Over 90% of all high schools in the United States do not offer computer science education. Computing is key to innovation and productivity throughout modern economies, and knowledge of how to use computing is creatively and economically powerful. Computing education is necessary far beyond the many computing professionals our societies need, because *most* people who program are *not* professional software developers. My research group at Georgia Tech has been pursuing the goal of computing education for everyone, not just for the computer science major. In this talk, I will tell four stories in pursuit of this goal: About creating a computing education for liberal arts, architecture, and business students; meeting the needs of high school teachers learning to teach computer science; helping graphic designers learn computer science beyond coding; and identifying unanswered research questions in the concerns of education policymakers working to improve computing education access in their states. Bio: Mark Guzdial is a Professor in the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. He has a joint PhD in Education and Computer Science from the University of Michigan. He is a learning scientist who focuses on computing education research. He invented “Media Computation” and has published several books on the use of media as a context for learning computing. Preparing more high school computing teachers is critical to improve access to computing education, so he co-leads an effort to develop electronic books to support teacher learning about computing ([http://home.cc.gatech.edu/csl/CSLearning4U]). He is one of the leads on the NSF-funded Expanding Computing Education Pathways (ECEP) alliance to help US states improve and broaden participation in computing education ([http://ecepalliance.org]). He serves on the ACM's Education Council, and is on the editorial boards of the "Journal of the Learning Sciences," "ACM Transactions on Computing Education," and "Communications of the ACM." With his wife and colleague, Barbara Ericson, he received the 2010 ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator award.  He was also the recipient of the 2012 IEEE Computer Society Undergraduate Teaching Award, and is an ACM Distinguished Educator and a Fellow of the ACM. Webpage: [http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~mark.guzdial] Blog: [http://computinged.wordpress.com]

1. STEPS TOWARD A
COMPUTING EDUCATION FOR ALL
Mark Guzdial
21 June 2015

2. Why teach CS in Schools?
2
In US, CS is about jobs.
• Provide access to inculcate interest.
In Germany, Denmark, and UK
(Computing at School), CS is a rigorous
field that helps students understand
their world.
Jeanette Wing: CS is for transferable
Computational Thinking.
My argument: Many will need to
program later in life.
Code.org
Over 12 million views

3. Computing education by-the-numbers
3
• ~25,000 high schools in the United States.
• 2,525 AP Computer Science teachers in the United States.
• NCTM founded in 1920
• American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) founded
in 1930.
• Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) founded in
2005.
• In 2012, there were 3 million professional software
developers in the United States.
• There were 13 million professionals who programmed as
part of their jobs, but were not professional software
developers.

4. Thanks to
Brian
Danielak

5. Histogram of who took AP CS 2012 in US States
% female
exam-takers
# Black
exam-takers
# Hispanic
exam-takers
Ericson, Guzdial, SIGCSE 2014

6. How do we meet society’s need for computing education?
6
• We need classes that show CS to be a possible career path, a rigorous
domain, and a useful set of skills and knowledge.
• We need teachers—more well-prepared, confident, and retained
computing teachers.
• We need to find ways to help adult professionals learn computing
when they discover that they need it.
• We need to answer the questions of policymakers who want
computing education in their states.

7. Meeting the Challenges
7
1. Curriculum: What does undergraduate computing education
look like that everyone can succeed with?
2. Teachers: How do we meet the unique needs of computing
teachers?
3. Adult learners: How do we help adults meet their computing
education needs after their school years?
4. Research and Policy: What are the research questions we have
to answer to support computing education policy?

8. Story #1: Curriculum: Context Matters
Fall 1999:
All students at Georgia Tech must take a
course in computer science.
– Considered part of General Education, like mathematics,
social science, humanities…
1999-2003: Only one course met the
requirement.
– Shackelford’s pseudocode approach in 1999
– Later Scheme: How to Design Programs (MIT Press)

9. One-class CS1: Pass vs. WDF
Success Rates in CS1 from Fall 1999 to
Spring 2002 (Overall: 78%)
Architecture 46.7%
Biology 64.4%
Economics 53.5%
History 46.5%
Management 48.5%
Public Policy 47.9%

10. Contextualized Computing Education
What’s going on?
– Research results: Computing is “tedious,
boring, irrelevant”
Since Spring 2003, Georgia Tech
teaches three introductory CS
courses.
– Based on Margolis and Fisher’s
“alternative paths”
Each course introduces
computing using a context
(examples, homework
assignments, lecture
discussion) relevant to majors.
– Make computing relevant by teaching it
in terms of what computers are good for
(from the students’ perspective)

