Making CS Relevant, Meaningful, and Engaging

Leigh Ann Sudol starts an interesting conversation about reenergizing pre-collegiate computer science at her blog with a post titled Another voice for enriching early CS education. She starts with a review of an article by Joanna Goode in the November 2008 issue of Communications of the ACM entitled “Reprogramming College Preparatory Computer Science.” Joanna Goode is one of the co-authors of Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race, and Computing which I am reading now and finding very interesting. Goode and the team she is working with has spent a lot of time working with computer science education. Leigh Ann highlights some of the issues they have documented in her post. (you should read it.)

One of the things that Leigh Anne is particularly interested in is finding out “how can I measure what my students think is important and relevant? ” Why? Because students need to understand how what they are learning is important and relevant to them. I think that anyone who has spent time in the classroom as a student or teacher understands that if students don’t see value in what they are supposed to be learning that they really don’t learn that much. To that end Leigh Ann is looking for ways to determine what students think. If you have ideas of what sort of questions she should be asking jump over to her blog and get involved in the comments.