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Computing Ed Research
How do people understand computing, and how can we improve that understanding?
- Posts
- 2,589 from 15 Jun 2009 to 19 Oct 2026
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- monthly (11 in the last year)
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- personal blog
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Latest
October 2026
March 2026
February 2026
- England: Time to replace Computer Science with Computing
- GenAI as automobile for the mind, and exercise as the antidote: A metaphor for predicting GenAI’s impact
- Personally Meaningful Data to Motivate Learning in Data Science and AI
- Come join us at the ITiCSE 2026 Doctoral Consortium!
- Defining Learner-Centered Design of Computing Education: What I did on my sabbatical
January 2026
- A New Zealand Perspective on the Challenges of Computing Education: What I did on my sabbatical
- Learning to teach better by observation: What I did on my sabbatical
December 2025
- Dr. Tamara Nelson-Fromm defends her dissertation: What Debugging Looks like in Alternative Endpoints
- Creating a measure of Critical Reflection and Agency in Computing
May 2025
March 2025
- Three stories about how CS is overwhelming, and ideas for how we can do better
- School teachers don’t need to recruit students into CS: An alternative model for K-12 computing education
- How scientists learn computing and use LLMs to program: Computing education for scientists and for democracy
- My Favorite ICER 2024 Paper: How Media Artists Teach Computing
- CS doesn’t have a monopoly on computing education: Programming is for everyone
February 2025
- Designing Courses for Liberal Arts and Sciences Students Contextualized Around Creative Expression and Social Justice: SIGCSE 2025 Experience Report
- How K-12 CS teachers support students for whom English is not their first language
- Media Computation in Python running in Google Colab Notebooks
- Dr. Bahare Naimipour defended her dissertation
December 2024
October 2024
August 2024
July 2024
- Assessing Student Understanding of Computing: Self-Efficacy, Non-CS Majors, and ChatGPT
- Everyday Equitable Data Literacy is Best in Social Studies, far more than in STEM
- A Purpose-First Theory of Transfer of Knowledge from Programming
March 2024
July 2023
- What Humanities Scholars Want Students To Know About the Internet: Alternative Paths for Alternative Endpoints
- A Scaffolded Approach into Programming for Arts and Humanities Majors: ITiCSE 2023 Tips and Techniques Papers
- Participatory Design to Set Standards for PCAS Courses
- Putting a Teaspoon of Programming into Other Subjects (May 2023 Communications of the ACM): About Teaspoon Languages
June 2023
- How computing instructors plan to adapt to ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, and other AI coding assistants (ICER 2023 paper): Guest blog post from Philip Guo
- Broadening Participation in Computing by Moving Away from Computer Science: Information, Arts, Humanities, and Sciences offer better models for #CSforAll
- Participatory Design to Support University to High School Curricular Transition/Translation in FIE 2022
May 2023
December 2022
- A Workshop on Slow Reveal Graphs for Social Studies Teachers
- Launching PCAS, the first two COMPFOR classes, and hiring our first lecturer
- Doing a Little Housekeeping and Rebranding
June 2022
- New ICER paper award for Lasting Impact: Guest blog post from Quintin Cutts
- Programming in blocks lets far more people code — but not like software engineers: Response to the Ofsted Report
- Getting feedback on Teaspoon Languages from CS educators and researchers at the Raspberry Pi Foundation seminar series
May 2022
- Ruthe Farmer’s important big idea: The Last Mile Education Fund to increase diversity in STEM
- Three types of computing education research: for CS, for CS but not professionally, and for everyone
- College Board stops sharing data on Advanced Placement Computer Science exams
February 2022
- Updates: Workshop on Contextualized Approaches to Introduction to Computing, from the Center for Inclusive Computing at Northeastern University
- Updates: Dr. Barbara Ericson awarded ACM SIGCSE 2022 Outstanding Contributions to Education
- Updates: NSF Funding to Study Learning with Teaspoon Languages for Discrete Mathematics
- Updates: Developing the University of Michigan LSA Program in Computing for the Arts and Science
December 2021
November 2021
September 2021
August 2021
- ICER 2021 Preview: The Challenges of Validated Assessments, Developing Rich Conceptualizations, and Understanding Interest #icer2021
