Mark Guzdial

Recipient of the 2019 SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contribution to CS Education
Professor of Computer Science & Engineering
University of Michigan

Computing Education as a Foundation for 21st Century Literacy

Teaching programming as a way to express ideas, communicate with others, and understand our world is one of the oldest goals for computing education. The inventor of the term ``computer science’’ saw it as the third leg of STEM literacy. In this talk, I lay out the history of the idea of universal computational literacy, some of what it will take to get there, and how our field will be different when we do.

Bio

Mark Guzdial is a Professor in the Computer Science & Engineering Division and in Engineering Education Research at the University of Michigan. He studies how people come to understand computing and how to make that more effective. He led the CSLearning4U project to create ebooks to help high school teachers learn CS. He was one of the PI’s on the NSF alliance “Expanding Computing Education Pathways” which helped 16 US states and Puerto Rico improve and broaden their computing education. He invented “Media Computation” and has published several books on the use of media as a context for learning computing. He is on the editorial boards of the “Journal of the Learning Sciences,” “Computer Science Education,” “ACM Transactions on Computing Education,” and “Communications of the ACM.” With his wife and colleague, Barbara Ericson, he received the 2010 ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator award. He was also the recipient of the 2012 IEEE Computer Society Undergraduate Teaching Award. He is an ACM Distinguished Educator and a Fellow of the ACM.