Education

We’ve been having talks in my department about what our wish list for classroom spaces might look like, and we’ve consistently been interested in a “design studio” type space that could be used for collaborative student work and some smaller, design-focused classes. This industrial design case-study of a “cafe classroom” has some cool features and also raises some questions about how this type of classroom would fit into a larger academic building. The combination of seating, writing surfaces, and whiteboards with lots of different heights and configurations is appealing for letting students figure out what type of space they need … Continue reading Future of classroom design

A couple of articles have been bouncing around in my mind, both of which touch on issues I’m sure most educators are thinking about, but where I feel like the most interesting part of the conversation starts at the point the articles end. The first article from Inside Higher Ed, New Data Shows Attendance Fosters Student Success, initially caught my attention because of the sheer obviousness of the statement and curiosity about what more there might be to say about this. If my class sessions don’t foster student success, what am I even doing! The article, of course, is more … Continue reading Thinking about what kinds of rigor are needed

Just the title of this long blog entry caught my eye, because YES!!! The Homework is the Cheat Code indeed! The content didn’t disappoint. Written by someone teaching CS at the graduate level at U Chicago, I’m not sure if I’m shocked or relieved that they’re seeing similar patterns in their students as we’re seeing at the undergrad level. Maybe the most honest reaction is that if we want to graduate students who are job- and grad school-ready, addressing these tendencies has to be central to undergraduate education (bold mine): I get a lot more requests now for extensions on … Continue reading A big agree that “the homework is the cheat code”

Mark Guzdial has written some blog posts recently about having computing education for everyone that doesn’t have to – and shouldn’t – look like computer science education. He has posts looking at this for both the undergraduate level and the K-12 level. I’m entirely on board with offering introductory computing and programming education from students with a range of disciplinary interests that doesn’t look like a typical CS1 class or have to cover the typical range of CS1 topics. However, I think a piece missing out of this discussion is whether there is value is teaching those courses in a … Continue reading Computing education for everyone, and maybe some CS also?

I’ve been back in Portland, OR this past week at SIGCSE 2024 (“back” after attempting to have SIGCSE 2020 here and getting sent home before the main symposium began). For our fifth year running (including in March 2020!) the Committee on Computing Education in Liberal Arts Education held our pre-symposium event “Innovations and Opportunities in Liberal Arts Computing Education” on Wednesday, with 41 people attending across the full day. I love the attendees we get at this event and the community that has built up around the committee – the conversation after all of the presentations and during our discussion … Continue reading SIGCSE 2024 Highlights

Tomorrow is the start of our Fall 2020 schedule, pushed back a week from our original plan and now fully online for the first two weeks before transitioning to in-person instruction for those students who have returned to campus (or, from an instructor perspective, hybrid instruction as essentially all of us have some number of students studying remotely). I am, on paper, prepared. My CMS is loaded up with day-by-day details about what we’ll be doing so everyone can follow along. I’ve met individually with each student in my intermediate-level course to make sure they have the needed software installed … Continue reading Getting back into the flow of the school year