Blog

A couple of weeks ago, Barb and I were awarded Georgia Tech’s Service Award for our work with Georgia Computes!. At the same awards ceremony, across the table, was David Collard of Chemistry who was getting the Professional education award.  He’s been part of an effort (described below) called cCWCS which teaches chemistry faculty how to teach better — and the program has taught over a thousand faculty!

A thousand faculty?!?  I’ve blogged about how hard it is to get CS faculty to come to our workshops, either Media Computation or Georgia Computes.  I’ve talked to other folks who offer workshops to CS faculty, and they say that they have to invite high school teachers, too, or they won’t have enough people to run the workshop.  Why do so many Chemistry professors show up, when we struggle to get CS professors to show up at teaching workshops?

Barb had an interesting insight: Maybe it’s because Chemistry is taught to everyone.  When you teach something to everyone, you have to teach…

Computing Education Blog

This is clearly the report that Eric Roberts was referencing in his recent (very popular) guest post (over 20K page views!):

For the third year computer science enrollments have increased, ending the precipitous decline in enrollments that followed the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000-2001.

When that speculative bubble burst, the subsequent shakeout and unemployment in the tech industry sent enrollments plummeting, raised concerns that the U.S. competitiveness would suffer in the long-run. Enrollments are arching up, but are still well below the peak reached nearly 10 years ago.

The Computer Research Association (CRA), which tracks enrollments and graduation rates for computer science students, says enrollments in computer science programs were up last fall by 10%.

via Computer science enrollments rebound, up 10% last fall – Computerworld.

Tagged: image of computer science, undergraduate enrollment
Computing Education Blog

Thanks to Sarita Yardi for these. Talk about CS Unplugged!

Tagged: image of computing
Computing Education Blog

We’re in the thick of it in my data structures class this semester: Doubly-linked lists last week, trees (scene graphs) this week.  And I’m running headfirst into my students’ misconceptions, which are surprisingly similar and pervasive.  Here’s an exchange that’s really had me thinking.

• I was creating a linked list of picture elements.  I declared a variable for holding the pictures, Picture p.  Then, I created a picture object, and stuffed it into a new node, e.g., “p = new Picture(…); node1 = new PictureNode(p);” and repeated this for node2, node3, and node4. A student raises her hand. “How many picture objects did you just create?”  I counted: “3.”  ”But you only declared one Picture variable p?  Isn’t that just one object?”
• I then executed the statement (this is all DrJava, so I could do it interactively, like an interpreter): “node1.setNext(new PictureNode(p))”  Another student took up the questioning, with the question that’s been bugging me since: “If you just created a…

Computing Education Blog

A particularly appropriate post, given SIGCSE this week:

Professors have two primary charges: generate new knowledge and educate students. The reward systems at research universities heavily weight efforts of many professors toward research at the expense of teaching, particularly in disciplines supported extensively by extramural funding ( 1). Although education and lifelong learning skills are of utmost importance in our rapidly changing, technologically dependent world ( 2), teaching responsibilities in many STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) disciplines have long had the derogatory label “teaching load” ( 3,  4). Some institutions even award professors “teaching release” as an acknowledgment of their research accomplishments and success at raising outside research funds.

via an article from Jan 14, 2011 Science Magazine.

Computing Education Blog

Here’s a compelling example related to our earlier discussion about if and when order in a curriculum matters.  This report suggests that having the appropriate background knowledge helps in understanding content fully, so that what’s learned is not just memorized terms.  I like the argument, that we delay teaching a subject until students know enough to understand the fundamentals of a subject.  However, there’s still a question of what we call “fundamentals,” of how deep.  I’ll bet that the eighth graders who learn about the eye learn about nerves and light and rods/cones, but probably not about rhodopsin, and quantum mechanics.  At some point, there is a “just trust us on the rest of it” to the explanation.  The question is where to draw that line — in what primitives does one ground the explanations? What’s “fundamental” enough?

Students in the United States generally start to learn about the human eye in elementary school. Students in many other countries, though, don’t…

Computing Education Blog

Barbara Boucher Owens shared this article on Facebook, and it’s really been haunting me ever since.  I discussed it with my Barb yesterday, and decided I should blog about it.

Kathy Weston was a tenured biology professor in the UK who decided to “jump” before she was “pushed” out of academia.  She had great opportunities in her career, including working closely with a (later) Nobel prize winner.  Yet, she decided she was unsuccessful, and left academia to become a science writer.  I think it haunts because I’m at a similar stage in my career: Almost 20 years in, wondering about what comes next.  I can say this for her science writing — I found it compelling and thought-provoking, but left me with questions.

• How would she be “pushed”?  She’s tenured.  One way I could imagine her being pushed is not being fired but simply starved. I just had a meeting with my School Chair yesterday where he expressed disappointment in my funding record — I get 95% of my funding from NSF, which has a…

Computing Education Blog

At CE21, I met Aman Yadav, an assistant professor in educational studies at Purdue.  He’s actually teaching a CS methods course (how to teach CS effectively), in a program that teaches pre-service high school teachers!  How exciting!  He only has one student.  Aman says that he doesn’t know how many semester that they can afford to offer the class with so few students.  The one teacher he has is a math education major, who is taking a minor in CS education.  Nobody there is going after CS education as their main focus.

We were sitting at breakfast Tuesday morning with Wayne Summers, my collleague at Columbus State University where they have a program to give teachers an “endorsement” (a kind of certification that comes after a teacher’s initial certificate in teaching math, science, business, or whatever) to teach high school computer science.  He had one student, but she dropped out in the first semester.

I mentioned in a previous blog post that UTeach has been in existence for 14…

Computing Education Blog

A fascinating take on the role of science in universities.  I’ve blogged previously here about the obsession with research (mostly in science) in Universities and how that twists budgets and perceptions.  This article points out that, while Universities desperately need Science, Science actually doesn’t need to be in academia to succeed.

The university needs science because some 97.5 percent of the sponsored research funding flows to science faculty members. It needs science because graduate science departments attract the largest share of international students, many of whom come with external funding. It needs science because science is its last bastion of intellectual credibility. It needs science because the most potent rationale for continuing state and federal support is that universities drive technological innovation and jobs, and this claim rests almost exclusively on the contributions of university science faculty. It needs science because science departments are a magnet…

Computing Education Blog

Max Hailperin passed on this story to the SIGCSE-Members list.  He added that: “About 40 students will graduate from the program in May. But that will leave about 40 who haven’t. They hope to get those students through within two years. But even if they do, the students may be forced to take upper-level computer science classes from faculty who may not have taught them before.” Interesting that Aviation was going to be cancelled, too, but the local business community worked to save that program. But not CS.

It’s been a bit blue in Minnesota State University’s computer science department.

But it’s not hard to understand why.

“Everyone in the department has either been fired, retired or has resigned,” said Dean Kelley, one of those faculty members. “Two took retirement — one effective last year, one this year — one who was on a leave of absence and has resigned. As for the remaining three, the word they used was ‘retrenched.’”

Computer science as a functioning program at MSU will…

Computing Education Blog