Crazy Travel Begins: NASA Goddard, MIT CSAIL, Stanford, and Tufts
November 27, 2012 at 10:26 am 4 comments
It’s nearing the end of the semester here, and classes are wrapping up, so the pent-up travel bursts into my calendar. Here’s what I’ve got the next three weeks:
- I told my youngest daughter, “I’ve got a cool talk coming up. What’s the coolest, geekiest, most amazing techie thing you’ve heard of recently?” She immediately replied, “The Mars Rover!” And I got to say, “I’m going to NASA!” (which is even cooler in our house than saying, “I’m going to DisneyWorld!”) I’m flying tonight to Baltimore to visit NASA Goddard Space Flight Center tomorrow and give a talk about computing education for everyone. My eldest daughter wishes she could come with me — “That’s my dream job!”
- Friday, I’m going to MIT Computer Science and AI Laboratory (CSAIL) to talk about “What we know about teaching computer science (Answer: Not all that much)”. It’s going to be an exciting day. Hal Abelson and Mitchel Resnick are both on my schedule. I’ve already received a note from Richard Stallman saying that he can’t make my talk, but am I going to release any free/libre software to address problems in CS education? (Seriously!)
- Next Tuesday and Wednesday (Dec 4-5), Barbara and I are visiting Stanford again. We were just there in March and are pleased to be invited back so soon. I’m giving two talks on Tuesday (and the nervousness factor rises geometrically, not linearly). The first is a demonstration lecture, which I’m excited about and wish I got invited to do more often when I visit places — I don’t get to teach introductory CS much here, and I love doing it, so it’s a treat for me. The second is a research talk on “On-Line CS Education.”
- Then the following Monday (Dec 10), I’m at Tufts University visiting the Center for Engineering Education and Outreach. There’s a bunch of great work going on there, but I have a more personal interest in going there, too. I lived at Tufts when I was an intern for GTE Laboratories in Waltham in the Summer of 1983, and have fond memories of the campus.
If I’m slow in responding here (or via email) over the next three weeks, I hope you’ll understand. If you’re around one of these places and can come to my talk, please do and stop by to say hello!
Entry filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: computing education research, goddard space flight center, Scratch.
1.
Amit Deutsch | November 28, 2012 at 6:17 pm
Hi Mark,
I’m an education student at Stanford and would love to see your talk next Tuesday, but I can’t find information on it– would you mind providing the details? Thanks!
2.
Mark Guzdial | November 29, 2012 at 9:21 am
I have 4:00 pm in Room 104 of Gates Building on my schedule.
3.
Mark Guzdial | December 6, 2012 at 4:18 pm
In case anyone’s interested, here’s my MIT talk on video: http://www.csail.mit.edu/videoarchive/talks/hci/guzdial
4.
Mark Guzdial | December 8, 2012 at 7:53 am
Here are the details for Monday’s talk at Tufts, for anyone who wants to join:
Tufts STEM Education Lecture Series
Co-sponsored by the Tufts Center for Engineering Education and Outreach
and Dept. of Education
Monday, December 10, 2012 from 4:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Location: Nelson Auditorium, first floor Anderson Hall (School of
Engineering), 200 College Avenue
Tufts University, Medford Campus
Map: http://campusmaps.tufts.edu/medford/
Open to the public. All are welcome.
Mark Guzdial
Professor
School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology
Computing Education for Everyone
Abstract: Computer science education worldwide has been focused
at the post-secondary level explicitly for the future IT
professional. Professionals in IT are a small piece of the
audience for computing education. One estimate from Carnegie
Mellon University suggests that today there are some 13 million
end-user programmers in the United States, compared to an
estimated 3 million professional software developers. In this
talk, I talk about how to address the much larger audience, to
make more successful the non-IT professional who uses or teaches
computer science. I will present work on helping adult
professionals (teachers, artists, and designers) to learn
computing, which suggests that we need to develop new kinds of
approaches to teach CS for different needs and goals. We have
developed methods for teaching computing that have improved
success rates for non-computing majors (while still including
programming), such as contextualized computing education.