One More Trip: CECC and ACM Ed Board

One last business trip of the year (by plane — I’m driving to visit collaborators in “Georgia Computes!” next week).  I’m heading today to Seattle, where I’ll have three days of meetings at Microsoft’s Lincoln Square facility in Bellevue, WA.

• Thursday and Friday are about establishing a Computing Education Coordinating Council (CECC).  ACM and IEEE collaborate on curricular volumes, but there are more issues in computing education than that.  And while there are some important new collaborations around computing education starting up (like Computing in the Core), the IS and IT communities have been pretty much left out.  CECC is about bringing all parties to the table for a unified voice in computing education.  CECC will be most useful at the K-12 level, I think, since the issues there are the same, whether you care about CS, IS, IT, CE, SE, or any number of other two letter computing degree designations that I’m forgetting.
• Friday and Saturday are an ACM Education Board meeting.  Lots of topics to discuss, including the 2013 CS Curriculum volume that Mehran Sahami is heading, the new AP CS efforts (Larry Snyder will be able to tell us how his pilot at U.Washington went), CSEd week, and international initiatives.

 

CMU’s CS Education Day

CMU has quite a star-studded CS Education going on today — http://www.cs.cmu.edu/csed/.  Jan Cuny of NSF’s BPC and CE21 programs is the keynote speaker, and includes themes of Alice, Running on Empty, Computational Thinking (from Jeanette Wing), and the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center.  Links to lots of good resources on the page.