The ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium is March 20-23 in Portland (see website here). I rarely blog these days, but the SIGCSE TS is a reminder to update y’all with what’s going on in the College of Literature, Science, & the Arts (LSA) Program in Computing for the Arts and Sciences (PCAS). PCAS is my main activity these days. Here’s the link to the PCAS website, which Tyrone Stewart and Kelly Campbell have done a great job creating and maintaining. (Check out our Instagram posts on the front page!) PCAS Expansion I’ve blogged about our first two courses, COMPFOR (COMPuting FOR) 111 “Computing ..read more

I am presenting two “Tips and Techniques” papers at the ITiCSE 2023 conference in Turku, Finland on Tuesday July 11th. The papers are presenting the same scaffolded sequence of programming languages and activities, just in two different contexts. The complete slide deck in Powerpoint is here. (There’s a lot more in there than just the two talks, so it’s over 100 Mb.) When I met with my advisors on our new PCAS courses (see previous blog post), one of the overarching messages was “Don’t scare them off!” Faculty told me that some of my arts and humanities students will be put off by mathematics ..read more

My main activity for the last year has been building two new courses for our new Program in Computing for the Arts and Sciences (PCAS), which I’ve blogged about recently here (with video of a talk about PCAS) and here where I described our launch. Here are the detailed pages describing the courses (e.g., including assignments and examples of students’ work): COMPFOR 121: Computing for Creative Expression COMPFOR 111: Computing’s Impact on Justice: From Text to the Web When we got the go-ahead to start developing PCAS last year, the first question was, “Well, what should we teach?” The ACM/IE ..read more

In May, my students and I published a paper in Communications of the ACM, “Putting a Teaspoon of Programming into Other Subjects” (see link here) about our work with teaspoon languages. It’s a short Viewpoint, but we were able to squeeze into our 1800 word limit description of a couple of teaspoon languages, a definition of them, a description of our participatory design process for them, and some of the research questions we’re exploring with them, like what drives teacher adoption of teaspoon languages, use multilingual keywords to engage emerging bilingual students, and identifying challeng ..read more

Hi everyone! This is Philip Guo from UC San Diego. My Ph.D. student (and soon-to-be faculty colleague) Sam Lau and I are presenting a paper at ICER 2023 on a topic that’s been at the top of many of our colleagues’ minds in recent months: How are instructors planning to adapt their programming-related courses as more and more students start using AI coding assistance tools such as ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot? A series of studies throughout 2021 and 2022 showed that GitHub Copilot can solve many kinds of CS1 and CS2 homework problems (see Section 3 of our paper for a summary of these studies). Ho ..read more

 In April, I gave a talk at Carnegie Mellon University’s Software and Societal Systems Department (S3D) “Broadening Participation in Computing by Moving Away from Computer Science” — slides available here, and video available here. The argument I’m making is that computer science as a field has become more narrow over time. I wrote a CACM Blog Post last month where I provided several definitions of computer science: “Education is always changing: We need to define CS to keep the good stuff.” The earliest definitions of computer science described it as something to be ..read more

Here’s my second blog post on papers we presented during the first year of PCAS. Emma Dodoo is an Engineering Education Research PhD student working with me and co-advised with Lisa Lattuca. When she first started working with me, she wanted a project that supported STEM learning in high school. We happened upon this fascinating project which eventually led to an FIE 2022 paper (see link here). The University of Michigan Marsal Family School of Education has a collaboration with the School at Marygrove in the Detroit Public Schools – Community District. The School at Marygrove requires all hig ..read more

Last year, Tammy Shreiner and I published an article in the British Journal of Educational Technology, “The information won’t just sink in: Helping teachers provide technology-assisted data literacy instruction in social studies.” (I haven’t been able to blog much the last year while starting up PCAS, so please excuse my tardiness in sharing this story.) The journal version of the paper is here, and our final submitted version (not paywalled) is available here. Tammy and I used this paper to describe what happened (mostly during the pandemic) as we continued to provide support to in-service/pr ..read more

My collaborator, Tammy Shreiner, is running a workshop for social studies educators on teaching with Slow Reveal Graphs. The idea of slow reveal graphs is that visualizations are just too complex for students to pick out all the visual elements. Instead, a slow reveal graph is presented in stages, and at each stage, students are prompted to reflect (and discuss, or write about), “What do you notice now? What do you wonder about?” Tammy has been building a bunch of slow reveal graphs that really fascinating. I’m particularly amazed at the ones that she and her colleague Bradford Dykes have been ..read more

I last gave an update on the Program in Computing for the Arts and Sciences (PCAS) here in February (see blog post). Since then, it’s become real. I was hired as of July 1 as the Director of PCAS. My Computing Education Task Force co-chair, Gus Evrard, is the Associate Director. We even have a website: https://lsa.umich.edu/computingfor I am building and teaching our first two courses now. I love our course code: COMPFOR. It stands for “COMPuting FOR…” The two courses are: COMPFOR 111 Computing’s Impact on Justice: From Text to the Web COMPFOR 121 Computing for Creative Expression I have nev ..read more