Traditionally I write a year end look back on thee previous yest in CS education. (Last year at Looking Back on Computer Science Education in 2021) Honestly, that post would largely work for 2022 as well. I attended SIGCSE, CSTA, and the New England Regional CSTA conference. They were all great. There was good learning at all of them. But new stuff? Not a whole lot. A few new tools. Some new robots. Some new AI and cyber security curriculum. But really not a whole lot.
I think we’re in for some disruption in 2023 though. Tools like ChatGPT and GitHub CoPilot are probably only the first of tools that are going to shake things up in teaching programming. Are we even going to still teach programming in computer science? If not, what will computer science courses look like? If we are still teaching programming how will we do it? What will it be all about?
We’re still going to see a need for teaching about cybersecurity for sure. Artificial Intelligence is also going to be more important. We’re seriously going to have to think about how we teach about it. We have to include not just how it works but how it should be used. Ethics in computer science has never been more important.
The discussion about ChatGPT and what it means for education in general and CS education in particular is going to be ongoing. We have to reink how and what we teach. It’s going to be an interesting year. Have you been thinking about it? What are your thoughts so far?
Note: I highly recommend Mike Zamansky's blog post at Kicking off 2023
As you have done, I've had this tool write a program for me. It worked really well. I tried having it write the program in different languages and looking at the results. It was an interesting experience. For ChatGPT, my tasks were pretty straight forward and we've all written them hundreds of times. That learning should be and is, known.
ReplyDeleteWhat I'm excited to see happen is for AI to write something brand new that's never been around before. That's the holdout area for me about embracing this new technology.
I just shared my thoughts on 2022/2023 and chatGPT and plan to write more about it in the coming weeks.
ReplyDeleteI think we have to remember that it's not writing code but rather pattern matching off of an existing code base so I think we're a ways off from a universal coding tool.