Off to WIPSCE 2014: 9th Workshop in Primary and Secondary Computing Education in Berlin

Barbara and I are attending the WIPSCE 2014 conference, the 9th Workshop in Primary and Secondary Computing Education in Berlin. See the program here and the proceedings here.  I was impressed as a reviewer this year — the quality of papers at WIPSCE is exceptionally high.  There is worldwide interest in improving K-12 computing education, and reports are flowing into WIPSCE on research findings and lessons-learned from all over the world.

Barbara is presenting a short paper on Friday (with co-authors Tom McKlin and me) on “Preparing Secondary Computer Science Teachers Through an Iterative Development Process.”  She’s going to tell how her professional development effort at Georgia Tech developed, using feedback from Tom’s evaluation efforts.  She’ll offer some of her lessons learned, such as using teachers themselves as providers where ever possible, to establish leaders in the community of teachers and to make the PD more sustainable.

I am honored to be the keynote speaker on Thursday morning.  My talk is on “Preparing Teachers is Different than Preparing Software Developers.”  I’m going to talk about what teachers need to know and do that’s different from software developers, with a particular emphasis on pedagogical-content knowledge, on reading code more than writing code, and about writing code to learn rather than to produce software.  I’m still working on my talk.  The audience is going to be primary and secondary school CS teachers AND researchers and providers of teacher professional learning opportunities.  So, how much do I tell teachers things that they might find useful in the classroom, and how much do I tell results from research or give suggestions on how to facilitate teacher learning?  I’ll let you know how it goes.