11. Media Computation:
Teaching in a Relevant Context
Presenting CS topics with media
projects and examples
– Iteration as creating negative
and grayscale images
– Indexing in a range as
removing redeye
– Algorithms for blending both
images and sounds
– Linked lists as song fragments
woven to make music
– Information encodings as
sound visualizations
11

12. 12
Open-ended, contextualized homework in Media Computation
Sound collage

13. Results:CS1“Media Computation”
86.5% 88.4% 84.7% 89.9% 91.9% 87.5% 80.3% 82.9% 77.5%
12.5% 10.3%
14.7%
9.4% 7.6% 11.4%
19.7% 17.1% 22.5%
TotalFall03
Fem
alesFall03M
alesFall03
TotalSp04Fem
alesSp04M
alesSp04TotalFall04
Fem
alesFall04M
alesFall04
WDF
Pass
Change in Success rates in CS1 “Media
Computation” from Spring 2003 to Fall 2005
(Overall 85%)
Architecture 46.7% 85.7%
Biology 64.4% 90.4%
Economics 54.5% 92.0%
History 46.5% 67.6%
Management 48.5% 87.8%
Public Policy 47.9% 85.4%

14. Voices from Media
Computation Students
“I just wish I had more time to play around with that and make
neat effects. But JES [IDE for class] will be on my computer
forever, so… that’s the nice thing about this class is that you
could go as deep into the homework as you wanted. So, I’d
turn it in and then me and my roommate would do more
after to see what we could do with it.”
“I dreaded CS, but ALL of the topics thus far have been
applicable to my future career (& personal) plans—there
isn't anything I don't like about this class!!!"
"Media Computation is a CS class but with less severity. The
media part of the class is extremely visually interesting. I
would only take another CS class if it were Media
Computation."

15. Table 1: R et ent ion dat a for Geor gia Tech’s M edia-
Com p cour se from Fall 2006–Fall 2012
Fem ale M ale Tot al
Passing grades 2102 1659 3761
Failing grades 208 235 443
Withdraw 30 46 76
DFW Total 238 281 519
% DFW-total 5.5% 6.5% 12%
% DFW-set 10.1% 14.5% 12%
that we were wrong. Whatever incites plagiarism, Media-
Comp does not seem to impact plagiarism.
Guzdial, ICER 2013

16. Story #2: Providing Teachers Support for Reflection and Community
We need CS teachers to have a sense of
identity:
• More professional learning
• Greater retention
• Retention of CS teachers is exceedingly bad
Where does that sense of identity come
from?
• For US CS teachers, from community and role
models. (Lijun Ni, 2011)
16

17. Teachers need their Communities
“I’m a better Math teacher, just because I’ve
had so much support. Whenever I have
problems, I can talk with the people that I
work with, most of who have taught for many
years in Math.…Every day, I’m eating lunch
with Math teachers.
With Computer Science, I’ve got nobody to talk
to.”
17
From Lijun Ni’s 2011 thesis
on CS teacher identity

18. Disciplinary Commons
Group of educators from diverse
institutions who teach within the same
subject area meeting monthly over an
academic year.
In monthly increments, the
participants prepare a course
portfolio.
Goals
1. To document and share knowledge about student
learning in Computer Science classrooms.
2. To establish practices for the scholarship of teaching
by making it public, peer-reviewed, and amenable for
future use and development by other educators. [1]
[1] Tenenberg, J. and Fincher, S. Opening the door of the computer science classroom: the Disciplinary
Commons. SIGCSE Bull., 39, 1 2007, 514-518.

19. DCCE in Georgia
Disciplinary Commons for Computing Educators
Adaptation – High School teachers AND University
Goals
1. Creating community
2. Sharing resources and knowledge of how things are taught
in other contexts
AND…
3. Supporting student recruitment within the high school
environment
Work by Briana Morrison,
Lijun Ni, Ria Galanos, & Allison
Elliott Tew

20. Creating DCCE
Mtg Month Original DC Topic DCCE Schedule
1 Oct
Institutional Context &
personal trajectory into
teaching
Personal trajectory into
teaching
2 Nov Curricular Context
Institutional Context,
Recruiting
3 Dec Course Content
Curricular Context,
Course Content
4 Jan Instructional Design Instructional Design
5 Feb Student Assessment
Teaching Philosophy,
Reflection Log
6 Mar Evaluation
Student Assessment,
Grading Rubrics
7 Apr
Delivery (including
debrief of peer
observation)
Peer Observation Debrief
8 May
Complete “first draft”
overview
Student Feedback
9 June Portfolio Presentations Portfolio Presentations
GA specific:
GA university
computing
curricula, HS
competitions,
field trip
possibilities

