Hadi Partovi’s keynote at CrossRoads 2018: CS Ed Research needs to up its game

I was scheduled to be on a panel at last year’s InfoSys Crossroads 2018 conference, but my father passed the week before, so I couldn’t make it.  Several people told me that I had to see the video of Hadi Partovi’s talk, because “he talks about CS Education Research.”  The facial expression suggested I should feel warned.

I enjoyed the talk. Hadi made some critical and completely fair statements about CS Ed Research today. I recommend watching.

 

The really research-y stuff is around 30 minutes into the talk.  He talks about CS competing with other fields (a point that Joan Ferrini-Mundy also made to ECEP), and that CS has to make the argument for itself. I most appreciated the point (around 31:50) that no CS Ed research meets the “What Works Clearinghouse” standards for “works without reservations.” He’s right, and it’s a fair criticism.  Maybe it’s too early, but at some point, we have to be able to compete at the evaluation standards applied to all other subjects.  Code.org is stepping up their game, with the first evaluation demonstrating that their CSP curriculum significantly increases the rate at which students take and pass the AP CSP exam (see paper here).

I learned a lot from his talk, especially his points about how to scale. I love the advice to “Execute first, raise funding after.”  Since I’m trying to re-start my research program at Michigan, I am thinking about that advice a lot. I hear Hadi saying that I need to be executing on something interesting to fund first, before trying to sell the something interesting I want to do. Writing proposals about things I’m not executing on will probably not be convincing, and delays me making progress on the things I’m passionate about.

Of course, I vehemently agree with his argument that the future of CS Ed is to integrate CS into other subjects.