- The Drawbacks of the One-Second Conference Trip. Or, how to prepare for ICER 2021. Guest Blog Post from Matthias Hauswirth
- Why aren’t more girls in the UK choosing to study computing and technology? Guest blog post by Peter Kemp
July 2021
- Announcing the inaugural Illinois Computer Science Summer Teaching Workshop: Guest blog post from Geoffrey Challen
- Considering the Danish Informatics Curriculum: Comparing National Computer Science Curricula
- There is transfer between programming and other subjects: Skills overlap, but it may not be causal
June 2021
- Rules work as a way of communicating computation at a mechanistic level without teaching programming
- Katie Cunningham’s Purpose-first Programming: Glass box scaffolding for learning to code for authentic contexts
- Call for Nominations for Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Computing Education
May 2021
- Call for Special Issue on CT in Early Childhood: Guest Blog Post from Wang, Bers, and Lee
- Seeking Collaborators for a Study of Impostor Phenomenon in Computer Science: Guest Blog Post from Leo Porter
April 2021
- The Bigger Part of Computing Education is outside of Engineering Education
- From Guided Exploration to Possible Adoption: Patterns of Pre-Service Social Studies Teacher Engagement with Programming and Non-Programming Based Learning Technology Tools
- Embodiment in CS Learning: How Space, Metaphor, Gesture, and Sketching Support Student Learning: Amber Solomon’s defense
February 2021
- Become a Better CS Teacher by Seeing Differently
- National Academies Report on authenticity to promote computing interests and competencies
- ICER 2021 Call for Papers out with Changes for ICER Authors
January 2021
- Broadening Participation in Computing is Different in Every State: Michigan as an Example
- Promote diversity by teaching to many goals for computing
December 2020
- The goal of the first CS course should be to promote confidence if we’re going to increase diversity in CS: Paying off on a bet
- Dijkstra’s Truths about Computing Education Aren’t: The many kinds of programming
November 2020
October 2020
- Define Computer Science so CS Departments include CS Ed
- Social Studies Teachers using Programming for Data Visualization: An FIE 2020 Paper Preview
- HyperBlocks come to Snap! — UX for PX in CS4All
September 2020
- Award-winning papers at ICER 2020 explore new directions and point towards the next work to do
- Let’s program in social studies classes: NSF funding for our work in task-specific programming languages
July 2020
- Proposal #3 to Change CS Education to Reduce Inequity: Call a truce on academic misconduct cases for programming assignments
- Proposal #2 to Change CS Education to Reduce Inequity: Make the highest grades achievable by all students
- Proposal #1 to Change CS Education to Reduce Inequity: Teach computer science to advantage the students with less computing background
- Changing Computer Science Education to eliminate structural inequities and in response to a pandemic: Starting a Four Part Series
- Paradigm shifts in education and educational technology: Influencing the students here and now
June 2020
- Subgoal labelling influences student success and retention in CS
- Managing CS major enrollment boom with a lottery: “A lottery, by definition, is fair.”
- Why do students study computing, especially programming
- How do teachers teach recursion with embodiment, and why won’t students trace their programs: ICLS 2020 Preview
- Becoming anti-racist: Learning about race in CS Education
- Goals for CS Education include Getting Students In the Door and Supporting Alternative Endpoints
May 2020
- Measuring progress on CS learning trajectories at the earliest stages
- Making Desktops on the way to Dynabooks: Happy 80th Birthday to Alan Kay!
- Thought Experiments on Why Face-to-Face Teaching Beats On-Line Teaching: We are Humans, not Econs
- SIGCSE 2020: Papers freely available, AP CSA over AP CSP for diversifying computing, and a tour of computing ed research in one hour
April 2020
- Data science as a path to integrate computing into K-12 schools and achieve CS for All
- Active learning has differential benefits for underserved students
- Checking our hubris with checklists: Learning a lesson from the XO Laptop
- How I’m lecturing during emergency remote teaching
March 2020
- So much to learn about emergency remote teaching, but so little to claim about online learning
- What I learned from taking a MOOC: Live Object Programming in Pharo
- How do we test the cultural assumptions of our assessments?
