I previously wrote about the creative ways learners in my spring 2020, fall 2020, spring and fall 2021 and spring 2022 Honors College courses (HONR 296) exhibited and documented their knowledge and understanding of the course's material. The course title is "Computer Science and Algorithms to Live By." The course final project, in summary, was to create a tangible artifact that recorded their responses to the course’s essential questions, as it related to their chosen major(s) and/or minor(s). In this post, I am showcasing the creativity of nineteen summer 2022, fall 2022, and spring 2023 learners who were willing for me to share their work.
I encourage you to read to the end of this post and click on all the images and links to experience the full breadth of how these students understood computer science and algorithms to impact their current and future lives. In the interest of brevity, I have not provided any commentary about them, but rather have provided a brief description and an image or link for you to investigate further. They are listed in random order.
Samuel Willey connected the course content to his sales major by creating a fictitious company that sells algorithms as a service. He created
a commercial that explains why you need to buy algorithms and how useful they are.
Ozzie Kazarian wrote a "choose your own adventure" style click and read story. It attempts to answer course essential questions like "what is a computer" through a sci-fi inspired narrator. It's fairly short to play through;
check it out.
Jackson Ketcham created
a video that connects the two worlds of computer science and algorithms with the medical field. While using algorithmic analogies, he breaks down the function of medicines (such as antibiotics) and how algorithms will impact the future of medicine. He also uses ASL in the video with drawings to simulate an effective teaching and communicative method of talking with a deaf patient in a hospital.
Jess Melvin combined her anthropology knowledge and fashion skills, to create a "
styling bible"—a guidebook for styling gigs—for a fictional client based on the course content. She answered the essential questions abstractly through moodboards and outfit plans and more concretely through text within the guidebook.
Jada Cooper created a
group of lessons orchestrated for sixth graders to be introduced to computer science and begin analyzing the importance of these technologies in the world today. The lessons begin with students being given general information and having the freedom to explore more on their own, before wrapping up with a Socratic seminar that dives deeper into these topics and makes connections to our own lives.
Fortune Anjorin created an infographic that explains how technology improves nursing care, as well as the technologies that will be used in the future. She gave examples of the technologies we see nurses use daily at the hospital and did some research on some newly developed robots that will be used in the future.
Liz Davis answered the course's essential questions, and then translated her responses into French, utilizing knowledge from her major. She also delivered her class presentation in French.
Delaney Fritch combined their Political Science and History majors to create an oral history. They interviewed themself, asking the course’s essential questions, and then formally wrote it up as a (fictitious) oral history for the BSU archives.
Joseph Gassensmith created a presentation wherein he explored the course's essential questions as they relate to the practice of law.
Ainsley Hall "rebranded" the course. As the class did a deep dive into algorithms and how they are used in our daily life—especially in the case of social media usage and artificial intelligence—her project focused on introducing and bringing interest to ideas within the course. This rebranding involved creating media pieces (
a video, a logo, and social media mockups) and integrating AI speech technology guided by a human-written script to show how newer technologies can be used to assist rather than replace.
Gabrielle Heiser created a collage that focused on algorithmic bias in healthcare, along with providing responses to how the course's essential question related to nursing.
Kade Wereley-Bross created a visual representation of Broadway attendance numbers throughout the last four decades, in the form of a blanket, based on the classic temperature blanket style yarn project. The
colors reflect ranges of attendance numbers. They also provided a document describing how this is related to the course's essential questions.
Dylan Kedra used social work skills to write up a set of
patient notes, where a computer was the patient. A representative quote from the notes: "Capability of immense change in the world due to their calculating and intelligent thought processes. While also mentioning their ability to fit into and improve almost every situation when there are clear boundaries set."
Gavin Neal designed a computer slide puzzle game that, once solved, would provide the answers to the course essential questions as the puzzle face. The unpredictability of the puzzle represents how algorithms sometimes are not so easily transferred from one medium to another.
Jess Schroeder created a poster containing images that represented her responses to the course's essential questions.
Abby McElroy practiced writing lesson plans, even if the topic was not at all related to her journalism major. She found making a lesson for computers and algorithms to be a fun twist on things she's been learning to do and included class discussions, homework, and more!
Jentry Keesling created an infographic describing the way computer science has changed psychology and created new fields combining the two.
Max Vale wrote a play about two pieces of brothers learning about what it means to answer the essential questions of the course. It explores where the boundary of human and computer overlap and what happens when that boundary is crossed.
Adrian Tauriainen created a presentation about how computers and technology have impacted the world of architecture.
So, there you have it. Nineteen different responses to the same prompt. Leaving an assignment open (as opposed to strictly defined) provides the learner an opportunity to explore their passions, and thus they are likely to engage with the assignment more fully. It also makes the evaluation of the assignment a lot more interesting, since the submissions are not cookie cutters of each other, and I often learn something new as well. Learner-centered teaching for the win.
What interesting assignments have you had? Describe it in a comment below.
Image credits: All images were provided by their creators.
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