CS Education Research at Tufts: Keynote by Ben Shapiro
December 5, 2014 at 8:15 am 1 comment
I recommend this talk by Ben Shapiro. He does a great job framing his work in computing education research, and shows some terrific examples of his latest work. I like how his work fits so well into both computing and education — he’s using education theory to help students learn important ideas in CS from distributed systems and parallelism (like latency and synchronization) that aren’t yet in the CS standards. This is using advanced knowledge in CS and advanced knowledge in Education to explore new ground.
Entry filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: BPC, broadening participation in computing, computing education research, computing for everyone, constructionism.
Computing Ed Research - Guzdial's Take 
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Peter Donaldson | December 6, 2014 at 3:25 am
Hi Mark,
thank you so much for highlighting Ben’s talk on your blog. As a Computing teacher I’ve read many CS and non CS education research papers, publications and watched various lectures over the years and that was one of the finest arguments I’ve seen about the true power and promise of CS.
It’s not just about jobs or the narrow technical aspects of one language or another it’s about being able to access and explore powerful ideas shaping the very fabric of society and giving everyone the opportunity to do so.
It was a real privilege being able to be an ICER delegate when so many american CS education researchers came over to Glasgow this year. The other teachers I work with still talk about the experience and how welcome you made them all feel, even if they were a bit shy to start with.
I hope Tufts do the smart thing and permanently hold onto Ben as a CS education professor and I hope I get a chance to hear him talk about his findings from the projects shown in the video one day.
We’ll be sharing the link to this video on the @CASScotland twitter account and encouraging our own government and education minister to take the time to hear Ben’s eloquent message.
Ben, if you end up reading this, thank you for making this talk public; you’ll provide hope and inspiration not just to american teachers but to many in the UK as well.