How to make progress in computing education: Get more funding!
April 27, 2010 at 7:17 pm 1 comment
Cameron Wilson and I wrote the Education column for the Viewpoints section of Communications of the ACM this month. Our title is “How to make progress in computing education?” where the subtitle (provided by the editors) gets it right: “Improving the research base for computing education requires securing competitive funding commitments.” It’s an analysis of where there is funding for computing education (answer: too few places), and where there is funding that’s not being tapped well by computing educators yet (answer: NSF’s Education and Human Resources (EHR) Directorate). NSF’s computing directorate programs, CPATH and BPC, together get about $20M per year. EHR’s research budget is $850M per year. We make concrete suggestions for what we can do to increase funding for computing education research.
Entry filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: BPC, computing education research, CPATH, NSF, public policy.
Computing Ed Research - Guzdial's Take 
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Alan Kay | April 27, 2010 at 8:51 pm
Hi Mark,
This is indeed a huge problem — and with some collateral barriers built in. Although the government does have some large education budgets, the combination of having to spread the money around (some would call this pork barreling) and lots of requirements to have to do research to the standards much more than “research to find out what the standards should be” (and a few other barriers as well) result in very little of the available money being used to try to do any real improvements in any area.
Cheers,
Alan