Hannah and Jane’s differing views of events within the project

One of the benefits of working with two individuals in the same project group is that this afforded multiple perspectives of certain events in the project timeline. Because the girls came in with different backgrounds and took on different roles within the project, these perspectives are even more distinctive. Hannah’s views of programming differed from Jane’s even before either fully understood what was being asked of them; while Jane had a respectable theoretical background from her GCSEs, Hannah’s theoretical understanding was supported by her experiences not only in her A Levels, but in her independent programming as well. One illustrative example of this is from two separate interviews held on the 9th of March, in which each girl was asked to consider a simile from the Khan Academy tutorial they had been working on:

J.18.03.09 lns 74-87 Hh.18.03.09 lns 58-67 R: Umm one of the things that was mentioned

in that first tutorial video on the Khan

Academy website the one that …umm was it talked about giving the computer a series of commands um which is kind of what you touched on already but then the next part said “think of the computer as a very obedient dog, listening to your every command” does that seem like an appropriate metaphor or would you change that somehow?

J: Yeah I mean it’s quite easy to understand I guess for people cause you tell it what to do and it does it but yeah and if you didn’t tell it the right way it wouldn’t do it so if you’ve got a mistake somewhere it wouldn’t actually run any of it but yeah I reckon it’s quite it’s quite a good one but then obviously dogs can like do their own thing as well but yeah it’s good R: So like if you’re if you tell your dog ‘we’re going for a walk’ or if you someone else says ‘we’re going out’ the dog still recognises ‘walk’ or ‘out’ and they’re like ‘oh my goodness’ but if you’re like if you say that to a computer-

J: It wouldn’t yeah

R: Okay um and one of the things so I went through and sort of looked at some of the introductory videos that were on the Khan Academy website um just to kind of get an idea of how it was being presented and one of the things that really struck me was a

comment that they made about ‘think of the computer as a very obedient dog, listening to your every command’

Hh: Yeah

R: Having now a little bit more background than the average person do you think that that’s an appropriate metaphor or how would you change that or clarify that?

Hh: Hmmm I’d agree… because as I said it’s writing instructions and then it does what you say so it’s like an obedient dog to be fair so I I’d agree [laughs]

The above was quite fascinating, as it indicates that Hannah was quite optimistic about her programming; if she codes for something, it will work. Jane was a bit more reserved in her reply; she believed the computer will obey, but only if you’ve given it the correct commands.

What is interesting is that just prior to the exchange with Hannah, she and I had been discussing what can go wrong, and she had related an anecdote about an error in code when she switched from work in JavaScript to work in C#, and yet the possibility of a bug in the code did not occur to her in terms of the commands she was giving her ‘dog’. At this point in the project, Jane was far more unsure of her own programming capabilities than was Hannah, and these conversations, less than an hour apart from each other, provide a prime illustration of this.

Communication between Hannah and Jane was critical throughout the project, as their roles fed into each other; Hannah’s experiences with the coding had to make it into Jane’s presentation and report, and Jane’s oversight and direction helped Hannah to plan what her next steps were. As previously mentioned, Jane worked hard to develop these communication skills, and the team as a whole fostered an environment in which frequent updates and meetings were the norm. This meant that when there were hiccups that perhaps delayed progress, the whole team was aware:

J.18.03.29 lns 76-80 Hh.18.03.29 lns 43-51 J: Yeah we haven’t really started on the

programming Hannah Chris sort of last time they just had to they were trying to figure out a way of collab- putting it together the

products and the brands but then they realised they were doing it in the wrong JavaScript type thing so it wasn’t working [laughing] but they know that so next time they’re gonna do that and I think next week will be mainly code not next week but you know the next time we do it

Hh: It is a bit yeah cause at first we realised we were putting it in to the wrong JS file cause we we would delete everything but yet the chart was still loading so we were going okay so we don’t need this file then so we deleted the file altogether and the chart was still loading so we didn’t need it so we were like okay so where is the JS file that is causing the chart to become a chart and it took us like 20 minutes to find then we realised okay we’ve been doing it on the wrong thing all the time that’s why nothing on the chart’s been changing anyways we tried what we were doing again and not much would change really um all that I’ve done so far is we used to have the brand then coming

off the product then coming off the review then coming off the person doing it I basically got rid of it and just shortened it to just brand-product-review

While Jane’s recollection of events lacks the technical language of Hannah’s, it reveals that she has either been paying close attention to Hannah’s coding, or been briefed in sufficient detail to be able to provide a descriptive summary of events. The greater level of detail in Hannah’s recollection is due most likely to her first-hand experience of the situation, as well as her need to understand the problem thoroughly enough to correct it. Jane’s account contains less detail, but is informative enough to provide an overview such as might appear in a report.

Another perhaps defining moment in the project is the day that Hannah and Jane essentially swapped roles. Hannah planned to take over editing of the report from Jane, and to add in some of the details that might have escaped her notice. Jane for her part was planning to format the product nodes, colour coding them according to the average number of stars they had from their reviews. They prepare for this in quite different ways, with Jane doing some

preliminary research from both the KeyLines website and from the work done by her peers (J.18.04.30 lns 7-11):

R: Umm how have you sort of prepared for that besides looking at the demos?

