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Teaching 4,500 students to program ubiquitous computing: Mike Richards and My...
One of the highlights of SIGCSE 2012 was meeting Mike Richards and learning about the new introductory computing course at the Open University, My Digital Life. It’s an interesting contrast to the...
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Computer Science Transitions From Elective to Requirement – US News and World...
Great to see this coverage! Computer science is increasingly becoming a requirement at universities, says a piece in US News. This is likely the most powerful way to get CS into high schools —...
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A nice definition of computational thinking, including risks and cyber-security
GasStationWithoutPumps did a blog piece on the newspaper articles that I mentioned earlier this week, and he pointed out something important that I missed. The Guardian’s John Naughton provided a...
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Modern HyperCard for Today’s Schools: But Where’s the Community of Practice?
I’ve talked about RunRev/LiveCode here before. It’s 90% HyperCard, updated to be cross-platform and with enhanced abilities. I mostly agree with the comments below (but not with the critique of...
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Study Opens Window Into How Students Hunt for Educational Content Online: But...
This reminds me of Brian Dorn’s work, and points out a weakness of this study. Brian went out to check if the knowledge that the students needed was actually in the places where they looked. Morgan’s...
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Excel programming for non-programmers: How mental models are developed
This new system for end-user programming from MIT raises a question for me about users’ mental models, which I think is key for computing education (e.g., for figuring out how to do inquiry learning in...
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25 years of HyperCard—the missing link to the Web | Ars Technica
An interesting argument: That Web browsers were designed based on HyperCard, and that HyperCard’s major flaw was a lack of hypertext links across computers. How did creator Bill Atkinson define...
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Open Source Edition of LiveCode (Modern HyperCard)
HyperCard is likely still the world’s most successful end-user programming environment. Having an open source version that runs on all modern OS and mobile platforms would be fabulous. I’m backing....
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Michael Littman’s new blog: End-user programming for household devices
I’m excited about the direction that Michael Littman is taking with his new blog. It’s a different argument for “Computing for Everyone.” He’s not making a literacy argument, or a jobs argument....
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Taming the Monolith: Refactoring for an open source HyperCard
LiveCode had an earlier blog piece on how they want to implement “Open Language” so that the HyperTalk syntax could be extended. This piece (linked below) goes into more detail and is an interesting...
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LiveCode Community Edition is released: HyperCard is free again and runs on...
I’m excited about this and find myself thinking, “So what should I do with this first?” LiveCode isn’t as HyperCard-like as it could be (e.g., you edit in one place, then compile into an application),...
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Is Coding the New Second Language? in Smithsonian Magazine
Nice piece in Smithsonian Magazine about the efforts to move computing into primary and secondary schools. And hey! That’s me they quoted! (It’s not exactly what I said, but I’ll take it.) Schools...
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“Six Learning Barriers in End-User Programming Systems” wins most influential...
Congratulations! Well-deserved! Here’s a link to the original paper. Brad A. Myers, professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, will be honored for the second year in a row as the author of...
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The new Wolfram Language: Now available on Raspberry Pi
The new Wolfram Language sounds pretty interesting. I was struck by the announcement that it’s going to run on the $25 Raspberry Pi (thanks to Guy Haas for that). And I liked Wolfram’s cute blog post...
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Should Everybody Learn to Code? Coverage in Communications of the ACM
I spoke to the author, Esther Shein, a few months ago, but didn’t know that this was coming out until now. She makes a good effort to address both sides of the issues, with Brian Dorn, Jeannette Wing,...
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End-user programmers are at least half of all programmers
I was intrigued to see this post during CS Ed Week from ChangeTheEquation.org. They’re revisiting the Scaffidi, Shaw, and Myers question from 2005 (mentioned in this blog post). You may be surprised to...
View ArticleReflections of a CS Professor and an End-User Programmer
In my last blog post, I talked about the Parsons problems generator that I used to put scrambled code problems on my quiz, study guide, and final exam. I’ve been reflecting on the experience and what...
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What do I mean by Computing Education Research? The Social Science Perspective
As a new guy at the University of Michigan, I spend a lot of my time explaining who I am and what I mean by computing education research. In this and the next blog posts, I am sharing two of those...
View ArticleDijkstra’s Truths about Computing Education Aren’t: The many kinds of...
ACM Turing Award laureate Edsger Dijkstra had several popular pieces about computer science education. I did my Blog@CACM post on one of these (see post here), “On the cruelty of really teaching...
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