For those of us who work in the field of computing education, do we ever question why we do what we do? Why do we teach computing, research computing education, or develop resources for computing? Why do we believe that young people benefit from learning about computing at all? Is it because we think it will help students to get a better job at the end of their schooling, because they should understand the social and ethical implications of technology, or because they should get better at solving problems? These are questions that are not often aired.
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This week, we’ve published a paper called ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About K-12 Computing Education’ that looks at why we teach computing in school (K-12 is the US way of talking about school education). It examines values, beliefs and traditions that underpin the teaching of computing. It takes the standpoint that there is no right way, or right rationale for teaching computing, but that understanding the breadth of views can help us to position ourselves and converse with others. This makes it a very important paper that we hope many people will read!
The conclusion of the paper is that there are four main traditions of computing education, as shown in the table below.
The algorithmic problem-solving tradition
This tradition is centred on algorithms and computational processes that manipulate information to solve a given problem. It is influenced by a more theoretical tradition of computing as a discipline, asking questions about computability, abstraction, logic, pattern recognition and decomposition, key elements in many computational thinking initiatives around the world. Learning objectives within the algorithmic problem-solving tradition tend to focus on developing learners’ abilities to use basic control structures to advance in the computation of a solution, effectively apply algorithmic design patterns, improve efficiency or other algorithmic properties, etc. An algorithm, in this perspective, is primarily seen as a solution to a problem, which takes the form of a finite set of unambiguous symbol manipulations.
The societal tradition
This tradition of computing education is rooted in the understanding that computing, its practices, and products are fundamentally embedded within broader social, cultural, and ethical contexts. As an underlying core assumption, technology in general and computing in particular are seen not as value-neutral tools, which only become good or bad in the hands of the people who use them, but as fundamentally value-laden, incorporating and propagating the goals and values of the people who produce it. Societal approaches, particularly critical approaches to computing education, often aim to enable learners to understand and evaluate how computing technologies are shaped by the sociocultural contexts in which they are designed and how, in turn, they influence social realities in their contexts of application. Students should develop an awareness of such mechanisms, in order to discover social biases and inequities in existing technologies and help them design more equitable solutions.. Another category of approaches within the societal tradition derives from the view of computing as a community of practice and aims to diversify its members, particularly with respect to under-represented student groups such as women or minorities. A key pedagogical idea is to make the practice of computing more relevant to these groups of students, e.g., by embedding learning material in sociocultural or local contexts directly related to those of the learners.
The scientific tradition
Within this tradition, computing can be treated both as an object of learning in its own right, and also as a means of further learning about the world. This tradition emphasises the acquisition of knowledge about the world with the help of computing and by means of, for instance, exploration, description, prediction, or explanation. Using this lens, computing curricula should better emphasise such core scientific competencies and content: modelling, scales and limits, simulation, abstraction, automation, and interpretation of data. The tradition is thus well suited for learning activities like inquiry-based learning and simulation-based pedagogy in which students are supported to develop their understanding by conducting experiments, as well as observing and exploring objects and processes that are otherwise beyond perception or control in the physical world. In the context of K-12 computing education, this tradition fits naturally with the cross-curricular computing needs of other disciplines, especially the STEM subjects.
The design and making tradition
This tradition takes its name from the constructionist design-making approach and emphasises the creation of useful artefacts, tools, products, or inventions that fulfil a personal or social need or want. In an educational context, disciplinary engineering rigour is often replaced by more playful, open-ended and creative projects. Students are regarded quite literally as creative builders of knowledge. When designing and making external artefacts – whether sandcastles on the beach or computer programs – evolving ideas and thinking become visible and shareable. Such externalisation, in turn, makes learning and reasoning processes visible for joint evaluation and sharing. Physical computing and maker initiatives are representative of this tradition, as they often emphasise collaborative projects and provide learners with powerful tools and social settings that aim to cultivate imagination, creativity, communication and self-expression in increasing levels of expertise and complexity.
Identifying your personal perspective
We are all different, and bring our own educational experiences to play when we think about education. What is the most important for you? One of the ways you can reflect on this is by rating statements, and we have developed a light-hearted quiz to help you think about your own perspective. As we progress this work, we may develop this further, but for now, it’s just a bit of fun.
From my personal perspective, I have reflected that ten years ago, I probably primarily leaned on the algorithmic tradition, probably stemming from my own computer science classes at university (many years ago!). This was definitely combined with a design-making perspective aligning with my research on physical computing. My perspective has definitely changed in recent years. While I can see the algorithmic tradition very much at play in the computing curriculum in England and associated computer science qualifications, my own rationale for computing education in school has definitely swayed away from the algorithmic tradition toward the other three. In particular, I feel that with the need to introduce AI concepts and skills to young people, we need to view this from both a scientific and societal viewpoint – at the school level at least.
How this paper came about
This paper was written by a working group of fifteen researchers from around the world. There is a tradition through a conference known as ITICSE (Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education) of establishing working groups that work for a year on a particular topic. Working group leaders (in this case me, Carsten Schulte and Sören Sparmann) propose a topic; others apply to be part of the group. We worked remotely from March to July, in person in July, and then remotely again until the paper was submitted and finally revised in December. You can sign up for ITICSE working groups this year from 10th February.
In our research, we used three approaches to uncover the traditions that represented values and beliefs about computing education in school. Firstly, we carried out a traditional scoping review of research papers that discussed curriculum interventions that specifically related to identifiable approaches; secondly, we used Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to search a huge number of research papers, including topic modelling to uncover implicit rationales. Thirdly, we considered philosophy and theory, beliefs about education, and perspectives on computing as a discipline (rather than computing education). These three areas of work led us to the results in the paper.
Read further
We hope you’ll enjoy reading the paper. In this blog post, I’ve paraphrased some of the text from our paper without fully referencing, for ease of readability, but you can find all academic references in the paper itself. Some of the most important scholarly work that underpinned our work was:
- Gert Biesta’s work on the actual purpose of education. He describes three ways of thinking about the role of school education: qualification, subjectification and socialisation. To find out more read: Biesta, G. Good education in an age of measurement: on the need to reconnect with the question of purpose in education. Educ Asse Eval Acc 21, 33–46 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11092-008-9064-9
- Matti Tedre’s work on computing as a discipline (not computing education per se) which identifies that computing may be viewed as a mathematical subject, a scientific discipline, or stemming from engineering. You can read about this in detail in Matti’s book: The Science of Computing: Shaping a Discipline.
- Jan Van Den Akker’s work on the curriculum, and the way that a curriculum is designed is dependent on the rationale for teaching that topic. He is well-known for his description of curriculum design as a spider web which has rationale at the centre and practical aspects at the edges of the web. You can read about this and the broader context of Van Den Akker’s work in this open-access book, starting from page 39.
Our working group was made up of the following researchers: Carsten Schulte, Sue Sentance, Sören Sparmann, Rukiye Altin, Mor Friebroon-Yesharim, Martina Landman, Michael T. Rücker, Spruha Satavlekar, Angela Siegel, Matti Tedre, Laura Tubino, Henriikka Vartiainen, J. Ángel VelÁzquez-Iturbide, Jane Waite, and Zihan Wu, representing 13 different universities across 10 different countries. Many thanks to them all!