I am writing this at the Games, Learning and Society Conference (http://www.glsconference.org/2012/index.html) in Madison, Wisconsin. This is an interesting and useful conference from a CSTA point of view, but perhaps not one that our membership has penetrated. There are probably 400 people registered and attending, with a good mix of K-12 teachers, education researchers and graduate students, art and design people, gamers and game-company representatives, and some computer scientists (not that any two of these sets have empty intersection). I am here with a colleague from Media Arts at USC to deliver a paper on the mobile application we are developing that will present using ludic methods one of the more controversial and sensitive subjects in the history of the University of South Carolina. (The controversy is that most of the historic campus was built by and maintained by slaves either owned by the university or hired from slaveowners by the university in the antebellum era.)
I would say that perhaps a third of the presentations here, including one of the keynote addresses, talked about games for STEM education. Unfortunately, although there is one session (that is about to start) on games for computing education, what I have heard most of the time suffers from the stereotypical exclusion of computer science from “STEM”. I have raised this issue with a couple of the speakers. There have been talks that involve heavy use of software tools for teaching about science concepts, but most of these show a marked disinclination to include real computer science. I come away wondering how these research projects intend to have a sustainable set of software packages.
The other really curious thing that I have seen is a substantial commitment to computational thinking, and this commitment is coming not from computer scientists but from the graduate students in education. I wonder from where this commitment derives? And I will be contacting the speakers to ask them as soon as I get the chance (conferences being somewhat chaotic and crowded and not always conducive to extended discussions).
This has been a really good conference so far (and it will clearly get infinitely better tomorrow morning when my colleague and I present our paper ((insert smileys here)) ). There are clearly opportunities for CSTA, its membership, and for the students, and we as a community should take advantage of the expertise here.
Duncan Buell
CSTA Board of Directors