Rediscovering the passion, beauty, joy, and awe: making computing fun again, continued

  • Authors:

  • Daniel D. Garcia;Robb Cutler;Zachary Dodds;Eric Roberts;Alison Young

  • Affiliations:

  • University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA;Computer Science Teachers Association, New York, NY, USA;Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, CA, USA;Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA;UNITEC, Auckland, New Zealand

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 40th ACM technical symposium on Computer science education
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

At the SIGCSE Symposium in 2007, the ACM Education Board organized a well-attended special session exploring the crisis in computing education and its underlying causes. The idea behind the session was to provide a forum at which a larger and more broadly representative subset of the education community could engage in direct dialogue with the members of the ACM Education Board and Education Council, who are charged with developing educational policy for the ACM as a whole. Last year, we extended that dialogue and explored concrete strategies for emphasizing the "passion, beauty, joy, and awe" (PBJA) of computing about which Grady Booch spoke so eloquently in his 2007 keynote address. The extremely positive feedback we received served as motivation to continue the discussion this year, to allow us to hear from new voices and receive updates on the current state of the crisis. It is increasingly clear that students today find less joy in the process of creating software than their predecessors did a generation ago. At the same time, these skills have become increasingly important, forcing companies to cast an ever widening net in their search for people with the necessary skills and training. Continued progress in the computing disciplines--and indeed the economic health of a society that relies increasingly on computing technology--can continue only if we can encourage an even larger number of students to pursue the many opportunities that careers in computing provide.