Who Is Driving Changes to Computer Science Education

There are a lot of Changes happening at code dot org The Slashdot article linked there lists several of them. While the changes include a number of people changes including President Cameron Wilson stepping aside, Chief Academic Officer Pat Yongpradit leaving to join Microsoft, and some staff layoffs the change in direction, to AI, may be the most concerning. From Hour of Code to Hour of AI? Some interesting comments follow that post.

The questions top of my mind are "who is driving the direction of CS education" and "is CS education moving in the right direction?" A lot of people believe that industry is pushing CS education in the direction of being vocational. The new focus on Artificial Intelligence often feels like a vocational direction.

My involvement with computer science education predates code.org and even CSTA so I have seen a lot of changes. In my first teaching days computer science teachers were pretty isolated. There was SIGCSE which accepted K12 teachers though welcomed sometimes felt like aspirational rather than actual. ACM, of which SIGCSE was and is still a part, was doing some support for CS education. Cameron Wilson was a huge part of that and worked policy.

CSTA was developed by some wonderful people in and around ACM. This started the real movement towards expanding K12 CS education. CSTA helped train and organize teachers to push for more more CS education. Code,org came a bit later and brought something new to the effort.

Code.org brought money and industrial production values. From the first set of videos that went viral to some very good curriculum resources as well as connections to industry and political leaders. Getting policymakers to push for CS education stepped up.

We’ve come a long way.

Coming back to my earlier questions. Is industry driving the directions that CS education is moving? A lot of people think they are. Industry has money and it has funded a lot of the work by code.org and CSTA. The modern Golden Rule is that the people with the gold make the rules after all.

Industry has some motivation here. I spent a few years working at Microsoft myself where my job was to promote the use of Microsoft tools for teaching. I didn’t get much in the direction of what to teach. I always felt that teachers should decide what to teach and I just wanted to help teachers find ways to use tools to teach those concepts. Teaching computer science as vocation was always there though. Senior mangers often told me that industry needed more people to know CS because there were jobs that needed to be filled.

CS as vocation has always been a selling point for CS education of course. It’s what helped sell school boards and other elected officials. Among teachers that was usually a secondary motivation. For a lot of teachers, including me over time, CS education became more about understanding how the world works. We don;t teach physics because we want to make more physicist. We teach it so that students understand the world around them.

People who are not working for tech companies often have to use computers and make decisions about computing. From spreadsheets to databases to internet searches. And now AI. People in all walks of life use computers. Understanding computer science can make those people more efficient. Computers are an important part of our world.

It seems like all the big tech companies are betting huge sums of money on AI. There is a lot of pressure to move the direction of CS education into AI. Is the industry push vocational in intent? Is is all about helping these companies to make money? CSTA and code.org are both pushing AI these days. Is this because of industry (gold making the rules?) or would it be happening independently?

That leads to the second question – are we moving in the right direction? I think that question may be different for K12 and for university. Personally, I still think CS education in K12 should be about understanding and not vocational. Someone else can address higher education but K12 should be about preparation for life and not for vocation at least in comprehensive schools.

So is AI the right direction? I think it is indisputable that AI is important to learn. Students should learn prompting and they should learn what AI can and cannot do, They should also learn how to think about what AI should not do. They need to know something about how AI works and that is core computer science.

I think that computer science, in the old analogy, is the dog and AI is the tail. The tail should not wag the dog. Making AI the focus at the expense of basic  computer science would be a huge mistake. We do have to teach the basics that make AI possible. Students need to understand where AI comes from and where it might go. Understanding code is an essential part of that understanding.  There is always going to be more to CS than just AI. We didn’t stop teaching arithmetic when calculators were invented. We should not assume that AI code writers mean we don’t have to stop teaching basic computer science.

CS in K12 should not be just vocational. Is industry driving CS education? I fear they may be. Are we moving in the wrong direction? Maybe. If so, it will be up to educators to provide some course correction. 

Looking Back and Looking Forward in CS Education 2023

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

Final Thoughts on SIGCSE 2022

I had a great time at SIGCSE 2022. As an introvert I probably suffered less from not being with people than many but after two years I really needed to be with people. I was able to connect in-person with friends I had not seen in years. Some a decade or more. That was truly awesome. The community building of an in-person conference should not be understated.

