Innovations in teaching and learning computer science education can easily be overly-specific to a given institution, or type of institution. For example, an innovation may require special hardware, or may make assumptions about the background of the students. This paper tracks one such innovation, a multimedia-focused introductory computing course, as it moved from a research-focused university to a public two-year college. At both institutions, the new course resulted in dramatically improved retention. Students at the two-year college were even more motivated and more positive about computing after the course than students at the research university. The results suggest ways of approaching innovation that is easily adaptable to other institutions.

Since its publication, Lave and Wenger’s concept of legitimate peripheral participation (LPP) [18] has become an important concept for understanding situated learning. LPP states that learning only occurs when students perceive that what’s being taught is aligned with their goals (in LPP terms, with the students ’ perceived community of practice). This has implications for our traditional CS courses (e.g., are we teaching what the students perceive as being relevant for their future careers?), but even greater implications for courses for non-CS majors. When computer science educators are asked to teach non-CS majors, we are often placed in the position of teaching in alignment with a community of practice that does not, or does not yet, exist. In that sense, our teaching is inauthentic—not aligned with a community of practice. However, there is the possibility that we can generate a perception of authenticity or alignment. We use the example of two classes at Georgia Tech that seem successful by several measures, yet suffer this inauthenticity. We propose that a useful tool for understanding how these classes work is the Disney Corporation’s Imagineering—their process of storytelling in three-dimensions as used in their theme parks. However, in the end, we find that what students actually learn is not necessarily the story that we are telling them, which points toward future research.

Since 1998, we have been developing and researching CoWeb, a version of Ward Cunningham’s WikiWikiWeb designed to support collaborative learning. In this article, we summarize our results of situating CoWeb across the academic landscape of Georgia Tech. In architecture, CoWeb enabled faculty to serve more students in a design-based course. In English composition, a comparison study demonstrated significant learning benefits without incurring disproportionate costs. Yet, situating CoWeb was not always successful. In many STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) classes, students actively resisted collaboration. From these studies, we conclude that the culture of the classroom and the discipline needs to be compatible with the medium for CSCL (Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning) to be effective. Finally, we demonstrate how collaboration can be designed into the culture. A new class on introductory computing was explicitly designed to take advantage of the collaborative possibilities that CoWeb affords. We report our findings of the success of this approach. We characterize this research as a scholarship of application. We demonstrate that this mode of scholarship is a viable mode of scholarship in the learning sciences. Unlike traditional scholarship of discovery, we are not solely concerned with discovering new knowledge. Instead, we support others in the application of a new technology to serve genuine and complex learning situations. By doing so, we seek to understand the potential that one new medium (WikiWikiWeb) has for supporting learning. Understanding a New Medium Media, the channels through which we forge and communicate meaning, affect us as individuals and as a society (McLuhan, 1964; Meyrowitz, 1985). New media change how we relate to ideas, to others, and to ourselves (Turkle, 1984, 1995). As such, a new medium has the potential to be a powerful and natural learning environment (Rick & Lamberty, 2005). Unfortunately, realizing that potential is challenging (Bolter & Grusin, 1999). The effect

This paper presents a thorough evaluation of CS for Scientists, a CS 1 course designed to provide future scientists with an overview of the discipline. The course takes a breadth-first approach that leverages its students ' interest and experience in science, mathematics, and engineering. In contrast to many other styles of CS 1, this course does not presume that its students will study more computer science, but it does seek to prepare them should they choose to. We summarize the past year’s worth of assessments of student learning, retention, and affect – with particular attention paid to women’s voices. Where possible, we contrast these student measures with those from a traditional, imperative-first CS1 that this new course replaced. The data thus far suggest that CS for Scientists significantly improves students' understanding of CS, its applications, and practice.

In this paper we survey the literature to identify the issues and challenges of broadening participation in computer science, and provide some suggestions to address these challenges. Our attention focuses on redefining the way we approach computing education so that we can successfully entice students to computing that have not traditionally participated, thereby promoting diversity and increasing the total numbers of computing professionals. Based on the literature review, we propose an interactional model from the social sciences to inform the way in which we might restructure and broaden the definition of computing and provide some examples of strategies that we have found to be successful in practice.

Context has been linked in previous reports to student motivation in introductory CS courses. In this report, we consider the role of context in a second course. We present a case study of a CS2 data structures class that uses a media computation context. In this course, students learn data structures and object-oriented programming through a pervasive narrative about how real media professionals use data structures to model the real world and to construct the digital images, sounds, and animations with which the students are familiar in their daily lives. We found that context played a different role in a second course than in a first course. We found evidence that some students had out-grown the desire for a context, and we found evidence that context can help students get engaged with the material that they otherwise do not find interesting. In particular, the narrative aspect of a context may help students in relating the elements of the course and may even help with learning.

Historically, Harvey Mudd College (HMC) has had very little success attracting women to the study of computer science: women have chosen CS less than any other field of study. In 2006 HMC began three practices in order to increase the number of women studying and majoring in CS; these practices have now been in place for 3 years. With this paper we describe these practices and present a thorough evaluation of the quantitative and qualitative differences that have accompanied them. In sum, these efforts have rebalanced our department by significantly increasing women’s participation in our computer science program.

The goal of computing education for the next five to ten years is to establish computing as part of a liberal, general education. Like mathematics or laboratory sciences, taking computing courses should be a presumption of an educated professional or academic. Everyone would take some computing, and most would take more. There are three reasons for the necessity of this goal. The first is that that’s where the future jobs are, in the mix of computing with other disciplines. As Thomas Friedman argues in his book The World is Flat (Friedman, 2005), forces of global competitiveness require future workers to become Versatilists. “The world ‘versatilist ’ was coined by Gartner Inc., the technology consultants, to describe the trend in the information technology world away from specialization and toward employees who are more adaptable and versatile…Enterprises that focus on technical aptitude alone will fail to align workforce performance with business value. ” Even technological powerhouses like Microsoft is looking for versatilists, as Bill Gates said, “The nature of these jobs is not closing the door and coding. The great missing skill is somebody who’s good at understanding engineering and bridges that to working with customers and marketing (Montalbano, 2005).”

There is growing interest in computing courses for non-CS majors. We have recently built such a course that has met with positive response. We describe our design process, which includes involvement of stakeholders and identifying a context that facilitates learning. We present evaluation results on success rates (approximately 90 % of the students earn an A, B, or C) and impact of the course on students over time (80 % report that the class has influenced them more than a semester later).

csta.acm.org