21. Year 3
HS teachers only
Outside GA
Mtg Month Portfolio Section
1 Sept Personal trajectory into teaching, Selection Structures
2 Oct Institutional & Curricular Context, Repetition Structures
3 Nov Instructional Design, Recruiting, Teaching Classes
4 Jan Teaching Philosophy, Reflection Log, Arrays and Sorting
5 Feb Student Assessment, Grading Rubrics, Recursion
6 Mar Student Feedback, Inheritance / Polymorphism
7 Apr Peer Observation Debrief
8 May Portfolio Presentations
• Discipline specific content area
• Mini-conference to bring in University teachers

22. Building Community
Partnerships Before (PRE) DCCE Partnerships After (POST) DCCE
Overcoming isolation (comments)
Feedback, diversity in environments
Morrison, Ni, & Guzdial, ICER 2012

23. Improving Recruiting
302% increase in number of AP CS students in the
year following their participation in the DCCE
• Year of participation – 122 students enrolled
• Next year – 491 students pre-registered
• One teacher 700% increase (3 to 24 students)
Reasons:
1. Venue to share recruitment ideas
2. Sense of community (keep up morale during recruiting)

24. Teacher Confidence
“I think DCCE definitely did help [me feel more
confident]. I think it was just being a part of a
community of teachers that you can actually talk
with about teaching. That gives you confidence
when you don’t teach it in a vacuum.”

25. Teaching CS Teachers online
25
We had a six-year effort NSF BPC alliance
which provided in-service teacher
professional development in-person:
“Georgia Computes!”
• $6M USD
• Reached 36% of schools in Georgia.
Can we reach more online, by emphasizing
the skills and knowledge of successful CS
teachers?

26. An Ebook for Teaching CS Teachers

27. Story #3: Fitting into existing adult practice:
Graphics designers who program
Brian Dorn studied
graphics designers who
program.
Conducted a series of
interviews and
assessment activities.
Found that these subjects
want more CS (Dorn &
Guzdial, ICER 2010)
P10: So, that was a
really long way of
saying yes, I think
that an academic
study would make me
a better programmer,
but not by a whole
lot.

28. Where are they getting their
CS knowledge?
They program a lot, with all
participants writing programs
over 100 lines of code.
They learn mostly on-line:
– FAQs and other documentation
– Books (when applicable)
– Lots of examples and networking.
Not so much classes
Dorn & Guzdial, CHI 2010

29. What do software engineers do?
Answer: The Boring Stuff.
P2: I was able to take different samples from different
places and instead of just being let's say an MIS major, or
computer science major, you know it's—you're not going
to be front-end anything with computer science. You're
going to be back-end everything.
P4: I think as a front-end developer, you focus more on
the design and the usability, and you're focusing more on
the audience. And then on the back-end I think you're
focused on more, these are like the software developers.
And they're programming something, and they don't
really see what it's gonna look like; they're just making it
work.

30. Who is in CS?
P2: I went to a meeting for some kind of programmers,
something or other. And they were OLD, and they were
nerdy, and they were boring! And I'm like, this is not my
personality. Like I can't work with people like that. And
they worked at like IBM, or places like that. They've been
doing, they were working with Pascal. And I didn’t…I
couldn't see myself in that lifestyle for that long.
P5: I don't know a whole ton of programmers, but the
ones I know, they enjoy seeing them type up all these
numbers and stuff and what it makes things do. Um,
whereas I just do it, to get it done and to get paid. To be
honest. The design aspect is what really interests me a lot
more.
30

31. They are not afraid of coding
“What interests you about web design?”
P12: The coding! I don't like to code. But the
things that the code can do is amazing, like
you can come up with this and voila, you
know, it's there. Javascript for one. The
plugins and stuff. I think that's very
interesting, intriguing and stuff. Because I
mean like the code is just, there's so much
you can do with code and stuff. It's just like
wow.