I had some great “hallway track” conversations. This is not nearly as easy in a remote conference and it contributed to what I was learning. Besides being with people I really did want to learn. So my hallway conversations were not all catching up with friends. I was able to ask a lot of questions about the work various people were doing. Things often outside the scope of a specific talk or panel that I attended.

I visited with Ruthe Farmer of the Last Mile Fund. The Last Mile fund is “investing in a broader group of students already committed to technology and engineering fields, providing support for challenges they face beyond their control, and incubating them to be the next generation of innovators.” It’s an amazing program that helps students who are missed by a lot of programs giving them the help they need to complete their educations. They are particularly focused on women but have some money for men in community  colleges. Check them out if you know someone who needs a little help making it through.

It seemed like there were multiple interesting sessions in every time slot. Where I had to choose I picked panel or supporter sessions over paper sessions. Mainly that was because with paper sessions I could at least read the paper. Not the same thing but it was that or miss out on a panel completely.

The elephant in the room may have been COVID and masks. COVID times was a topic of conversation but masks? Not that I heard. The conference organized stated that even though CDC guidelines had changed the attendees had signed up expecting everyone would be masked so they were going to stick with that. I think it was the right decision. While masks are not always comfortable and they make it a little harder to recognize people it added to comfort levels for many attendees. Including me.

Sessions were split between the Rhode Island Convention center and the Omni hotel. The two are connected and traveling between them was pretty easy. I have a bias to all being in the same building but honestly I have walked further between sessions in some convention centers so there is that. The rooms themselves were large, accommodating people sitting apart if that made them more comfortable. I suspect that is what required using both facilities when one might have divided large rooms under normal circumstances.

Hybrid sessions where some or all of the presenters were remote were interesting. It worked pretty well overall. I hear there were some that were played recordings with no interaction but I didn’t “attend” any of them. The real bonus of a paper session is being able to ask the author questions so that is important. Mike Zamansky has more on this on his post at SIGCSE 2022 - Conference format.

I left Providence with a lot to think about and some great memories of visiting with people face to face – even with masks. Now to renew my passport so I can attend next year in Toronto!

SIGCSE 2022 Day 2

The morning keynote was by Barbara Ericson. She talked about a lot of her early work including some of her online books CSAwesome and her work with the free online CS textbooks at Runestone Academy. I need to look at these some more https://runestone.academy/runestone/books/index She also talked a lot about Parsons Problems - a subject I am really interested in. One project is Sisters Rise Up which provides mentorship for women taking AP courses. She’s got a lot going now as well. She is an inspiration.

First Paper Session:Trends in CS Teacher Professional Development: A Report from the CSTA PD Committee. A lot of CS teachers are experienced teachers but not experienced in CS. Teachers want PD but it can be hard to find. The PD committee is evaluating and accrediting CS Ed professional development. You can see their efforts at the CSTA web site

Next up was Detecting Struggling Students from Interactive eBooks Data: A Case Study Using CSAwesome This talk was by Barbara Ericson and was about data from ebooks on Runestone and CSAwesome. Barb was able to collect a lot of data.  Students don’t watch videos to completion a lot which doesn’t surprise me that much. A lot of information in this talk. I recommend reading the actual paper. (Available for free for a limited time) I really need to look at these ebooks and see if they are something I can/want to try and create myself.

Last of my morning papers was Who Belongs in Computer Science? This study looked at middle school students to see what their perception was of computer scientists and how that impacted their feeling of belonging. In brief, boys and girls had the same perceptions but girls didn’t see themselves in what they perceived as being a computer scientist.

I took advantage of the “hallway track” to talk to Aman Yadav (author of the paper above) about the importance of CS teachers talking about race and computing. We need students to understand how bias works its way, usually unintentionally, into software. Both white and non-white students need to know about this. We clearly need a diversity of involvement in computing if we are going to have a chance as software that is fair to all.

