Asha was invited and sponsored by Code.org to attend the APCEC conference on computer education in Japan. Mr Rajaraman attended the conference on behalf of Asha.
Asia Pacific Computer Education Conference
by Code.org and Minna no Code.
Nov 20th to 23rd , Tokyo and Sendai Japan
Asha was invited to participate in the Asia Pacific Computer Education Conference (APCEC) organised by Code.org in partnership with their Japanese partner organisation Minna no Code (or Code for Everyone). Further I was sponsored by Code.org to attend the same. This provided a wonderful opportunity for us learn from seeing how Computer Science is being taught in Japan and also interact with people from other countries to understand the common challenges and possible solutions.
Here are all the photos taken during this trip.
Background
Asha has been teaching Computer Science through different programs for a number of years. The CS Fundamentals (for classes 1 to 5) and CS Discoveries (for classes 6 to 10) courses created by Code.org provide excellent curricula to teach. Asha has been integrated bits and pieces of CS Fundamentals for introducing programming to younger class students. Further in our RTCs we have been offering several courses in CS Discoveries as part of our advanced courses. Further with support from Amazon Future Engineer (AFE) program we were brought closer to Code.org. Most beneficiaries of AFE have been using Code.org’s contents to teach Computer Science. We have attended a couple of training sessions conducted in person by people from Code.org.
For the APCEC conference Code.org invited and sponsored 4 other organisations, also part of the AFE ecosystem to attend the conference in Japan.
Schedule of the Conference
Here is the detailed schedule for the conference. In addition to this, Code.org had meeting on the first day with the India partners. Here is the brief schedule for the days of the conference.
20th Nov (Day 1): Indian partners meet with Code.org in Tokyo.
21st Nov (Day 2): Visits to two schools in Tokyo.
22nd Nov (Day 3): Travel to Sendai and a visit to a school there.
23rd Nov (Day 4): Main APCEC conference at Sendai
I started from Chennai on the 18th evening and reached Tokyo on the 19th. We left Sendai back for Tokyo on the 24th. I spent 3 more days just sightseeing on my own before returning to Chennai on the 27th. Our accommodation in Tokyo and Sendai during the days of the conference were also arranged for us by the hosts, Minna no Code, at the same hotels where the conference was organised. We started the trip at Hotel Monterey at Hanzomon in Tokyo.
India Partners Meet with Code.org – Nov 20th
In addition to Asha, the following partners were also invited to the APCEC conference.
Leadership for Equity
Peepul
Education Initiatives
Quest Alliance
Simon Guest, the CTO of Code.org and Forest Key and Doyeon Kim from their International partnership team were there for the meeting. Yuta Tonegawa from Minna no Code was also there. In addition there were also partners from Chile and Mexico present during the meeting.
Each of us talked about the state of CS education in our state/country. I talked about what is being done with Computer Science education in Tamilnadu. In addition, the organisations also talked about the work they are doing and some of the common challenges that are encountered by all of us. The standard challenges expressed by most were,
Infrastructure availability.
Training the teachers. How to train teachers with non-CS background to teach CS?
Doubts about what to teach. Using computers vs. understanding how they work vs. programming them. Where to bring in AI? Using AI vs. teaching how AI works? etc.
Lack of movement with government officials on these discussions.
Another important aspect that Alexandro from Mexico brought up was tracking the work of the teachers. Many of the organisations have a model similar to our trainers. The organisations (like Asha) employ trainers to train the government teachers. The work output of the government teachers needs to be monitored. The trainers often have to travel long distances. The organisation in Mexico was looking into AI agents that can check with the teachers and monitor their work!
One thing here that made me happy was that the work that we are expecting and getting from the ACE teachers was far more than what the other organisations were seeing with the government teachers they work with. Alexandro was saying that something like 30% of the teachers will be doing most of the lessons, another 30% will do about ½ to 2/3rd of the lessons, another 30% ¼ to ½ the lessons and finally 10% would be almost non starters. With out ACE programs we ensure through our trainers as well as by selecting motivated teachers that ALL of them complete the entire course for their students. This seems to not at all be the norm!
Nitobe Bunka High School Visit – Nov 21st Morning
After a good breakfast at Hotel Monterey, we were taken by a bus to the Nitobe Bunka High School. At all the schools we visited, we were required to take off our shoes at the entrance to the school and then wear a slip-on into the school. This is a traditional Japanese practice that is also practiced at all the schools. The schooling system in Japan is 6+3+3. Six years of elementary school, 3 years of Junior High and then 3 years of Senior High school.
