That's right. It can seem like so many times,
there's so many different things that our brain needs to be juggling.
Although you may feel that, hey,
as a teacher, that's part of my job.
Is that I pay attention to
how many different things my students are having to attend to in learning a new topic,
and I build things up for them so that they aren't constantly juggling a lot of balls.
That's true, but you know what?
Computers are notoriously complex.
I mean, you're just like an old laptop with the bottom taken off,
just the amount of things that are inside there and that
they all somehow are working together that make something happen on my screen.
Yeah, inherently, computers are full of lots of
different things that maybe we have to know about in order to use them effectively.
But don't even think about into a computer.
Just think about working with someone using different applications,
getting with your documents are using Google Docs or using Word.
Because, of course, we know that has different implications in
terms of where you are storing files,
how do you find them,
even just the interfaces that you use.
Speaking of cognitive load,
look at all of the different things that are
showing there on the end of the options with the file,
and the edit, and whatever,
and then the millions of different little things you can choose from.
Boy, that seems like that's imposing quite a cognitive load.
Then, let's just think about when you're talking to
people about ways that you communicate,
and maybe this is something that you've experienced if you work with someone
who's older and doesn't use all these things like marmarev.
You don't know, that wasn't Gmail,
that was a text message.
Or was it a tweet, or was it a Facebook post?
There is all these different forms of communication now
that we wished to just think maybe it was like on the computer, right?
But now, there is so many different types of communication, and apps,
and this and the other that, keeping them straight,
probably requires quite a bit of cognitive effort.
Then, we will just maybe in this class we're talking about
impacts of computing or impacts of technology in the world.
Well, what about- there's different worlds,
there is like, what about the impact of computing on me?
Or what about impacts of computing in
my local region as it maybe impacts those around me in San Diego,
or in the United States,
or on the planet?
So, in reality, a lot of what we teach about
computing whether it be the technology and the details
of how the Internet works to even just thinking about impacts of computing,
there can often be a lot of complexity, detail,
different things to consider or manage that might be
causing our students a significant amount of cognitive load in trying to deal with these.
So, as a teacher,
it's probably a term that you feel very comfortable with,
the technique that we often use to help
our students manage and learn
new things without being overwhelmed or cognitively overloaded,
that's a scaffold, right?
So we can think of it as we offered different manners and
ways of helping people move up a little bit at time or over,
and that they can get to the top level of
their learning in a way that is supported in some way.
Have we done that in this class?
Well, some of the things that might have helped
to scaffold your learning, reduce cognitive load,
is rather than just like throwing things out you're like, "Oh,
here's the Internet, let's learn all about it",
or, "Here's a geolocation, et cetera.'
We take a problem-based approach, right?
Which helps constrain things a little bit and gives you
that tangible physical experience of how
the computing is impacting our lives to hold to as the base level of our scaffold.
Even if you just want to think about the digital or the video lectures that we make,
often make use of images because research on
multimedia learning and cognitive load shows that our brains, by the way,
have a visual process and an audio process by which we can take information in,
and we can take in visually and audiolly but we can't take in two things visually.
So, if I'm trying to ask you to read at
the same time as I'm asking you to listen to what I have, that's going to be chance.
A picture can help reduce the cognitive load in learning from a video.
Then, even just as we're exploring the technology underneath each problem,
we had a number of different things that we wanted to cover,
and rather just throw them all out at once,
we should have break them down into two levels, right?
Technology exploration is our beginning look at various things,
and then for those things that we want you to know a little more detail,
we move that second level into teacher power up.
Next though, we're going to have you look at,
have an experience programming.
Don't worry, it will be good, okay?
But just to give you something scary to look at,
this is an image of a common programming language, IDE.
That's called Integrated Development Environment.
So, if you think of like, well,
I write an essay and I use Google Doc to do it.
That's my application or maybe I use Word to do it,
that's the application I write it in.
This is the application that many people write code in.
The first thing you'll notice is that there's
rows more different windows all piled into one.
We get the project just clear up there in the corner,
and the verification, and the thing in the middle,
and the things at the bottom, and the thing on the right.
Yeah, lots and lots of different things going on here,
and this is a common problem in computer science.
Turns out that giving computers instructions can be very overwhelming for human brains.
So, here's something a little bit simpler and something
that you will explore next in a very carefully,
hopefully better scaffolded way than just throwing it up to you on a screen.
But this is an example of HTML code,
or the code that we can write to cause web pages to display.
You might see some words in there that seem normal English to you,
and maybe some of them are things like title,
and maybe some of them are things like one, or two, or three.
But as you can see,
this is code that is probably pretty cognitively overloading for humans to look at,
but is required it into terms of
the detail that it takes for us as humans to give computers instructions,
and have them do what we want.