A Chat with Michelle Venable-Foster 
by Andrew Kerr
April 2007

Michelle Venable-Foster has taught mathematics and computer science at South Gwinnett High School since 1998. In a previous life, she was a U.S. government computer programmer in New York City. I talked with her on March 28, 2007 about her Georgia Intern-Fellowships for Teachers (GIFT) experience and teaching in general.

Q - What sort of programming did you do?

A - I did Fortran and Cobalt way, way back in the day.

Q - Why did you leave programming for teaching?

A - It afforded me more time to spend with my son.

Q - You could have picked other careers to spend more time with your son as well. Why was teaching particularly alluring?

A - I always ended up tutoring kids, or having kids come to my house and saying, "I like the way you explain things." So I said, "I might be good at this!"

Q - Why mathematics? Why not computer science, say, since you were a programmer?

A - Because they don't have a degree in computer science. The only thing that is equitable in Georgia is a business ed degree, but that's more like teaching word processing and that sort of thing. So I got the certification in math, and I'm still able to teach computer science classes as well.

Q - And what prompted the move to Atlanta?

A - My husband's job got transferred.

Q - You worked this summer with the college of computing. Tell me a little bit about what you did there.

A - It was three one-week camps. What I did was develop a curriculum to introduce [students] to programming concepts, using two programs from two different colleges. One is called Scratch and is still in the beta stages--that one's from M.I.T. And the other program is Alice, from Carnegie-Mellon [University]. They were very user-friendly and introduced the concepts to upcoming seventh and eighth-grade students.

Q - What do these programs teach?

A - The Scratch program helps students learn to write programs using something similar to LEGO blocks, where they drag out the blocks, and each block will have a line of code. They learn how to loop, they learn how to do iterative steps, they learn how to problem-solve, and it ends up building an animation. They can import music, they can import digital pictures. A lot of them made games that involve themselves, like a whack-a-mole game, but it had their picture and they were whacking themselves.

Q - That's pretty neat stuff.

A - They all brought their iPods and downloaded tunes, and it played music if you hit a certain thing.

Q - It kind of combines gaming with the whole iPod angle, and that's pretty neat.

A - The Alice program is similar, but it's more like they can drag out code, and their final product is a 3-D movie.

Q - Wow, it's just incredible to think the amount of money that was needed to make those kinds of things only a decade or so ago; now kids can just play with it.

A - It is amazing. One of the programs you can readily get on the internet at alice.org--it's a free download. The other one is in beta stages, but they're also going to make that a free download. I just think it's amazing that they could market this and make so much money, but they choose not to, because they wanna introduce as many kids to programming as possible, to bring those jobs back to the United States.

Q - Does this stuff fire kids up?

A - Definitely. I had a lot of girls who were apprehensive to even try it, because they said "I don't like computers." By the end of the first hour, they were the best ones in there.

Q - There's a lot of computer-type stuff being made specifically to target girls, nowadways. Do you find that you have to teach computer science differently for girls vs. guys? And why do you think there was ever a gap in the first place?

A - There was a gap even when I was in school, because there were several times when I was the only female student in my computer science class. I think it's because girls are, or have been (I don't know how it is now), conditioned to think that they shouldn't be good at math or they shouldn't be good at computer science. So they would shy away from it. They didn't want to be in the class and be the only female student.

I encourage them to do pair-programming. That's where you take two students and pair them together; one writes the code and the other one edits it at the same time. So they are both actively involved. If you can get a girl and her buddy in the same class and tell them they can be partners for the whole year, it works out really well because they don't want to feel like they're isolated from the rest of the class.

Q - I guess the key is to find incentives that are attractive as well, which could be said for all students, male or female. I took a computer science course back in the 1980s. We used a program called Karel the Robot, where we drew little squares.

A - Oh yeah, we still do that. I still use that in the first couple of weeks in my AP computer science class. The most fun thing that they think about Karel is that they can change it, so I'll have, say, a ninja Karel. Whatever makes them learn the stuff is fine with me!

Q - What's the biggest change in terms of aptitude and attitude towards computers since you started teaching, almost ten years ago, at South Gwinnett?

A - I think the biggest change is not really the aptitude but just the interest. I'm having more kids actually interested in computers and actually suggesting that we work on different projects, real-life scenario projects. They're more involved in it now since everybody pretty much has their own home computer.

Q - What's the plan that you're implementing right now during the school year based on this summer experience?

A - I compiled all the materials that I created last summer, and I made a manual and also a CD with everything on it, and I distributed that to each one of the middle schools in Gwinnett County. [GIFT program manager] Donna Barrett also gave one to middle schools in another county. They are going to try to implement what I did at their local schools: little mini-camps in the summertime so they don't all have to go to Georgia Tech to do this. And if any teacher contacts me I will actually go there and help them out, get them started, so they can do it all on their own.

Q - Sounds like you'd be reaching a lot of kids.

A - A lot of kids, yes, definitely. And there were a couple of middle school teachers at the GIFT program last summer who asked me, "Can I have a copy of that now?" So I would give them a copy, and they would ask me questions, and they emailed me and told me that they had incorporated some of the things in their classes, using Scratch and Alice, and even the LEGO robots as well.

I think it's great that Georgia Tech took the time to try to get more kids involved in computer science. To hit that age group was perfect because that's when they start developing their own little personalities and learning what they like and don't like. It was fun to see kids who didn't think that they would be good with computers end up being whiz-kids. I even had kids emailing me after the camp was over thanking me and asking me to send them copies of things so they could show their grandma and their teacher!

Q - Your mentor was Barbara Ericson. What was it like working with her?

A - She is awesome, awesome, awesome. Anything I wanted she provided. We had microphones, we had headphones, we had everything we needed. It was awesome. They bent over backwards to make this work.

Q - Do you miss New York?

A - I miss it in the fall, because I like to see the leaves change. I don't miss the noise. I've been up a couple of times, and every time I go up I say, "Now I see why we left." So every once in a while I'll miss it. I miss the snow, but I don't miss cleaning it up!

Laleh Khoogar transcribed and co-edited this piece.