Visiting Melbourne

I’m in Melbourne, Australia, where I spoke yesterday at the Melbourne Computing Educational Conventicle. It was an exciting, high-energy event. Almost 90 attendees from around Melbourne came to talk about issues, from cheating and Android, to the definition of Multimedia. Even more exciting was the news that their doctoral consortium the day before had 20 PhD students, exploring research issues related to CS education. That’s amazing! Below is Catherine Lang, the chair and organizer of the event, opening the Conventicle. (Thanks to ACM Distinguished Speakers program for providing me support for this.)

Heard an interesting talk yesterday from ACDICT, Australian Council of Deans in ICT. They’re funding work in “Grand Challenges in CS education.”. Will be interesting to see what they identify.

Today, Barbara ran a workshop for teachers (middle and high school) on building apps for Android. She ended up touching on lots of other issues, from Lightbot to CS Unplugged. She had about 20 teachers.

Monday, we head to Adelaide for two talks there on Tuesday.