32. They’re Lost without Initial Knowledge
Learning less than they might because of a
lack of deep knowledge.
– For example: Exploring code by searching Google for
function and variable names.
– Learning about Java when programming in JavaScript
Brian’s experiment: Given a case library with
conceptual information vs. a code repository
alone, what gets learned, used, and liked?
(ICER 2011)

33. 33

34. Bottomline: Cases work
They like the case library and the code respository.
They coded the problems the same.
Case-users learn the concepts, while repository users
do not.
Key: We are providing computing education within
the graphics designers world view.
34

35. Story #4: Answer Policymakers Questions
Two NSF BPC Alliances:
• “Georgia Computes!” emphasized activities in
middle and high school: Summer camps,
weekend workshops, after-school programs.
• Lots of teacher professional development.
• CAITE emphasized higher-education pathways
(recruiting, retention, advising, alignment,
institutional change) focused on community
colleges in underserved regions.
• Regional outreach and teacher PD
35

36. Refine and integrate CAITE & Georgia Computes!
interventions and practices
Take to other states & regions via partners (SC & CA),
associates (IN, AL & PR/USVI), and others (CSTA & STARS)
• Our experiences, practices and outcomes
• And those of our “experts bureau” (includes CAHSI,
AccessComputing, & Into the Loop experts)

37. What We’ve Learned: States are Diverse
• In some states, the Department of Education controls everything.
In other states, individual districts make most decisions, and the state
Department of Education controls little.
• In some: Advanced Placement is valued.
In others: Advanced Placement is considered elitist. “Not for our
kids.”
• In most states, Computer Science is classified as Career and
Technical Education.
In some: CTE teachers are in schools, so CS can integrate with math
and science.
In others: CTE is in separate vocational high schools.

38. Issues from States
• SC: Requires CS for graduation, for over 30
years.
• But most classes that meet requirement
are not really CS. Should they change?
• Can we teach CS to everyone?
• Research Questions:
• Can we teach CS to special needs students?
How much CS?
• What are the challenges of teaching CS to
English Language Learners (ELL)?

39. Issues from States
• UT: Focusing on K-5 CS.
• Only 104 students took AP CS in 2014,
only 4 female.
• Research Questions:
• How much of CS can we teach in K-5?
• Does teaching CS in K-5 lead to long term
improved attitudes towards CS?
• How is the cost different of scaling CS in K-5
rather than high schools?

40. Issues in States
• Georgia Computes had
significant impact on women
and Hispanic AP CS exam-
takers.
• Less impact on Black.
• Most states have lower AP CS
participation and pass rates for
Black students than Hispanic
and female students.
• Why?
0
100
200
300
400
500
600
700
800
900
1000
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
Total in Georgia
Women
Black
Hispanic

41. Being a CS Ed Researcher in the US
Most CS Ed researchers are in CS Departments in the US.
• Few in research universities.
• Many in teaching track positions.
• Less than 10 in Education faculty slots: Makes pre-service CS teacher
professional development difficult.
• In comparison: Over a dozen CS Ed Professors in each of Germany and
Israel.
CS Education as a research area is much bigger in Europe and
Australasia in US.
• CS Ed Doctoral consortia are larger.
• More CS Ed faculty.
CS Faculty do not value BPC or Computing Education efforts.
• Many don’t want CS in high schools. They’re sure the high schools will do
it wrong.
My View: Computing is a valuable literacy. It will become
ubiquitous.
41

42. Conclusions
1. Curriculum: Providing a context for computer science education
has had a dramatic impact on retention.
2. Teachers: Creating a community is key to increasing teacher
success.
3. Adult learners: Adult learners may reject CS even more than
high school students. We have to place educational opportunities
in their context.
4. Research and Policy: We mostly understand computing
education from research on undergraduates.
We have many unanswered researcher questions for policymakers
to create computing education for all.
42

43. Many thanks!
Colleagues: Barbara Ericson, Tom McKlin, Rick
Adrion, Renee Fall, Brian Dorn, Allison Eliott
Tew, Lijun Ni, & Briana Morrison
Our Funders:
US National Science Foundation
– Statewide BPC Alliance: Project “Georgia Computes!”
http://www.gacomputes.org
– Expanding Computing Education Pathways Alliance,
http://expandingcomputing.org
– CCLI and CPATH Grants, and now CE21 and IUSE to produce ebooks
Georgia’s Department of Education
GVU Center, and Institute for People and
Technology (iPaT) at Georgia Tech

44. Thank you!
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~mark.guzdial
– Lab: http://home.cc.gatech.edu/csl
– Ebook Access:
http://ebooks.cc.gatech.edu/TeachCSP-Python
– Media Computation:
http://mediacomputation.org
Institute for Computing Education at Georgia Tech:
– http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/ice-gt
Expanding Computing Education Pathways (ECEP):
– http://ecepalliance.org