The state of the field in pre-college computer science education: Highly recommended Google report

Google has just released a report: Pre-College Computer Science Education: A Survey of the Field (available here).  The report is authored by Paulo Blikstein of Stanford.  The report is innovative, developed with an unusual method.  It’s terrific, and I highly recommend it.

Paulo started out with a pretty detailed survey document about the state of the literature in computer science education. He covered from the 1967 launch of Logo to modern day.  Then he interviewed 14 researchers in the field (I was one). These were detailed interviews, where the interviewees got to review the transcript afterwards.  Paulo integrated ideas and quotes from the interviews into the document.  Here comes the really cool part: he put the whole thing on a Google doc and let everyone comment on it.

When I got the call to review the document, I just skimmed it.  It looked pretty good to me.  But then the debates started, and the fights broke out.  That Google doc had some of the longest threads of comments I’ve ever seen.  After a few weeks, Paulo closed the comments, and then integrated the threads into the document.  So now, it’s not just a serious survey paper, brought up to date with interviews.  It’s also a record of significant debate between over a dozen researchers, where the tensions and open questions were surfaced.

This is the document to read to figure out what should come next in computing education research.  I will recommend it to all of my students.

Of course, it’s not perfect.  The researchers interviewed tended towards the Logo/MIT/constructionist perspective.  The emphasis was on the US, though there were a couple of non-US interviewees.  If someone was to do this again (which I don’t recommend for a few years — it’ll take us awhile just to work on this agenda), I’d recommend including interviews with a wider range of folks:

• We need to hear more voices from the evidence-based learning perspective, those inspired by Carl Wieman.  I’m thinking about people like Beth Simon, Leo Porter, Cynthia Lee, Christine Alvarado, and Dan Zingaro.
• There’s no one on this list that I think would label themselves as a cognitive tutors or Learning at Scale researcher.  We need to hear from people like Mehran Sahami and Ken Koedinger.
• I’m so glad that we have voices from the UK in this document, but if you’re going to go international, you have to include voices from the Nordic (e.g., Michael Caspersen, Jens Bennedsen, Lauri Malmi, Juha Sorva, and probably several from Upcerg, the world’s largest academic CS Ed research group), from Israel (e.g., Moti Ben-Ari, Judith Gal-Ezer, Yifat Kolikant, and Orit Hazzan), and from Australasia (e.g., Katrina Falkner, Ray Lister, Tim Bell).  The reality is that CS Ed Research is far larger outside the US than inside the US. There are more CS Ed researchers with a more diverse range of opinions outside the US.

I’m sure that I’m forgetting important voices, but this is enough to say that this report is a good first effort at bringing in a range of perspectives.  There are other important voices needed, if you really want to understand the state of CS education research at the pre-college level.

As it is, it’s still a fascinating and important report.  I’m biased — my thoughts and words are in there.  There is a range of opinions in there. I don’t agree with everything in there.  Paulo did a good job capturing the tensions around computational thinking, and I’m much more positive about blocks-based programming languages than are other voices in the report.

I highly recommend reading the report.