Seminar Series | Thinking about Computing Education's Future

Thinking about Computing Education's Future - Where should the field be headed?  How do we get there?

Computers, technology, and particularly artificial intelligence are topics that are frequently discussed in academia as well as mainstream media recently. The question of what people should know about computing and technology is a question that has been discussed for decades. This talk will present ideas surfaced in a recent workshop focused on where the field of computing education and, in particular, computing education research should be in 15 years. The goal of the workshop was to present a vision on where computing education should focus in the coming decades. While presenting the ideas from that workshop, I will include information about several of my current projects in computing education at the university level, some that focus across the entire university experience, and others that focus specifically on introductory and intermediate students. Throughout the talk, the audience will be asked to share their experiences with computing education and ideas of where they think the future should be headed in computing education. 

Adrienne Decker is an Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering Education at University at Buffalo. Over the past 20 years, she has worked to enrich and improve the student experience in computing education, including work in broadening participation. Her current projects include identification of threshold concepts for intermediate students, the continued development of subgoal labels in the introductory curriculum, preparing faculty to manage neurodiversity in their classrooms, and creating a framework to help integrate more equitable grading practices into computer science classrooms. She has been both a teaching-track and research-track faculty member and has been active in the computing education community through leadership in ACM SIGCSE (current board past chair, program co-chair (2014) and general co-chair (2015) for the SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science), serving on the AP CSA development committee (2015-2021), and is currently the co-chair for the ACM Student Research Competition.