After lunch, a GitHub Supporter Session: Scale your classroom with GitHub Classroom and Codespaces. A tough decision as there was also a panel I was interested in attending. I was curious about GitHub though so … The features of GitHub classroom including connections to LMSs, automated assignment distributing, auto grading and more seem pretty exciting. I also like the idea that students will create GitHub repositories that can act as a portfolio. The demo was great. I have set up a GitHub Classroom but I need to play around and try some things before I feel like I can use it. I think I need to create a “student account” as well. We’ll see how much time I can put to it.

Next up was a Microsoft Supporter Session: Core developer tools for your computer science classroom because I wanted to  see what Microsoft was promoting for educators to use for teaching CS. That was once my job.

They started with talking about VS Code and VS Code Coding packs are a tool to make it easy for students to set up a development environment. They are available to set up VS Code for Java, Python, and .NET. The packs for .NET and Java are available for both Windows and MacOS.

Next up was Development Containers and VSCode.dev which is a web past development environment so no installation is needed. This combination makes it easy to ensure that all students have the same development environment. This looks pretty cool for bring your own devices schools. There was a lot presented in a short period of time. I need to dig into some of these things on my own.

Over all a great day for me. I have some things to look through tonight.

SIGCSE 2022 Day 1

SIGCSE 2022 is my first in-person conference in over 2.5 years. It’s my first SIGCSE in a lot longer than that. It looks to be a great conference . There are 1518 people registered in total with 780 attending in person. I HAD to come in person. Honestly, I missed people and a lot of people I know in CS Education and CS Ed research are here. There is a lot to learn here as well.

The opening keynote was Barbara Liskov. This was a fascinating talk that covered a lot of the history of her work. She started publishing and researching what became object oriented programming while I was in the early stages of my career. Several papers she studied and referenced were published the year I got my undergraduate degree. I remember clearly many of the issues she discussed and problems she was looking to solve back then. I hope we can get access to her talk and show it to students.

My first session of the day was a panel discussion of should AP CS A switch to Python from Java. Needless to say, the room was full. The stick with Java people had two main issues. One was the work involved in changing – new resources, teaching aids, test questions, and the like. The second was that while there is a slight edge in universities using Python over Java for CS1, Java and C++ are FAR more widely used in CS2 courses. The current course results in students who do very well in CS2 and that is important.

The argument for Python is multiple. One is that it opens the door wider for using APIs for making more interesting projects. Another is that there is less syntactic “cruft” in Python which reduces cognitive load. A third is that Python is increasingly used in disciplines that are not computer science. For example the Physics and Chemistry departments are Stanford want their students to take a Python based CS1 course. FWIW, the school I retired from added Python in part because the Physics teachers encouraged it. I am finding the arguments for Python more convincing than I expected.

After lunch, It Seemed Like a Good Idea At The Time (COVID-19 Edition). The session opened with examples from the past: see if you can hack the department mail server; open book exams without a time limit; exponential time examples are actually cubic. Victoria Hong shared a study she did where she asked one section to write questions for the final exam. The cohort that wrote questions did worse on the final than the cohort that didn’t write questions. The opposite of what was expected. Ellen Spertus talked about a course without deadlines. This set off a lot of discussion about deadlines and the different ways to allow or not extensions. Some have tokens that students can use for an extension. I hope this was recorded because I can’t do the discussion justice here.

Next up for me was another panel: Advancing Opportunities for CS Teachers: How To Best Support Professional Development for Experienced Teachers in K-12 CS Education This session was hybrid which means that most of the panel was remote and not physically at the conference. More on that later perhaps.

Most professional development for CS teachers is focused on new and early career CS educators. We have a good number of experienced teachers (10+ years of teaching CS) and their needs and backgrounds tend to be different from new  CS teachers. A lot of the initial presentations was stating the problem.

Don’t tell anyone but I jumped out early and dropped in on a Special Session: K-12 Computing Education and Education Research Resources. Colleen Lewis talked about Computer Science Teaching Tips (csteachingtips.org) and a Teaching Practices Game. This can help teach about microaggressions. Briana Morrison introduced Engage CSEDU: www.engage-csedu.org which has a searchable database of CS Ed resources. Davina Pruitt-Mentle introduced NATIONAL INITIATIVE FOR CYBERSECURITY EDUCATION (NICE) which has a lot of resources for teaching and learning about cybersecurity. More information can be found at Cyberseek.

