The Ground Truth of Computing Education: What Do You Know?

Earlier this month, I was a speaker at a terrific event at Cornell Tech To Code & Beyond: Thinking & Doing organized by Diane Levitt (see Tweet here). I spoke, and then was on a panel with Kelly Powers, Thea Charles, Aman Yadav, and Diane to discuss what is Computational Thinking.

One of the highlights of the day for me was listening to Margaret Honey, a legendary educational technology designer and researcher (see bio here). She is President and CEO of the New York Hall of Science. One of my favorite parts of her talk was a description of the apps that they’re building to get kids to notice and measure things in their world. I even love the URL for their tools — https://noticing.nysci.org/

At the event, Diane mentioned that she was working on a blog post about her “ground truth” — what she most believed about CS education. She shared it as a tweet right after the event. It’s lovely and deep — find it here.

A couple of my favorite of her points:

Students thrive when we teach at the intersection of rigor and joy. In computer science, it’s fun to play with the real thing. But sometimes we water it down until it’s too easy—and kids know it. Struggle itself will not turn kids away from computer science. They want relevant learning experiences that lead to building things that matter to them. “I can do hard things!” is one of the most powerful thoughts a student can have.

The biggest lever we have is the one we aren’t using enough yet: preservice education for new teachers. The sooner we start teaching computer science education alongside the teaching of math and reading, during teachers’ professional preparation programs, the sooner we get to scale. It’s expensive and time-consuming to continually retool our workforce. Eventually, if every teacher enters the classroom prepared to include computer science, every student will be prepared for the digital world in which they live. This is what we mean by equity: equal access for every student, regardless of geography, gender, income, ability, or, frankly, interest.

Sara Judd answered Diane’s post with one of her own — find it here. I really enjoy it because she sees computer science like I do. It’s not just about problem-solving, but also about making things and connecting to the world.

Programming makes things.

While programming for it’s own sake can be fun for some people, (me, for instance) generally when people are programming it is because there is a thing that needs to be made. These things can be expressive pieces of visual art or music. These things can be silly fun for fun’s sake. These things can revolutionize the world, they can make our lives easier. The important thing is, they are “things.” CS doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Therefore, classroom CS should not exist in a vacuum.

I encourage more of us to do this — to write down what we believe about CS education, then share the essays. It’s great to hear goals and perspectives, both to learn new ones and also to recognize that others share how we think about it. I particularly enjoy reading these from people with different life experiences. I have a privileged life as a University CS professor. Teachers in K-12 struggle with very different things. I’m so pleased when I find that we still have similar goals for and perspectives about CS education.