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Getting Everyone the IT Education They Need

Published: 06 October 2021 Publication History

Abstract

The inventors of the term "computer science" meant for it to be something that was taught to everyone, to facilitate learning other subjects, and to help people understand the risks of technology in their lives. Alan Perlis (with Newell and Simon) published the first definition of "computer science" in Science in 1967 [6]. In 1961, he argued at MIT that everyone at the academia should learn to program, to give them a new way to understand their world [10]. At the same event, C.P. Snow (author of The Two Cultures [11]) argued that we should teach everyone about computing so that they would understand the dangers in our new computerized society [12]. He wrote: "A handful of people, having no relation to the will of society, having no communication with the rest of society, will be taking decisions in secret which are going to affect our lives in the deepest sense."
The world today relies on information technology but, we mostly teach IT to people who will become professionals. This leaves us with only a privileged class that understands a critical part of our world. If we want to reach the original and more general goal, we will have to change how we teach about computing. With my students and collaborators, I have been identifying the barriers to giving everyone an understanding of the computing technology in their world.We have explored how socioeconomic status influences success in computing [9], and how increasing access to high school computing courses has not led to a commensurate increase in the number or diversity fo students taking those courses [7, 8]. We have been studying why students reject computer science [1], and how to invent new forms of computing education that meet the needs of students who have not succeeded in traditional computing courses [2]. In our most recent work, we ask questions like "What are fundamental ideas of computing that everyone needs to reason about and use the computational technologies in their world?" and "How can we re-design computation to make it more approachable, accessible, and adoptable?" [3-5]

References

[1]
Kathryn Cunningham, Rahul Agrawal Bejarano, Mark Guzdial, and Barbara Ericson. 2020. “I'm Not a Computer”: How Identity Informs Value and Expectancy During a Programming Activity. (2020).
[2]
Kathryn Cunningham, Barbara J. Ericson, Rahul Agrawal Bejarano, and Mark Guzdial. 2021. Avoiding the Turing Tarpit: Learning Conversational Programming by Starting from Code's Purpose .Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445571
[3]
Mark Guzdial and Tamara L. Shreiner. 2021. Integrating Computing through Task-Specific Programming for Disciplinary Relevance: Considerations and Examples. In Computational Thinking in Compulsory Education: A Pedagogical Perspective, Aman Yadav and Ulf Dalvad Berthelsen (Eds.). Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.
[4]
Bahare Naimipour, Mark Guzdial, and Tamara Shreiner. 2019. Helping Social Studies Teachers to Design Learning Experiences Around Data: Participatory Design for New Teacher-Centric Programming Languages. In Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research (Toronto ON, Canada) (ICER '19). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 313--313. https://doi.org/10.1145/3291279.3341211
[5]
Bahare Naimipour, Ilana Rauch, Tamara Shreiner, and Mark Guzdial. 2021. From Guided Exploration to Possible Adoption: Patterns of Pre-Service Social Studies Teacher Engagement with Programming and Non-Programming Based Learning Technology Tools .AACE.
[6]
Allen Newell, Alan J Perlis, and Herbert A Simon. 1967. Computer science. Science, Vol. 157, 3795 (1967), 1373--1374.
[7]
Miranda C. Parker. 2019. An Analysis of Supports and Barriers to Offering Computer Science in Georgia Public High Schools . Human-Centered Computing PhD Thesis. Georgia Institute of Technology.
[8]
Miranda C. Parker and Mark Guzdial. 2019. A Statewide Quantitative Analysis of Computer Science: What Predicts CS in Georgia Public High School?. In Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research (Toronto ON, Canada) (ICER '19). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 317--317. https://doi.org/10.1145/3291279.3341212
[9]
Miranda C Parker, Amber Solomon, Brianna Pritchett, David A Illingworth, Lauren E Marguilieux, and Mark Guzdial. 2018. Socioeconomic Status and Computer Science Achievement: Spatial Ability as a Mediating Variable in a Novel Model of Understanding. In Proceedings of the 2018 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research. ACM, 97--105.
[10]
Alan J. Perlis. 1962. The Computer in the University. In Computers and the World of the Future, Martin Greenberger (Ed.). MIT Press.
[11]
C.P. Snow. 1959. The Two Cultures .Cambridge University Press, London.
[12]
Charles Percy Snow. 1962. Scientists and Decision Making. In Computers and the World of the Future, Martin Greenberger (Ed.). MIT Press.

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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGITE '21: Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Conference on Information Technology Education
October 2021
165 pages
ISBN:9781450383554
DOI:10.1145/3450329
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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Published: 06 October 2021

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  1. computational literacy
  2. computational thinking
  3. cs for all
  4. history
  5. it for all

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