Emotional-Learning Activities in Computer Science
Social-Emotional Learning, aka SEL, is a science of living in human society.
It gives knowledge on how to manage emotions, identify yourself and your position in the socius, develop empathy towards others, achieve personal and collective goals, and build strong and healthy relations with people around you.
While coding and computer science are the domains where people primarily work in groups, SEL may prove an important tool to reduce workplace toxicity and boost collaboration.
This article will discuss how SEL is implemented in the learning and later working environment.
What is the aim of SEL?
Whether you run a large software development company, lead a team, or work in a group, you can suddenly encounter problems more connected to inter-human relations than the work itself.
The red flags of collaboration problems vary. Suddenly, you start spotting background messages during meetings; there are no clear feedback, people mute each other’s ideas, work is not distributed fairly, etc.
SEL aims to avoid such situations by introducing special training on interpersonal relations in school and college.
How is SEL implemented in computer science and programming activities?
SEL practices are well-known to schoolteachers as they are initially practiced at schools, especially in the early grades.
Today, more attention is given to practicing SEL from the earliest childhood, as children are adaptive to learning, and schools are a perfect environment to implement “mandatory activities intended to modify beliefs, attitude, disposition or personality,” as proposed by Lynne Friedli and Robert Stearn to raise the generation with the highly positive attitude to work.
The methods of SEL in computer science are the same as in other subjects. That presupposes specifically selected exercises and training, talks, and communication between teachers and students.
For example, a typical training in computer science paired with SEL may start with a discussion of emotions students feel at the moment, then flow into an exercise in robotics which would improve students’ mood. For example, students can successfully finish training in making a robot move from point A to point B and share their positive emotions with the teacher and the class.
To perform the surveillance of children’s psychology and also introduce psychological interventions to modify children’s moods and behaviors, special apps are used. For example, the app ClassDojo is now used by about 35 million teachers worldwide to track students’ moods to regulate their emotions and behavioral patterns.
The use of tech to implement SEL in schools
According to the report by The Boston Consulting Group for Word Economic Forum, technology and wearables will be widely used to foster socio-emotional skills in the future. The report advocates using biosensors to track the student response to the learning environment.
This approach aims to get a minute-by-minute record of students’ emotional states and, in this way, help them build self-awareness and empathy.
Other technologies include transdermal cameras that measure facial blood to determine students’ emotions, glove-like devices to track emotional arousal during exercise, etc.
These initiatives will help children nurture the emotional reactions which will bring them to a successful career. In the grown-ups, these tools and methodologies aim to “achieve a form of emotional augmentation,” according to the sociologist William Davies and render an emotion more preferable in a given situation. In other words, the tech is aimed to reduce the feelings of frustration and dissatisfaction and increase positive emotions.
Author’s bio: Anastasiia Lastovetska is a technology writer at MLSDev, a software development company that builds web & mobile app solutions from scratch. She researches the area of technology to create great content about app development, UX/UI design, tech & business consulting.