The Beauty, the Wonder and the Awe of Computing

1
The Beauty, the Wonder and the Awe of Computing

• Chris Stephenson

2
Chris Five Ideas for Motivating Students

• An enthusiastic and engaged teacher
• A connection to student lives, realities, and
  dreams
• A curriculum that is not boring (too much syntax
  is a very bad thing)
• Innovative teaching methodologies
• Good teaching tools (why do we think industrial
  relevance is a good criteria for teaching?)

3
Chris Five Ideas for Motivating Teachers

• Understand the environment in which they work
• Give them the resources they need to do their
  jobs
• Provide a wide range of teaching and learning
  materials to address a wide array of experience,
  knowledge, and skill (the Alan example)
• Be much more consistent about what we want and
  need from them
• Treat/pay them like professionals

4
Chris Five Favorite Teaching Methodologies

• Project-based learning (a constructivist approach
  )
• Real-world/authentic learning (from a
  learner-centered epistemology)
• Group work with an emphasis on so called soft
  skills
• Service learning
• Integrated/interdisciplinary learning

5
Chris Five Favorite New Curriculum Approaches

• 3-D programming environments
• Media computation
• Computer gaming
• Robotics
• Computational thinking (if they could only tell
  me what this really means for a K-12 CS course)

6
Wonder and Awe vs. Shock and Awe

• Shock
• Beating them to death with syntax
• Programming, programming, programming
• No relevance to what you are or who you care
  about
• No big dreams, big goals, or unexplored frontiers

• Wonder
• Our discipline is more than rules and tools
• Incorporating and exploring the rich breadth of
  the discipline
• CS is solving problems that matter to people and
  communities
• We dont even know all the questions yet, let
  alone all the answers