We were given an introduction to the school by the principal of the school. The school has a long history and it has been operational since 1927. The school prides itself on creating students who cultivate happiness and are creators. They focus on cross-curriculum interactions for the students through activities outside of the school. They are giving a lot of importance to technology.
We first went to a STEM lab setup in partnership with Vivistop. There was also a teacher appointed by Vivistop in the classroom. There was a class going on with class 4 students. They were working on something that resembled a bridge built with small sticks. In this maker space, the children work on projects that includes but not limited to technology.
After a lunch in one of the classrooms, we went to a class conducted for 9th std students. This class demonstrated one of the things I heard of often – the use of computers and technology while teaching other subjects. This was a Maths class where the children were being taught statistics and in particular correlation. All the children were working on their own individual tablets. They were working with a big excel file. There were 40 questions for which there were answers from 2000 respondents. These were questions like “Shoe size”, “Height”, “Do you eat breakfast in the morning?”, etc. The questions were columns in the excel and the 2000 answers were as many rows. Children were asked to guess which answers will be well correlated and asked to verify it using Excel.
We could also observe other things during the class. The students were allowed free use of their smartphones! A few of them were distracted with other things like chatting.
Tokyo Metropolitan Kunitachi Senior High School – Nov 21st Afternoon
We then travelled across Tokyo to the Kunitachi Senior High School. This is a government school and it is one of the best schools. Students have to write an entrance exam after their Junior High school to gain admission to this school. We could see that in the level of seriousness exhibited by the students.
We went to a coding class for 10th std students. This was very different from the typical coding classes. Given that the communication between the teacher and the students was all in Japanese, I couldn’t initially understand the class. The students have all learnt some Python coding. They have asked ChatGPT to generate code for 10 different requirement. Most of these are small programs which get a “choice” from the user or based on random number and give some text output based on that choice. For example, it may emit a random fortune or based on the temperature today it will tell you what you can wear etc. The LLM has been asked to generate the program with one bug. The students were working in teams of 3. They should debug the program and then explain it to the students from the other teams. With all students running everywhere, it took us a while to understand what was going on!
The infrastructure at the school was very good. There were 4 rows of computers. In each row there were 10 computers. But in between two computers there would be a monitor which is controlled by the teacher. The teacher can project his screen to that or have another student’s screen be visible on all these monitors! This class was using all this infrastructure very effectively.
When we were leaving the school, we could see all the extra-curricular activities taking place. There were children learning to play music as part of an orchestra. There were lots of children playing shuttle cock and other games in the play ground.
On the way back, they dropped us at Shinjuku. We did some shopping and ate at a nice Vegan place in Shinjuku,
Attached Schools of Miyagi University of Education – Nov 22nd
We checked out early in the morning from Hotel Monterey and boarded the Shinkansen to Sendai a town about 350 Kms to the North of Tokyo. The train took barely an hour and a half to reach Sendai! We were then taken by bus from there to he Attached Elementary and High schools of Miyagi University of Education.
After dropping our bags in the library at the school, we went to see a class for 7th std students doing programming. The children here were all having a small laptop – may be 11’ screen. They were programming using a block based programming tool called Progummy. It seems to be a variant of Scratch. It supports some collaborative programming. The students are able to send messages to each other. They were working in teams of 4 and they are supposed to send messages to each other when some keys are pressed. Then when the messages are received, they show a colour or play a tone. The level of the activity seemed to not be very different from what we will do in our schools. However, the team exercise and communication made the lesson quite interesting.
We then had lunch in one room. From the corridor outside that class I could see all the rooms of the elementary school classes some 50 feet away. I could see a lot of activity in all the classes. All the children had worn white overalls and a cap and were busy cleaning their classroom. Children as young as 1st and 2nd standard were cleaning their classrooms with brooms and mops twice their size! It was a complete pleasure to immerse myself in this sight. The actual cleaning that was happening was probably questionable but the culture it develops in the children to feel that public property is theirs to take care of, was something remarkable and a joy to behold. Children came to our corridor to clean as well. They were a little intimidated by the sight of 30 or 40 strangers and ran back probably to consult their teacher. I felt this was something that we should cultivate among our children in India too.
In the afternoon we first went to visit a 5th std class. They were all working on a 6 week (1 hr per week) project and were in the last stage of it. They were using a microbit card. They were detecting various sensors (sound, touch, temperature and light) and driving a strip of LED lights to do various things. After doing the coding in this class, they went to the next room which had beenturned into a dark room to test/demo their project. One boy was lighting up his Christmas tree which changes colours every time someone claps. One group of girls had an armour plate that changes colour every time it is struck. The kids were unconstrained and were having a blast. One thing that really impressed me what the confidence with which some of them communicated with us using Google translate. They quickly typed in Japanese and showed us the English translation and asked us to speak into the mic to read our response in Japanese! There was also a TV crew from a local TV station filming these children and also covering our visit. Here is the TV program.
