3 Can it be done completely asynchronously, without being able to go to the education provider, teacher, lecturer, tutor and asking questions being delivered some content face to face, or being asked questions or having the Socratic dialogue when there's nobody to have the Socratic dialogue with?

I appreciate these questions are not yet quite right. They are closed, they're begging for yes or no. There is no desire to seek extent, but that's ok because this is just a starting point captureing my thoughts. In fact, each of them could be themselves a whole level of experimentation.

The other thing that really interests me is the concept of CPD in a box. Can the concept of CPD in a box - one single box, the constraints of that box - that can be posted to any teacher in the country, potentially the world, as a self-contained teaching device of training and CPD and education... for a teacher. Can it be developed into a full thing? Can it, as a concept, be something which can be done either individually or as a pair or small group within a department without the trainer-deliverer being there?

RQ4 Can CPD in a Box become an effective CPD programme?

But perhaps that's trying to shape research around a project idea...

So:

I have these questions. And this desire to support learners. And a desire to know more myself. I've wanted to complete a PhD for a long time, ideas have come and gone - but this one has stuck. I'm in a better place in my life with the children being a bit older, and I now take ADHD medication which (normally) let's me get through a day without getting distracted by brain squirrels. I'm learning more about myself, and the way I work. I'm finding more efficient ways to deal with things (this is an edited voice note, for example). I was settled on a PhD, until my colleague Dr. Chris Douce reminded me of the EdD programme, which sent my head spinning a bit more. It's partly taught, with the taught sections leading towards thesis chapters, it can be (sometimes) completed quicker even in part time mode, so I'm now in a quandry.

I have to choose my question(s), choose my programme, and choose my supervisors... but I've at least got an area, and idea, and a determination.