Rediscovering the passion, beauty, joy, and awe: making computing fun again, part 4

• Authors: Daniel D. Garcia;Michele Friend Hutton;Eugene Lemon;Josh Paley
• Venue: Proceedings of the 42nd ACM technical symposium on Computer science education
• Year: 2011

In 2006, computing education was suffering from a crisis - enrollments were dropping sharply at universities and colleges across the United States, and interest in computing from high school and middle school students was waning significantly. At the 2007 SIGCSE Symposium, the ACM Education Board organized a special session to explore the underlying causes [7]. In his keynote at the same conference, Grady Booch exhorted us to share the "passion, beauty, joy and awe" (PBJA) of computing [4]. This led to a series of room-packed sessions at the following three SIGCSE symposia to explore that idea from different perspectives [8, 9, 12]. They have provided a forum for sharing: " What we've done: Highlighting successful PBJA initiatives the presenters have undertaken or seen and wish to celebrate. - What we should do (curriculum): Pointing out where our curriculum is lacking in PBJA, and how to fix it. - How we should do it (pedagogy): Sharing how a change in attitude / focus / etc. can make strides to improving PBJA. Fortunately, enrollments have been continually rising, and there are colleges where the numbers are so strong (returning to historic highs), that some claim the crisis is over [10, 13]. Many dispute this, however, citing statistics that indicate under-represented students have not returned, and continuing negative connotations about the field [2]. Also, recent news of limited hiring in the information technology sector could have a damping affect [11]. This PBJA "movement" was born out of this enrollment crisis, but is not tied to it. There is always value in sharing novel best practices and advocating techniques that make computing fun. In the past, we tried to gather educators who brought a wide variety of perspectives (e.g., in 2010 we heard from international, domestic, high school, university and industrial representatives). This year, we've shifted from that "breadth-first" model to a "depth-first" one, and have invited three K-12 teachers who, collectively, have taught computing at an all-girls middle school, an under-served high school, and an affluent high school. The hope with this panel is to be able to drill down and understand the K-12 space, in terms of extolling the PBJA of computing.