Got some dinner skipping the Birds of a Feather but I’ll go back for the reception. Overall, a very good day for me. Learned some things and connected with a bunch of great people. More tomorrow I expect. If you are reading this and at SIGCSE please look me up and say “hello.”

What’s Up with Novice Programmers and Comments

Continuing my look at papers from the SIGCSE 2021conference. The papers are available for free for a limited time. Get them while you can. I take a look at Usage of the Java Language by Novices over Time: Implications for Tool and Language Design.

The BlueJ tool for teaching Java has the (opt in) ability to collect data on language usage by the novices who use it. This is a valuable research tool and the authors of this paper have taken a good look at it for a number of research questions. I recommend the paper for more insights but I was particularly struck by one finding. Students, in large numbers, delete the comments that BlueJ inserts in code automatically.

BlueJ adds stub JavaDoc comments (which can be used to generate documentation) into objects that are created. Over 45% of projects analyzed had no JavaDoc comments in them Students had gone out of their way to delete them. Not answered in the paper but I suspect many of the comments were not expanded from the default either.

What is it with students and comments? In my own teaching I often created stub projects with comments as sub-goal labels. In several cases I saw those comments deleted before coding started. In other cases the comments were left completely separate from the code created in ways that suggest they were ignored. I know that students don’t see the value in adding comments to their code. Is that our (educators) fault? I know that most of us try to teach good commenting practice but at the same time the projects we assign are easy enough to understand (usually) without comments. But why ignore comments clearly designed to help students?

What’s going on here? This looks like a great research question to me. I wonder if anyone is looking at it? What do you think?

Interesting Links for Computer Science Educators 19 March 2019

I haven’t done one of these for a while. I still Tweet or retweet a lot at @AlfredTwo but I needed a break. I’m not sure I will do this every week but I think I will shoot to do it from time to time.

Microsoft Education posted a bunch of resources on Ways to encourage girls to keep pursuing STEM this Women’s History Month There are some posters I think will show up in my computer lab soon there as well as other helpful links.

David Renton is doing some amazing things with his students who are programming virtual reality applications. Currently he is having Students Build International VR Prototypes for Children This is more than about computing. It is a multi-national effort with some support from Microsoft in the UK and deployment at a hospital in Sweden.

Mike Zamansky has a  great post about Adapting A Nifty Assignment  You may or may not be familiar with the SIGCSE Nifty Assignments sessions, check them out if not, but they are pretty nifty but many of them really do benefit from adaptation to a particular environment.

I found this on the Blog at CACM I don’t know about you but calculating with Roman numerals (what no zero?) was something I wondered about. This article explains it all. I wonder if this might make a nifty project? Calculating With Roman Numerals is Not So Difficult 

Speaking of SIGCSE, Bryan Twarek provides a nice list of K-12 Teacher Takeaways from SIGCSE 2019  on the CSTA Blog. Not as good as being there but Brian includes a bunch of related links.

Under my list of things to keep an eye on, Microsoft had a post called Achieve more with Microsoft Game Stack It looks mostly like a repackaging or rebranding of a number of new and existing resources for game developers. Will it have application for schools? Maybe in game development courses but even there it seems like Game Stack is more for professionals than beginners. But we’ll see if anyone in education takes it on and provides information.

What Are You Reading?

We all get asked this question – What are you reading? Often this is the context of an interview and the person asking is really asking “how are you keeping current in your field?” For computer science educators there are few things better to read than SIGCSE papers. Right now the Proceedings of the 50th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education are open for download. I think they’re only open (FREE) to non-members for a few more days. The conference closes this Saturday.

I’ve been downloading anything and everything that looks interesting or useful to me as a high school CS teacher and as someone interested in learning more about the field. I have about 35 papers downloaded. It’s going to take me a while to read them all.

I am a member of ACM and SIGCSE so I will be getting these papers in hard copy so you might wonder why I am downloading PDFs. The short answer is that I lose paper documents but I have a lot of room to store soft copy. And I confess that I want to start reading now.

I can’t make it to SIGCSE (it started today BTW) but I will be following Tweets and other social media updates. Having the papers available will help me understand what is going on better.

So are you taking advantage of paywall free access to SIGCSE proceedings? What other places do you go to learn what others are doing?