Special Session Rediscovering the Passion, Beauty, Joy, and Awe: Making Computing Fun Again, continued Daniel D. Garcia (moderator) Robb Cutler University of California, Berkeley Computer Science Teachers Association 777 Soda Hall 2 Penn Plaza, Suite 701 Berkeley, CA 94720 New York, NY 10121 +1 510-642-9595 +1 408-588-1544 ddgarcia@cs.berkeley.edu robb@nne.net Zachary Dodds Eric Roberts Alison Young Harvey Mudd College Stanford University UNITEC 301 Platt Boulevard Department of Computer Science Private Bag 92025 Claremont, CA 91711 Stanford, CA 94305 Auckland, New Zealand +1 909-621-8225 +1 650-723-3642 +64 9 8154321 x6040 dodds@cs.hmc.edu eroberts@cs.stanford.edu ayoung@unitec.ac.nz Categories and Subject Descriptors K.3.2 [Computer and Information Science Education]: Computer science education General Terms Experimentation Keywords Computer science education 1. SUMMARY At the SIGCSE Symposium in 2007, the ACM Education Board organized a well-attended special session exploring the crisis in computing education and its underlying causes [2]. The idea behind the session was to provide a forum at which a larger and more broadly representative subset of the education community could engage in direct dialogue with the members of the ACM Education Board and Education Council, who are charged with developing educational policy for the ACM as a whole. Last year, we extended that dialogue and explored concrete strategies for emphasizing the “passion, beauty, joy, and awe” (PBJA) of computing [3] about which Grady Booch spoke so eloquently in his 2007 keynote address [1]. The extremely positive feedback we received served as motivation to continue the discussion this year, to allow us to hear from new voices and receive updates on the current state of the crisis. It is increasingly clear that students today find less joy in the process of creating software than their predecessors did a generation ago. At the same time, these skills have become increasingly important, forcing companies to cast an ever widening net in their search for people with the necessary skills and training. Continued progress in the computing disciplines—and indeed the economic health of a society that relies increasingly on computing technology—can continue only if we can encourage an even larger number of students to pursue the many opportunities that careers in computing provide. 2. BACKGROUND The steady decline in enrollments and the even more precipitous decline of secondary school students in the field leaves little doubt that companies, seeking as they are to hire ever increasing numbers of talented employees, will soon face a serious shortage of people with the necessary skills. In 2007, and again in 2008, the situation has improved to some extent. Many universities— including the top research universities in the United States— continue to report enrollment increases. While the numbers are far short of their peak in 2000, this encouraging trend offers some hope that the worst of the crisis may be behind us. That said, many students are still turned off to computing long before they graduate from high school. Often, this is because they have come to think of computing as little more than word processing and web browsing, offering few opportunities for the excitement that has always attracted people to computing. In all environments—secondary schools, universities, and companies—it is important to make it clear that computing offers intrinsic excitement that is difficult to match in other disciplines. That excitement, however, comes primarily from the intellectual challenge of solving problems and the engineering challenge of building things that work. To the extent that our discipline becomes associated with applications at the secondary school level, the minute details of some programming language at the university level, or the task of maintaining long outdated code in the workplace, that sense of excitement will be harder to achieve. Only by working together can we address the broader dimensions of this interconnected problem. As was true in last year’s special session, we expect each presenter to take between five and ten minutes to present their own ideas as to how we can help the next generation of students Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). SIGCSE’09, March 3–7, 2009, Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA. ACM 978-1-60558-183-5/09/03. r 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. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. C f ’04 M h1 2 2004 Ci S C 65