Challenges to Computer Science Education Research Mark Guzdial College of Computing/GVU Georgia Tech Bottomline: What we’re doing isn’t new, so a contribution means knowing what’s happened…and going beyond it.

Computer Science is new, But Humans aren’t Evolution is slow. Lessons from Education are relevant for us.  Humans are bad at estimating their own performance and learning. Therefore, course opinion surveys are inaccurate measures of educational innovations.  Humans learn throughout their lives—our brains have enormous plasticity. Therefore, we don’t have to teach everything in the first semester, and people can unlearn “bad habits”

And Computer Science isn’t that new, People have been studying object-oriented programming since the mid-70’s.  Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg described students getting lost in class hierarchies in  We’ve known that students confuse class and instance for over 20 years. If we teach computer applications first, students won’t learn the theory to make it all make sense.  Said Alan Perlis in 1961.

And Computer Science Education isn’t new either For example: Lessons about Algorithm Animation  Aptitude-Treatment Interaction (ATI)  Static images.  Predictions.  Making own’s own. A contribution means we have to build on what others have done.  Reinvention is rarely contribution.