Book Review: Learner-Centered Design of Computing Education

Mark Guzdial works at Georgia Tech and writes the most prolific and most read blog in computer science education. Thus I was intrigued to read his new book, “Learner-Centered Design of Computing Education: Research on Computing for Everyone”.

The book is a short and accessible read, that summarises huge chunks of research, especially the parts about teaching computing to everyone (i.e. non-specialists). One of Guzdial’s most well-known interests is media computation, which is used at Georgia Tech to teach non-majors (i.e. those taking non-CS courses) about programming, and it’s interesting to see how much positive impact it has had. But there’s no favouritism here: the book always has the research to back up its claims, and this is one of the great strengths of the book. The reference section has some 300 references, making it a great place to start getting to grips with research in the area. If I have any complaint with the book it is that it could do with a bit of copy-editing to remove some typos, but it’s not a serious issue.

Computational Thinking

The recent buzz area of computational thinking is covered in the book. One of the key ideas around computational thinking is that of teaching computing in order to teach general problem solving skills. Again backed by research, Guzdial dismisses this idea as unsupported: there never seems to be any transfer from programming into more general problem-solving skills. Programming’s utility would seem to be two-fold: teaching programming can transfer into other programming (i.e. between programming languages), and teaching programming does give an idea of how computers operate and execute. Beyond that, much of the rest is wishful thinking. But in an increasingly computer-centric and computing-reliant world, I believe this is still sufficient to argue for teaching computing to all.

Identity and Community

Several parts of the book remind me of this article I read recently on computing as a pop culture. One interesting aspect of programming is how programming languages live and die. It’s tempting to think that it’s solely to do with suitability for purpose. However, there are all sorts of other factors, such as tool support, library availability, and popularity. Languages do clearly move in fads, and this is just as true in computing education. Pascal is not necessarily any worse today to teach programming than it was twenty or thirty years ago, but it is dead in classrooms. Guzdial relates this to communities of practice: students want to believe they are learning something which leads them towards a community of professionals. For physicists, this might be MATLAB; for programmers this might be Java. This can be frustrating as a teacher: why should a teaching language be discounted just because students (perhaps wrongly) come to see it as a toy language. But this seems to be a danger to languages for use in classrooms, especially at university.

The issue of identity and belonging crops up repeatedly. Guzdial makes the point that for people to become programmers, they need to feel like they belong. If they don’t see people like themselves doing it then they are likely to be put off. This may be minorities not becoming full-time software developers, but it can also affect non-specialists. There’s an anecdote from one of Brian Dorn’s studies where a graphic designer who writes scripts in Photoshop tells of being told that he’s not a real programmer, he’s just a scripter. Technically, programming is programming, but it’s clear that issues of identity and community are often more important than the technical aspects. Programmers reject those they see as non-programmers, non-programmers reject those they see as programmers.

One really interesting case study on belonging as a programmer is that of the Glitch project, which engaged African American students in programming by using game testing as a way in. Several of the participants learned programming and did extra work because they were so engaged — but they would not admit this to anyone else. They constructed cover stories about how they did extra for extra money, or that they were only doing it to play games or learn money, disguising the fact that they were learning computer science.

The issue of identity also resurfaces when Guzdial talks about computing teachers. As in the UK, many US computing teachers come from other subjects: business, maths, science, etc. Many felt that they were not a computing teacher and (in the US) lacked sight of a community of computing teachers for them to join, which demotivated them. I also appreciated the section on how computing teachers’ needs differ from those of software developers. “Teachers need to be able to read and comment on code… We don’t see successful CS teachers writing much code.” I wonder to what extent this is reflected in CS teacher training. The point is also made that teachers need to “know what students are typically going to wrong”, which is something my colleague Amjad Altamdri and I have done some work looking into.

Conclusion

I’d recommend the book to any computing teacher who is interested in learning more about what the research tells us about teaching computing. I could imagine lots of secondary school computing teachers in the UK being interested in this, and a fair few computing university academics who could benefit from reading it. Although there may be little chance of widespread impact, as the book itself describes: “Several studies have supported the hypothesis that CS teachers are particularly unlikely to adopt new teaching approaches” and “Despite being researchers themselves, the CS faculty we spoke to for the most part did not believe that results from educational studies were credible reasons to try out teaching practice.” (I wonder how many of those believe in evidence-based medicine, etc, but not evidence-based teaching.) The book would also be particularly useful to new computing education PhD students who want a head start in getting to grips with previous work in the area. If any of those describe you, I’d recommend picking up a copy.