Then we went into the 4th standard class. They were also in the 5th week of their 6-week project. This project was based on Sony’s Toio Cube. The children had to design an arm that will attach to the robot and then write a program to move the robot from start to finish while collecting as many balls strewn in the area as possible. The children’s coding seemed to be without loops! The arms were 3-D printed based on their design. The children were testing with paper-based arms. Again, the children were really enjoying themselves in the class. Some were working on their own and some in teams.
The classroom with Z shaped tables which enable easy working as teams and the electric connections hanging from the ceiling and not being in the way were all very innovative. At the end of the class the students are asked to share what they have accomplished today and what they hope to do in the upcoming days. It was nice to see the sincere aspirations of the kids to learn and create better solutions.
After this we left the school. As we were leaving the school we could see the students participating in different extracurricular activities like playing instruments in an orchestra, playing various games etc. In the evening, we were put up in Sakan resort at the Aiku hotsprings some 40 mins from Sendai. This was a Japanese style hotel or Ryokan. This was also an experience for all of us.
Main APCEC Conference – Nov 23rd
The APCEC conference was also held at the conference facilities at the SAKAN resort. The Keynote address was delivered by Cassie Hague of OECD on the topic “Creativity in the time of AI”. She talked about the assessments done across the developed countries measuring how creativity was approached by their repective education systems. She also detailed the various works undertaken by OECD as an organisation towards developing tools (lesson plans, assessments etc.) to incorporate creativity and critical thinking into the curriculum for all subjects.
Two speakers from Code.org Simon Guest, the CTO and Pat Yongpradit talked about the new AI course available through Code.org and their approach to teach AI as well as teach how to use AI. Doyeon Kim, also from Code.org, talked about how Code.org has evaluated the CS readiness among states in the US and the yardstick they are planning to use to evaluate the same for countries of the world.
Over the next couple of sessions, representatives from various countries talked about the state of CS education in their countries. This included Bangladesh, South Korea, Malaysia, Mongolia, Cambodia, Thailand etc. Where govt representatives were not available organisations from those countries talked about the same including Indonesia, India, etc. Many of the countries were dealing with infrastructure and teacher training related issues similar to India. The countries that are including it are all grappling with questions such as,
Whether to include CS as a separate subject or include that along with other subjects.
What to teach in CS. Digital literacy vs learning how things work vs programming.
There was a separate session on Japan the host country. Two government officials talked about Japan’s steps towards improving technology education. Their GIGA School program provides for one device per student and Giga bit network connectivity to all schools. This was planned to be completed by 2024. Because of Covid they accelerated it and completed it in early 2021 itself!!! In addition to devices they also brought in a common collaboration framework across all schools. We have been seeing this both the government schools we visited. There was also another presentation regarding how AI is to be used in classrooms integrated with the subjects. There were some very good ideas here. We had also seen this in the Python class at the Kunitachi high school.
There was one talk by a woman from Minna no Code which talked about the gender gap in STEM education and in teaching STEM. We have once again been seeing that in all the schools we visited. ALL the teachers we saw in the CS classes were men. I learnt that there are more male teachers every at a primary school level than women. This ratio is even more skewed in CS teachers.
There were also couple of sessions by partner organisations of Code.org and Minna no Code like Microbit. We have to seriously evaluate if we are going to continue with AdaFruit or move to Microbit.
In Conclusion
After the main conference I stayed for one more night at the Sakan resort before returning to Tokyo. I spent a couple of days sightseeing in Tokyo before returning to India. This has been a great trip for me and I believe for Asha. The opportunity to see how the schools are functioning in a developed country like Japan was very eye-opening. While the infrastructure at the schools are decades away for Indian schools, many of the techniques they were using were relevant and provided interesting ways to develop our own curriculum and what we were doing.
It has also a great opportunity to get to know people and organisations working for the same cause as we are. I got to know the Indian NGOs better. I had already met most of them during previous Code.org trainings in Bengaluru and Pune. The people from Minna no Code are taking the lead in bringing together all the organisations in the Asia Pacific region working on Computer Education. They had organised this conference in a wonderful manner and it was very good to get to know them well. While we knew Code.org well and have already been working with them, through this conference, I got to know more people in the organisation and opened up more possibilities of working together. Further Doyeon Kim, Head of Global Partnerships at Code.org, agreed to visit Chennai in February during her next visit to India. We are keen to have her see our RTC Impressions where we are using many of the CS Discoveries courses.
