Blog Post #1999: The Georgia Tech School of Computing Education #CSEdWeek

Three and a half years, and 1000 blog posts ago, I wrote my 999th blog post about research questions in computing education (see post here). I just recently wrote a blog post offering my students’ take on research questions in computing education (see post here), which serves to update the previous post. In this blog post, I’m going to go more meta.

In my CS Education Research class (see description here), my students read a lot of work by me and my students, some work on EarSketch by Brian Magerko and Jason Freeman, and some by Betsy DiSalvo. There are other researchers doing work related to computing education in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech, notably John Stasko’s work on algorithm visualization, Jim Foley’s work on flipped classrooms (predating MOOCs by several years), and David Joyner and Ashok Goel’s work on knowledge-based AI in flipped and MOOC classrooms, and my students know some of this work. I posed the question to my students:

If you were going to characterize the Georgia Tech school of thought in computing education, how would you describe it?

We talked some about the contrasts. Work at CMU emphasizes cognitive science and cognitive tutoring technologies. Work at the MIT Media Lab is constructionist-based.

Below is my interpretation of what I wrote on the board as they called out comments.

• Contextualization. The Georgia Tech School of Computing education emphasizes learning computing in the context of an application domain or non-CS discipline.
• Beyond average, white male. We are less interested in supporting the current majority learner in CS.
• Targeted interventions. Georgia Tech computing education researchers create interventions with particular expectations or hypotheses. We want to attract this kind of learner. We aim to improve learning, or we aim to improve retention. We make public bets before we try something.
• Broader community. Our goal is to have a broaden participation in computing, to extend the reach of computer science.
• We are less interested in making good CS students better. To use an analogy, we are not about raising the ceiling. We’re about pushing back the walls and lowering the floors, and sometimes, creating whole new adjacent buildings.
• We draw on learning sciences theory, which includes cognitive science and educational psychology (e.g., cognitive load theory).
• We draw on social theories, especially distributed cognition, situated learning, social cognitive theory (e.g., expectancy-value theory, self-efficacy).

I might have spent hours coming up with a list like this, but in ten minutes, my students came up with a good characterization of what constitutes the Georgia Tech School of Thought in Computing Education.