What Are Computer Science Educators Interested In? The Case of SIGCSE Conferences

Abstract

This paper explores the fields of interest of the computer science education (CSE) community during the 12 years between 2006–2018 as reflected in the professional content of SIGCSE conferences. For this purpose, we investigated four SIGCSE conferences—2006, 2010, 2014, and 2018—and identified main topics and themes addressed in the following three presentation formats: papers, panels, and special sessions. We defined five content categories derived from the different presentation content: teaching methods, curricula, CSE research, recruitment and retention, and educators. The paper compares the four conferences according to two main classifications (1) content categorization, according to the above content categories we defined; and (2) the most frequent keywords used by the authors to describe their work. These keywords were divided into three themes: CS curricula, CS topics, and pedagogy. Our analysis reveals that: (1) according to the content categorization, teaching methods received the most attention from the SIGCSE community, with curricula coming in second, at a substantial distance; (2) according to keywords categorization: (a) the most frequently used CS curricula keywords relate to CS1, followed by, at a significant gap, CS0 and K-12, following by computational thinking and interdisciplinary studies; (b) it is difficult to identify the most frequently used CS topics keywords (c) in relation to the pedagogy characteristic, the most frequently used keywords are: assessment, active learning, and team collaboration. In future work, we intend to check the consistency of the current findings with other journals and conferences in which the CSE community publishes its work.