Science Fiction in Computer Science Education Rebecca Bates (moderator)
Judy Goldsmith
Rosalyn Berne
Minnesota State University, Mankato Mankato, MN 56001 +1-507-389-5587
University of Kentucky Lexington, KY 40526 +1-859-257-4245
University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA 22904 +1-434-924-6098
[email protected] Valerie Summet
[email protected]
[email protected] Nanette Veilleux
Emory University Atlanta, GA 30322 +1-404-727-0546
Simmons College Boston, MA 02115 +1-617-521-2705
[email protected]
[email protected]
SUMMARY The use of science fiction (SF) to engage students in computer science learning is becoming more popular [1-6]. There is ample material available to help both undergraduate and graduate students make connections between technical content and human experience, from Star Trek to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to 2001: A Space Odyssey to I, Robot and many others. Fiction can be included in technical courses or used to draw students into the field in introductory classes. The panelists, who represent a range of schools, perspectives and classes, will present brief overviews (5-8 minutes) of how they have used science fiction to engage students in technical topics as well as ethical and societal issues related to computing. After the overviews, there will be plenty of time for discussion of examples used within the community and ways to make connections between science fiction and particular classes or topics. We will be gathering additional examples from the discussion and making them available online.
Categories and Subject Descriptors K.3.2 [Computer and Information Science Education]: Computer science education
General Terms Human Factors
Keywords Science fiction, computer science education methods.
1. REBECCA BATES In the context of a teaching-focused, comprehensive university, I have developed an undergraduate general education course on Artificial Intelligence and Science Fiction (CS 201W), which meets the requirements for literature, ethics and writing intensive classes. The course traces the historical imagining of AI technology in science fiction, giving a context for the technical developments and societal expectations of technology. Students can grapple with ethical issues in the relative comfort of an alien world, while learning about state-of-the-art technology and developing their writing skills. The course has also been taught for graduate students with the option of completing a technical project, with required connections to literature, or a creative project, with required connections to technology.
Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). SIGCSE’12, February 29–March 3, 2012, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA. ACM 978-1-4503-1098-7/12/02.
Science fiction is incorporated through weekly movies, television episodes, novels and short stories. History and point of view can be shown through comparison of movies such as The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, a Disney movie released in 1969, TRON, another Disney movie released in 1982 (the same time as WarGames) and the TRON sequel released in 2010. Related essays by philosophers and scientists are included to help provide real-world context and analysis. Explicitly stated in the course is the importance of creativity in computer science and the relationship between “traditional” creativity and technical creativity. Student reaction to this class, as well as to fiction reading assignments in other introductory classes, has been very positive, in part because students are able to connect something they (often) love to their future career. This has implications for retention and long-term persistence in the field. (See [7] for more information about the course.)
2. JUDY GOLDSMITH CS 463 is a senior-level elective, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence. The students are usually juniors and seniors, though formally, non-CS graduate students can take the class for credit. (So far, none have.) The University of Kentucky is a Research 1 university, and has the strongest CS research program in the state. The students who take the course can program reasonably well in at least one programming language. The graded work for the class consists of significant programming assignments (specified), plus the students' individual choices of midterm and final papers, projects and presentations. For the midterm and final, the students can review science fiction (book, movie, or TV show) with significant AI, write a survey paper on an AI topic, implement an AI algorithm from the research literature, present a research paper to the class, or even write a short story with AI content. The two general constraints are that they can't choose the same option for midterm and final, and they must submit a proposal and negotiate the details with the professor. The most popular option is the SF review. The proposal consists of the SF work and the relevant AI theme. The negotiations lead to a suitable work, and corresponding bibliography of research papers (at least 3 peer-reviewed papers or chapters of advanced textbooks) on the AI topic of interest. Suitable work is broadly defined. I try to steer students away from instances of “AI” that have no technical content, and to warn them if they choose overtly sexual material. (For example, one student complained that there was too much sexual content in Marge Piercy's He, She, and It.) I provide a list of suggestions, which is deliberately weighted toward female authors, e.g. Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber, Melissa Scott’s The Jazz, and Joan
Slonczewski’s Daughters of Elysium and Brain Plague. It has been my experience that students are often contrarian, seeking out more obscure AI themes. This keeps the papers fresh, and is encouraged. One of the difficulties for students is that the contrarian urge leads them away from my areas of expertise, so they are left to track down the research themselves. I teach them how to use CiteSeer and Google Scholar, but it is still real work to track down relevant and readable papers. Overall, this is a popular assignment. Students like the sense of agency, and the chance to explore a small corner of the research world. (See [8] for more information about the course.)