J: Umm I don’t that was pretty much it just looked at some of the demos I also actually looked at somebody else another person one of my friends anyway in a different group in the Computer Science project was going through his code and showing me some of the stuff he had done so I was just kind of like I kind of like just looked at that as well I yeah

Jane viewed her foray into programming as an opportunity to pick up some computer-related skills, which is not surprising; she came into the project with relatively few, and so had developed a plan for how to successfully complete the task ahead of her. Hannah however seemed to show great self-confidence in her role switching, believing she already had the skills necessary to help improve the report (Hh.18.05.01 lns 5-15):

R: Umm but is there anything that you plan to try to take out of that report whether it’s reading through what’s already been done or kind of using it as an excuse to plan ahead umm

Hh: Uhhh so I know that tomorrow we’re all gonna basically uh at some point during the day just stop everything that we’re doing cause we’re given as I said given most of the documentation stuff to Jane and most of us don’t even know what’s in what’s written in it and stuff and so we’re all just going to stop and kind of get Jane to explain to us what she’s done already and if there’s anything we can add or improve as a group then it will get it done a lot quicker so hopefully tomorrow we can get most of it done um do as much as we can um and then if she’s maybe done a few spelling mistakes we can pick up on it, if she’s missed a key bit we can add to it so it’s just we’re gonna plan and hopefully to do that maybe that period before break cause we only have one period before break so we might just do it then

Hannah did not mention any benefits she expected to gain from the report writing portion, in terms of adding to her general view of the project. She did have several ways in which she believed she will be able to add to the report, however, and it is in these areas that she focussed her attention. Whereas Jane makes the development of transferrable skills a major focus of her work within the project, Hannah views these as secondary behind her programming ambitions. This also plays out in their recaps of the ‘swap day’, though admittedly the long gap between this day and the subsequent interviews42 may certainly have had some impact. When Hannah was asked about the report though, her account shows that the whole team had put a lot of

collaborative effort into the report on the day (Hh.18.05.15 lns 105-120):

Hh: Uh so yeah we kind of all just dropped the coding um cause Jane was doing most of the report and we didn’t know anything that was in it … she couldn’t really do the stuff

42 _{As noted in the methods section of the methodology, there was a gap in interviews due to unavoidable personal}

about like the programming side of it the struggles that we had with the programming cause she wasn’t really doing that so I kind of took on the role of putting out what we struggled what we managed to achieve I even put some snippets of code that we did in there and then umm we put some screenshots of our development umm in the code and stuff so I kind of focussed on the coding side of the report if that makes sense umm Matthew went through and structured the presentation so kind of made a slide for each part we need to cover … then me Jane mainly just finished it off and we sent it to um can’t remember her name one of the mentors yeah and she um checked it all through and gave us loads of points to finish so the week after that we got it back and Jane went through it and kind of marked it and checked it compared to what that woman said to do differently and the rest of us went back to focusing on the code and stuff so yeah that’s what we did

Hannah had significantly less to contribute regarding the colour-coding of the combos, which Jane had attempted while the rest of the team was working on the report (H.18.05.15 lns 7-9):

Hh: Umm we have achieved a lot more since obviously the KeyLines people have come in so we’ve we’ve got combos sorted now Chris has achieved the colour coding Jane first attempted to do it but she couldn’t do it so Chris then did it which he did it really well…

In terms of Hannah’s priorities, this account was sufficient: there was an element of the project that needed completion, and a more computer savvy individual took over when a more novice programmer was unable to complete the task. There is no hint of negativity or judgement, but it was not of any great import to Hannah the programmer who completed the feature, so long as it was done.

While Jane recalled more detail of her attempts to code, she too seemed inclined to dismiss her struggles and focus more on the fact that the task was completed and she had contributed in another way (J.18.05.11 lns 26-28…39-42):

J: Well I just well ‘if’ statements but it just didn’t work really and then maybe it might have been something to do with like the order of stuff and everything in the end Chris just did it because then I just worked on the report…I don’t know what he did for the halos cause that was just like kind of nearing the end of the day on Wednesday so we didn’t really have that much to check everything but next week cause we have to prepare our presentations, we’re going over like everyone’s going over everything they’ve done so everyone knows everything everyone else has done so we have an idea

Jane’s account here appears to trivialise the amount of effort she put in to getting the colour- coding to work; she not only researched by viewing KeyLines demos and the API reference, she tried several different approaches to the code itself, and did independent research on the subject using an external coding help site before collaborating with her peers. However, in the end, the main point for both girls was that the job was done, and that the group remained on target.

For both girls, and indeed the group as a whole, the hard work of both paid off when their group was named the judge’s choice at the presentation day. Besides having a presentation that went on for exactly the allocated time (something all the group members seemed quite proud of), there was always going to be one factor that contributed most significantly to their victory. Each girl had their own opinion on what it was and, unsurprisingly, those opinions differed:

J.18.06.08 lns 7-11: Hh.18.05.24 lns 4-10 R: Um what do you think the biggest factor

for those judges was in making that decision? J: Well we marketed it more towards like having people we were selling it for while that’s what they told us anyways we had goal and how we had like a client and how we were gonna like make the product for them and not many other groups actually did that

R: Umm did they tell what that the factor was that kind of brought you guys over some of the other groups

H: Uh yeah one of the guys did come over to us a said he was impressed that we were the only ones who got combos working which we knew so we tried to kind of stress that when we were doing our presentations cause uh one of the groups came up to us and said ‘oh what

which was the whole initial kind of question is selling the intelligence and we sold it

makes yours better than everyone else’s or stand out’ and we really mentioned like about the whole combos situation and stuff…

While Hannah did go on to mention the fact that they had catered to a particular client, and Jane did eventually mention combos, both felt their own contributions to the team carried the most weight for their team. In the end though, both girls were able to take away a sense of pride over what they had accomplished over the preceding months, and were able to take these experiences with them as they moved on to the next phases of their educational journeys.

CHAPTER 7- A comparison of the three cases