Teaching CS: Am I doing it right?
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by Richard White

2016-11-10

I’ve been teaching Computer Science in one way or another for a decent part of my teaching career, from courses using BASIC and Pascal on standalone PCs (pre-Internet!) back in the 80s to courses using Python and Java currently. I’d like to think I mostly know what I’m doing by this point.

It’s interesting to note, however, that there is a wide variation on how teachers work with students in a computer science classroom. From the AP Computer Science teaching community, I’ve heard of teachers who:

* have their students use Linux workstations exclusively
* have their students learn Java exclusively through graphics programming (Processing language)
* have their student use web-based Java compilers/interpreters
* have their students learn how to interact with a server
* have their students turn in all assignments on paper only
* have their students retrieve lessons and submit assignments using GitHub
* teach Java by having their student write mobile apps

It’s a stunning variety of strategies given that we’re all teaching the exact same course with the exact same curriculum.

And maybe that’s a strength of computer science, that there are lots of ways to make it happen. Whether you use Linux or OS X or Windows, whether you program using a terminal or an IDE, whether your programs interfaces are text-based or graphical… we’re all teaching computer science.

If there’s a downside to this variety, it’s that we may be tempted to feel that some of the other strategies–old ones that we haven’t had time to consider, or new ones that have just been recommended to us–might be better (more interesting? more effective? more appealing to students?) than what we’re currently doing. And so we feel compelled to give these new strategies some consideration.

In the last few years there has been an explosion of interest in Coding (which is not quite the same thing as Computer Science, but we’ll take what we can get, eh?). Hadi Partovi’s Hour of Code, MIT’s block-based Scratch language, the Raspberry Pi, the Arduino, the College Board’s new AP Computer Science Principles curriculum… and these are just the most popular of the recent technology and CS-based innovations that might merit some consideration by me, with an eye toward possibly incorporating some of them into my teaching toolbox.

How much should I stay the course and stick with what I think works best? How much of my limited professional time should I invest in consider these other possibilities?

More than teachers in any other subject area, we teachers of Computer Science need to wrestle with these questions. It’s a de facto part of our job description.

What is your specialty in teaching CS/technology? What topics do you add to your courses, because those topics work, or they’re part of your pre-existing skill set? Do you feel pressure to always be looking at The Next Big Thing?

For related reading: http://blog.acthompson.net/2016/11/too-many-cs-teaching-resources.html