Research Questions from CS Ed Research Class

My CS Ed research class did lots of reading in the first half, and then are developing research plans in the second half.  In between, I asked the students to develop research questions (faces deliberately obscured in picture of the class above), and several colleagues asked me, “Please share what they came up with!”

• Do we need to teach CS to everyone?
• How do we make CS education ubiquitous, and what are the costs and benefits of doing so?
• How effective is Media Computation (and like courses) in “tech” schools vs. liberal arts schools?
• How do we make individualistic (contextualized, scaffolded, etc.) CS experiences for everyone?
• What are equal vs just interventions?
• What is the economic cost of not teaching computing to all?
• How do we create a community of practice among non-practitioners?
• How to make CS teachers adopt better teaching practices?
• How we incorporate CS learning into existing engineering courses vs. create new courses for engineers?
• How does teaching to all high school students differ from teaching undergraduates?
• How do people learn CS? Define a CS learning progression.
• Are those AP CS Principles skills transferable to college CS courses? Or anywhere else?
• How does programming apply to everyone?
• What are the enduring computer science/splinter areas?
• How does the content and order of teaching computing concepts affect retention and transfer to other disciplines?
• How do we scaffold from problem-based learning to culturally relevant computing projects?
• What characteristics do successful CS teachers who transition from other disciplines exhibit?
• Is metaphor useful in learning CS?  Which metaphors are useful?