3. ROSALYN BERNE STS 2500, “Ethics, Science Fiction and The Future” is a course I have been teaching at the University of Virginia’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Most amazing is how consistently engineering students express concern over the possible loss of control of artificial intelligences. Fueled by science fiction itself, these concerns lead many of them to attest that engineering design which allows for autonomous decision making by artificially intelligent machines is destined to seek independence from human beings, most likely becoming a threat to our existence. The focus of my research is the ethical, cultural, and societal implications of the emergence and convergence of nanotechnology, bio-technology, information technology and cognitive sciences. I am particularly interested in the role and function of moral imagination, mythology and religious belief in conceptualizations pertaining to ethics in technological development. These I have explored and discussed in the book Nanotalk: Conversations with Scientists and Engineers about Ethics, Meaning and Belief in the Development of Nanotechnology [9], and continue in the science fiction novel Waiting in the Silence (under review for publication).
4. VALERIE SUMMET CS 190 is a freshman seminar course at Emory University based on robotics. Every department is required to offer seminar courses for first year students only. These courses offer small group learning experiences and should include components to foster a liberal arts education such as critical thinking, writing and communication skills, and interactive learning experiences. The course includes basic programming in Python, roughly following the IPRE robotics curriculum with Scribbler Robots [10]. In addition, the course includes current news articles, science fiction stories, and research readings. In particular, I use science fiction stories like Bierce’s “Moxon’s Master” and Silverberg’s “The Macauley Circuit” to foster discussion about society's perceptions of robotics and AI. The students discuss the technology portrayed in the stories (often in very outdated terms) and whether the situations could “really happen” given the current state of technology. These discussions help students to refine technical topics related to robotics and AI, which are the subject of further writing assignments. These assignments hone students' academic research, writing, and public speaking skills.
5. NANETTE VEILLEUX HON 101/102 at Simmons College, a women’s liberal arts college, is a learning community that pairs two professors from different fields with a single cohort of incoming freshman in the Honors program. My partner was a visual artist who has worked extensively in digital media; I introduced computational linguistics. We found that science fiction was an excellent means
of allowing students to abandon their preconceived notions of very basic aspects of encoding information. Most notably, the famous “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” Star Trek episode engendered a discussion on the nature of representation, a topic that first year students had not fully considered. (Developmentally, they are at the “one-truth” stage) More recently, I have developed a curriculum for IT 101, Living in a Digital Society, which is an information technology fluency course and serves the college to provide a basic level of technological competency, primarily to non-CS students. As an innovation this fall, I have used several science fiction texts (e.g., Super Sad True Love Story, G. Shteyngart , “We Were Out of Our Minds with Joy”, D. Marusek) to push students to examine their relationships with devices, most noticeably those that they anachronistically refer to as “phones”. The readings are paired with an exercise that requires students to isolate themselves from remote communication devices and applications for several hours and report on the adjustments they made in response. My goal is to use the texts and exercises to begin discussion on the place technology has in our lives, the skills we need to understand and control it, and the opportunities and trade-offs it requires.
6. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Our thanks to the late Don Sanderson for conversations about science fiction and CS education at SIGCSE 2011.
7. REFERENCES [1] Sanderson, D. 2004. Using science fiction to teach computer science. Proc. WWW@10. Terra Haute, IN, 9/30-10/1/2004. [2] Want, R. 2008. The seeds of inspiration. IEEE Pervasive Computing 7, No. 3, 2-3. [3] Schmitz, M., C. Endres and A. Butz. 2007. A survey of human-computer interaction design in science fiction movies. Proc. 2nd Internat’l Conf on Intelligent Technologies for Interactive Entertainment, 7:1-10. [4] VanderLeest, S. 2000. Perspectives on technology through science fiction. Proc. American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference and Exposition. [5] Layton, D. 2010. Using the college science fiction class to teach technology and ethics: themes and methods. Proc. American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference and Exposition. [6] Schurr, N., P. Varakantham, E. Bowring, M. Tambe and B. Grosz. 2007. Asimovian multiagents: applying laws of robotics to teams of humans and agents. Proc. 4th Internat’l. Conf. on Programming Multi-agent Systems, 41-55. [7] Bates, R. 2011. AI & SciFi: teaching writing, history, technology, literature and ethics. Proc. American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference and Exposition. [8] Goldsmith, J. and N. Mattei. 2011. Using science fiction in AI classes. Proc. EAAI-11: The Second Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence. [9] Berne, R. 2005. Nanotalk: Conversations with Scientists and Engineers about Ethics, Meaning and Belief in the Development of Nanotechnology, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. [10] Summet, J., Kumar, D., O’Hara, K., Walker, D., Ni, L., Blank, D., Balch, T. 2009. Personalizing CS1 with Robots, Proc. SIGCSE, 433-437.
