Will be missing my friends at SIGCSE 2018 — Preparing for What’s Next

I am not going to SIGCSE 2018.  I haven’t missed SIGCSE in a lot of years, and I’m sorry to miss it this year.  SIGCSE is the biggest computing education conference in the world, and it’s the best place to hear what’s going on in CS classes and the United States — and to possibly influence what’s going on.  I’m particularly sorry because I owe Owen Astrachan a beer and dinner.  I lost our bet about Code.org and CSP Curricula.  I have to find another time to pay up.

I’m not going because it’s a time of change for me.  I don’t know for sure what I’m going to be doing next. This post is another in the (perhaps wearisome) series of posts where I explored what a post-full professor should do and my failure CV.

There are two forcing functions for the change:

• My wife and research partner, Barbara Ericson, is finishing her PhD on adaptive Parsons problems.  She is going to shift her emphasis from being Director of CS Outreach to more research.
• Our role in ECEP is ending in September.  From “Georgia Computes!” to ECEP, we have been doing work in Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC) for over a dozen years.  We want to move on. Others will carry ECEP further.  I started doing work in BPC as a natural next step from my research on making computing education for a broader audience (e.g., Media Computation).  Different kinds of research and leadership are important for the next steps of BPC Alliance work.

SIGCSE may not be as big a part of my academic life, depending on what comes next for me. I may do more Engineering Education Research in the future.  I may get more involved in preparing future CS teachers. My research directions are changing. I will continue to work towards Computing Education for All, and I’m interested in studying and developing different ways of getting there. The proposals I’m submitting these days are about doing work that looks like Bootstrap. I’d like to do more in applying computing (specifically, programming) as a notation and tool for learning in disciplines other than computer science. Venues other than SIGCSE may be the right places for this kind of work.

It’s going to be a great SIGCSE, and I’m thrilled that my student, Katie Cunningham, is co-author on a paper that will be receiving a Best Paper Award. Sorry I won’t be there to see all my SIGCSE friends this year.