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Contextualized approaches to introductory computer science: the key to making computer science relevant or simply bait and switch?

Published: 09 March 2011 Publication History

Abstract

America's youth perceive Computer Science to be difficult, tedious, boring, irrelevant and asocial. Unfortunately, many traditional introductory Computer Science classes and textbooks do little to improve that image. In contrast, contextualized approaches to teaching introductory Computer Science are very attractive. Instead of writing a leap year program, students can learn about conditional statements by programming a robot to follow a light, or by creating an animation to tell a story, or even by modifying a picture of the college president so that she is wearing a neon orange jacket instead of a navy blue one. The arguments in favor of contextualized approaches to attract non-Computer-Science-majors to our classes are very persuasive. But what about students who then choose to major or minor in Computer Science? Of course we want to offer them interesting and engaging first courses in Computer Science, and indeed this may help with our efforts to attract more students to our programs. But what happens in subsequent semesters? The purpose of this paper is to initiate a general discussion on the use of any sort of "cool" new approach into both undergraduate and K-12 Computer Science education. These approaches successfully attract students to study subjects that we ourselves are deeply engaged in. But we need to discuss as a community what happens to students who do choose to major or minor in Computer Science when our individual classes conclude and the rest of their studies commence.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      SIGCSE '11: Proceedings of the 42nd ACM technical symposium on Computer science education
      March 2011
      754 pages
      ISBN:9781450305006
      DOI:10.1145/1953163
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Published: 09 March 2011

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      Author Tags

      1. CS0
      2. CS1
      3. bait and switch
      4. contextualized approaches
      5. education
      6. enrollment
      7. interest
      8. manipulatives
      9. motivation
      10. recruitment
      11. retention
      12. robotics

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