Mark Guzdial

Georgia Institute of Technology, USA

Requirements for a Computing-Literate Society

Abstract

We share a vision of a society that is able to express problems and ideas computationally. Andrea diSessa called that computational literacy, and he invented the Boxer Programming Environment to explore the media of computational literacy. Education has the job of making citizens literate. Education systems around the world are exploring the question of what should all citizens know about computing and how do we provide that knowledge. The questions being asked are about public policy, but also about what does it mean to be expressive with computation and what should computing users know. The answers to these questions have implications for the future of human-centric computing.

Bio

Mark Guzdial is a Professor in the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. He studies how people come to understand computing and how to make that more effective. He leads the CSLearning4U project to create ebooks to help high school teachers learn CS. He is one of the leads on the NSF alliance “Expanding Computing Education Pathways" which helps US states improve and broaden their computing education. He invented Media Computation which uses media as a context for learning computing. With his wife and colleague, Barbara Ericson, he received the 2010 ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator award. He is an ACM Distinguished Educator and a Fellow of the ACM.

Franklyn Turbak

Wellesley College, USA

Taking Stock of Blocks:

Promises and Challenges of Blocks Programming Languages

Abstract

Blocks programming environments (e.g., Scratch, Blockly, App Inventor, Snap!, Pencil Code, Alice/Looking Glass, AgentSheets/AgentCubes) represent program syntax trees as compositions of visual blocks. Through activities like Code.org’s Hour of Code, these languages have become extremely popular ways to introduce programming and computational thinking to tens of millions of people of all ages and backgrounds, from grade-schoolers to President Obama. Proponents of blocks languages claim that blocks languages lower barriers to programming and enhance learning, while detractors complain that they are not particularly visual and are just toy languages from which it is difficult to transition to "real" text-based programming.

In this talk, I take stock of blocks languages, focusing on the following points:

• Both blocks and text are representations of the same underlying program structure, but blocks offer some advantages in key programming language dimensions: syntax, static semantics, and dynamic semantics.
• Blocks language features can be incorporated into programming environments that cover a spectrum from enhanced text editors to full-fledged visual editors.
• The popularity and importance of blocks programming environments is due to far more than blocks representations (e.g., high-level abstractions for behaviors, web-based environments, cloud-based program storage, online communities for sharing programs).
• Remarkably little research has been done to support claims (both pro and con) involving the usability and efficacy of blocks languages.

I hope that discussion of these points will spur conversations about future work involving blocks languages within the VL/HCC community.

Bio

Franklyn Turbak is an associate professor of Computer Science at Wellesley College. His interests include the design, analysis, and implementation of expressive programming languages and visual representations of programs and computational processes. He is co-author of the textbook Design Concepts in Programming Languages. As head of the Wellesley TinkerBlocks research group, member of the MIT App Inventor development team, and lead PI on the NSF-funded Computational Thinking Through Mobile Computing project, his current goal is to improve the expressiveness and pedagogy of blocks programming languages.