Visiting CMU: Historical Home of CS1-for-All

It’s Spring Break at Georgia Tech this week.  Last week was crammed full of midterm grading. Now that it’s Spring, I’m traveling north to colder climates.

Today, I’m at Carnegie Mellon University to speak in their Program for Interdisciplinary Education Research (PIER) today, and at the “EdBag” tomorrow.  I’m excited (and a bit nervous) — I’ve never spoken here at CMU before.  Leigh Ann Sudol-DeLyser is my student host, and she gave me a great tour of the campus yesterday.  For today’s talk, I’m giving a variation of my “Meeting the Computing Needs for Everyone” talk (describing Brian Dorn’s work and the role of contextualized computing education in this goal), but with special attention to the Alan Perlis lecture from 1961.

I re-read that chapter again yesterday.  Wow — it’s really clear that the idea of teaching everyone an introductory course on CS has its home here, at the University that grew out of Carnegie Tech.  While I had remembered that Peter Elias of MIT had pushed back against the idea of such a course as being unnecessary, I hadn’t remembered how J.C.R. Licklider and Perlis responded.

• Elias argues that programming is just a “mental chore” that the computer should be able to take care of for us: “If the computers, together with sufficiently ingenious languages and programming systems, are capable of doing everything that Professor Perlis describes—and I believe they are (and more)—then they should be ingenious enough to do it without the human symbiote being obliged to perform the mechanical chores which are a huge part of current programming effort, and which are a large part of what must now be taught in the introductory course that he proposes.”
• Licklider emphasizes what might be possible with this new kind of language. “Peter, I think the first apes who tried to talk with one another decided that learning language was a dreadful bore…But some people write poetry in the language we speak.”
• Perlis makes a really interesting pedagogical rebuttal. He says that what he really wants to teach are abstractions, and a course in programming is the best way he can think of doing that. He also says (not quoted below) that he has no evidence for this, but believes it strongly. “The purpose of a course in programming is to teach people how to construct and analyze processes…A course in programming is concerned with abstraction: the abstraction of constructing, analyzing, and describing processes…The point is to make the students construct complex processes out of simpler ones….A properly designed programming course will develop these abilities better than any other course.”
• John McCarthy (father of Lisp) also responded in opposition to Elias. “Programming is the art of stating procedures. Prior to the development of digital computers, one did not have to state procedures precisely, and no languages were developed for stating procedures precisely. Now we have a tool that will carry out any procedure, provided we can state this procedure sufficiently well. It is utopian to suppose that either English or some combination of English and mathematics will turn out to be the appropriate language for stating procedures.”  Interesting how McCarthy and Licklider, as in Donald Knuth’s Turing award lecture, talk about programming as art.

Leigh Ann told me that the “EdBag” is a place to play with new and incomplete ideas.  I’m planning to talk about the challenge of producing more high school CS teachers, including alternatives like Dave Patterson’s proposal.  I’ve been thinking a lot about using a worked examples approach, informed by Ashok Goel’s structure-behavior-function model of design cognition.

Tomorrow, I fly to DC and spend two days reviewing NSF proposals.  Still trying to get the rest of my proposals read today, and all the reviews written tonight.  Thursday night, I’ll get back home to Atlanta where it really is Spring already.