Learner-Centered Design of Computing Education

Computing education is in enormous demand. Many students (both children and adult) are realizing that they will need programming in the future. This book presents the argument that they are not all going to use programming in the same way and for the same purposes. What do we mean when we talk about teaching everyone to program? When we target a broad audience, should we have the same goals as computer science education for professional software developers? How do we design computing education that works for everyone? This book proposes use of a learner-centered design approach to create computing education for a broad audience. It considers several reasons for teaching computing to everyone and how the different reasons lead to different choices about learning goals and teaching methods. The book reviews the history of the idea that programming isn't just for the professional software developer. It uses research studies on teaching computing in liberal arts programs, to graphic designers, to high school teachers, in order to explore the idea that computer science for everyone requires us to re-think how we teach and what we teach. The conclusion describes how we might create computing education for everyone.

Presents an overview of the research on how to teach computing and highlights challenges Categorizes the various populations of learners and discusses the goals of each Presents teaching methods for students who are aiming to be software developers as well as methods for those who aren't

Autorentext

Mark Guzdial is a Professor in the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. Mark is a member of the GVU Center. He received his Ph.D. in education and computer science (a joint degree) at the University of Michigan in 1993, where he developed Emile, an environment for high school science learners programming multimedia demonstrations and physics simulations. He was the original developer of the CoWeb (or Swiki), which has been a widely used Wiki engine in universities around the world. He is the inventor of the Media Computation approach to learning introductory computing, which uses contextualized computing education to attract and retain students. He was vice-chair of the ACM Education Board, and still serves on the ACM Education Council. He serves on the editorial boards of ACM Transactions on Computing Education and Journal of the Learning Sciences. His blog on computing education is active, with over 500 pageviews per day. He and his wife were awarded the 2010 ACMKarl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award, he was awarded the IEEE Computer Society Undergraduate Teaching Award in 2012, and in 2014, he was named an ACM Distinguished Educator and a Fellow of the ACM.

Inhalt
Preface.- Acknowledgments.- What Does Computing for Everyone Mean?.- The Challenges of Learning Programming.- Computational Thinking and Using Programming to Learn.- Media Computation and Contextualized Computing Education.- Adults as Computing Learners.- Learner-Centered Computing Education for Computer Science Majors.- Steps Toward Computing for Everyone.- Bibliography.- Author's Biography.- Index .