This CISE Special Project provides funds to form an entity called the Computing Education Coordinating Council (CECC). The CECC is envisioned to be inclusive and wide ranging ultimately including all organizations with an interest in computing education. The starting point of the Council will be simple, with a small core of prominent computing education organizations, which will be responsible for laying the foundational for long-term sustainability of the CECC. Once it has achieved a higher level of maturity and acceptance, the CECC will be expanded into a larger and more robust group. This project was developed as a direct result of the NSF-funded Future of Computing Education Summit that took place in June 2009. The CECC project team plans to first develop a draft strategic plan for CECC start up that includes ideas and recommendations concerning CECC formation. Then the team intends to engage the leadership of the core computing education organizations in order to solidify CECC goals and activities, establish a two-three year strategic plan, and to secure their commitment to the CECC plan.
Intellectual Merit: The field of computing is somewhat paradoxical. Almost everyone recognizes its vital importance in their daily lives; computing is foundational for many other sciences; budgets for computing products and services continue to expand; and there is currently a high demand for competent computing professionals that extends well into the future. Yet, in the last decade there has been little or no growth in the enrollment in educational computing programs; the populations of computing students, educators, and professionals lack diversity; pre-university computing education has critical weaknesses in funding, teacher preparation and curriculum requirements; and the nature, content, and practices of the various computing professions are not well understood by the public. The alarming lack of women and minorities engaged in computing will have long-term impact on our ability to innovate. This lack of diversity of thought is finally being recognized as reaching crisis level by government and industry. Various computing organizations have worked independently to address these problems; however, working singly or in small groups does not have the same positive effect as a more substantial and universal approach. The purpose of the CECC is to present a unified view of how to address the significant challenges faced by computing education.
Broader Impact: The CECC will have a wide ranging and significant influence on the state of computing education. The Council will engage in endeavors that support and promote the following: ongoing research and scholarship in computing education to ensure effectiveness, relevance and currency through developments in pedagogy, curriculum, practice, and technology; improvement in pre-university computing education in the areas of teacher preparation and curriculum requirements; increased diversity in the populations of computing students, educators, and professionals; increased numbers of students pursuing degrees in various fields of computing, including computing education; improvement in the public understanding of the nature, content, and practices of various computing professions; and enhanced understanding about the relationship between computing and other disciplines.
As our world becomes more technologically sophisticated, the need for workers who can use, understand, and build computing technologies continues to grow. The professional societies of the mathematics, science, and engineering disciplines have taken responsibility for their specific education needs. Computing education is a relative newcomer, and the professional organizations in computing have just started to address those needs. This grant funded meetings of an organizing committee with representatives of various computing professional organizations to create a council to coordinate efforts to advance computing education for the entire discipline. Our work was successful in establishing a new entity, the Partnership Advancing Computing Education (PACE), to serve that role. The initial members of PACE included ACM, IEEE Computer Society, Association for Information Systems (AIS), National Center for Women and IT (NCWIT), and Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA). Membership grew in 2012 to include the Computing Research Association (CRA). We established a website: http://computinged.org. PACE produced its first physical artifact during 2012, a "Talking Points" card to explain to parents and teachers the need for computing education (broadly encompassing computer science, information technology, information systems, software engineering, and computer engineering). In addition to quarterly board conference calls, PACE has had two face-to-face meetings (one in 2012 and another in 2013) which included discussions with the US Bureau of Labor Statistics on computing jobs needs, Microsoft and Code.org on industrial activities in computing education, and the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) to understand cross-disciplinary connections. We are currently planning an NSF-funded workshop to set a research agenda in computing education.
