Tufts STEM Education Lecture Series
Co-sponsored by the Tufts Center for Engineering Education and Outreach and Dept. of Education
Open to the public.  All are welcome.

Mark Guzdial
Professor
School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology

Computing Education for Everyone

Abstract:
Computer science education worldwide has been focused at the post-secondary level explicitly for the future IT professional. Professionals in IT are a small piece of the audience for computing education. One estimate from Carnegie Mellon University suggests that today there are some 13 million end-user programmers in the United States, compared to an estimated 3 million professional software developers.  In this talk, I talk about how to address the much larger audience, to make more successful the non-IT professional who uses or teaches computer science.  I will present work on helping adult professionals (teachers, artists, and designers) to learn computing, which suggests that we need to develop new kinds of approaches to teach CS for different needs and goals.  We have developed methods for teaching computing that have improved success rates for non-computing majors (while still including programming), such as contextualized computing education.

Bio:
Mark Guzdial is a Professor in the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. His research focuses on learning sciences and technology, specifically, computing education research. He has published several books on the use of media as a context for learning computing. He was the original developer of the "Swiki" which was the first wiki designed for educational use. He was awarded a joint Ph.D. degree in Education and Computer Science from the University of Michigan in 1993. He serves on the ACM's Education Council and the Special Interest Group in CS Education (SIGCSE) Board, and is on the editorial boards of the "Journal of the Learning Sciences," "ACM Transactions on Computing Education," and "Communications of the ACM." With his wife and colleague, Barbara Ericson, he received the 2010 ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator award.  He was also the recipient of the 2012 IEEE Computer Society Undergraduate Teaching Award.

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