With our ever-busier lives, I really appreciate my friends who help keep me up to date on interesting and exciting new developments in computing education. I am sure I saw the original posting but reminders from my friends help me remember to pay attention!!
Here are 2 items that my friends Mark Guzdial and Alfred Thompson recently pointed out to me!
Mark has a really interesting blog and recently wrote about the new SIGCSE conference paper award. To celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the SIGCSE Conference, the “Test of Time” award has been created. Its goal is to identify the top 10 papers submitted to SIGCSE in the past 50 years! You can see the list and vote here.
In honor of this event, ALL SIGCSE conference papers are freely available in the ACM Digital Library until March 2, 2019.
Here are a few of Mark’s favorites:
- The paper introducing Scratch to the world.
- The Multi-Institutional, Multi-National (MIMN) study supporting the value of Peer Instruction in CS classes.
- The paper on CSin3,
- The paper introducing Alice.
- The 2001 paper on factors leading to success and failure in CS1
- The Defensive Climate paper,
It’s worth the time to skim through the list and see what catches your eye – download now for FREE and save them to read later. There are lots of fun papers!
Alfred keeps a list of interesting blogs – at http://blog.acthompson.net/2012/11/computer-science-education-blog-roll.html including:
- Mike Zamansky Mike runs the computer science program at Stuyvesant High School in New York City. He’s a very creative person. he’s also built and maintained a community of students who stay connected after graduation.
- Garth’s CS Teacher Blog Garth Flint is a teacher at a private Catholic school in western Montana. Garth always gives me things to think about.
- Mark Guzdial – Computing Education Blog Mark is probably doing more research in how to teach computer science right than anyone else I know. His posts include information about the CS Principles course, he is on the advisory board, which will probably be a new APCS course.
- Doug Bergman is the award winning head of Computer Science at Porter-Gaud School in Charleston, SC
- Set Another Goal By Clark Scholten Computer Science Teacher at Pinnacle High School
- Dawn DuPriest – coding in math class – Middle School Computer Science and Electronics teacher
- Communications of the ACM: blog@CACM The CACM blog has
posts from some of the top people in computer science. Some of the posts are
very technical but many are potentially interesting for students, teachers and
CS hobbyists alike.
Oh, and one more thing – I was honored to be the guest editor for the ACM Inroads magazine celebrating the 50th Anniversary of SIGCSE organization. This special issue came out in December 2018 and has a variety of articles about the history of the organization, thoughts about the future, challenges we may face, etc. My favorite section is the “My SIGCSE’ where some of the SIGCSE members who share their stories with us. Give it a look!
So thankful for my friends!!
Jane Prey, ACM Representative