- Ebooks, Handbooks, Strong Themes, and Undergraduate Research: SIGCSE 2020 Preview
- Defining CS Ed out of existence: Have we made CS too hard to learn and teach?
- Final (likely) version of JES released, 18 years after first release
February 2020
- BDSI – A New Validated Assessment for Basic Data Structures: Guest Blog Post from Leo Porter and colleagues
- Call for participation at the 2nd Excited Summer School on Research in Computing Education
- Importance of considering race in CS education research and discussion
- Barbara Ericson’s analysis of the 2019 Advanced Placement CS data
- Learning the Craft of CS Education: Recommending the CS-Ed Podcast
January 2020
- Thorndike won. Dewey Lost: The Most Important 4 Words about the US Education System
- Is there a Geek Gene? Are CS grades bi-modal? Moving computing ed research forward
- Abstract Submissions Opens for FIE 2020!
- Computing Education Lessons Learned from the 2010’s: What I Got Wrong
December 2019
- What’s unique about CS education compared to other DBERs?
- Why don’t high schools teach CS: It’s the lack of teachers, but it’s way more than that (Miranda Parker’s dissertation)
- Why some students do not feel that they belong in CS, and how we can encourage the sense that they do belong
- Please forward to high school history teachers: Task-specific programming in social studies data viz
- When computer science has to be a requirement if we want it to be available to everyone
November 2019
- The future of computing education is in providing literacy to all: Video of SIGCSE 2019 Keynote now available
- Making the Case for Adaptive Parsons problems and Task-Specific Programming: Koli Calling 2019 Preview
- We should be emphasizing design of computing over teaching computational thinking
- Come to the CUE.NEXT Workshop: Making computing education work for all undergraduates
- Freakonomics misunderstands what public education is, how it works, and how to change it
October 2019
- Come to the NAS Workshop on the Role of Authentic STEM Learning Experiences in Developing Interest and Competencies for Technology and Computing
- How to change undergraduate computing to engage and retain more women
- Results from Longitudinal Study of Female Persistence in CS: AP CS matters, After-school programs and Internships do not
- An Analysis of Supports and Barriers to Offering Computer Science in Georgia Public High Schools: Miranda Parker’s Defense
- Task-specific programming for and about computing education (Precalculus TSP Part 5 of 5)
September 2019
- Task Specific Programming will only matter if it solves a user’s problem (Precalculus TSP Part 4 of 5)
- Task Specific Programming vs Coding: Designing programming like we design other user interfaces (Precalculus TSP Part 3 of 5)
- Building Textures from Waves: Debugging in Task-Specific Programming (Precalculus TSP Part 2 of 5)
- Precalculus Task-Specific Programming for Building Image Filters from Matrix Operations (Precalculus TSP Part 1 of 5)
- Upcoming NSF Computing Education Workshops from Jeff Forbes
- What’s generally good for you vs what meets a need: Balancing explicit instruction vs problem/project-based learning in computer science classes
- Come talk about the Role of Authentic STEM Learning Experiences in Developing Interest and Competencies for Technology and Computing #STEMforCompTech
- Where a Notional Machine Doesn’t Help: JavaScript and the DOM
- How the Cheesecake Factory is like Healthcare and CS Education
August 2019
- Holding ourselves to a higher standard: “Language-independent” just doesn’t cut it
- Summarizing findings about block-based programming in computing education
- Social studies teachers programming, when high schools choose to teach CS, and new models of cognition and intelligence in programming: An ICER 2019 Preview
- Let’s think more broadly about computing education research: Questions about alternative futures
July 2019
- Why high school teachers might avoid teaching CS: The role of industry
- Beta release of new JES (Jython Environment for Students) now available: Media Computation for Python IDE
- So what’s a notional machine anyway? A guest blog post from Ben Shapiro
- How to reduce the defensive climate, and what students really need to understand code: ITICSE 2019 Preview
- Learning to build machine learning applications without code as an example of computing education research
- Iterative and interdisciplinary participatory design sessions: Seeking advice on a research method
June 2019
- What a CS Ed Letter Writer Needs: Evaluating Impact for Promotion and Tenure in Computing Education
- An Ebook for Java AP CS Review: Guest Blog Post from Barbara Ericson
- Blocks and Beyond 2019 and SnapCon19 Call for Papers
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