Keynote speakers
Beth Simon, University of California, San Diego, USA
Does CS teacher content training deliver what is needed in the classroom?What are required local computing content courses for teachers in your country/state? Where do teachers in preparation find them? In Computer Science programs? In Education programs? How do these courses align with the specific content/standards for your school classrooms? Is there school content not even covered in your CS program? In this activity-laden talk we'll explore whether traditional Computer Science courses/programs are the most efficient and effective way of preparing CS school teachers and explore what teacher-specific computing courses might look like. Come prepared to discuss!
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Dr. Beth Simon is a Teaching Professor in the Education Studies Department at the University of California, San Diego. She designs, teaches, and analyzes courses to support the development of pre-service and in-service K-12 computing teachers in the United States. Beth is especially interested in the challenges of scaling training and support of computing teachers to meet the desires of governments to get computing education into our schools quickly. As a member of CSForAll, she embraces the mission to make high-quality computer science an integral part of the educational experience of all K-12 students and teachers and to support student pathways to college and career success. Dr. Simon is the higher education advisor to the San Diego Computer Science Teachers Association chapter, a member of the code.org San Diego regional partner team, and co-lead of the Computer Science Standards Advisory Committee for California. Most importantly, she has enjoyed working with hundreds of K-12 computing teachers in the San Diego region to build capacity for computing education in our schools while working to ensure students participation is representative of student body demographics. Dr. Simon has previously studied methods of increasing student success in university introductory programming courses, has led the adoption of Peer Instruction in university CS classrooms, has studied assessments in introductory programming, and the "commonsense" computing knowledge our students bring to their computing studies. |
Sue Sentance, Raspberry PI Foundation, UK
Moving to mainstream: developing computing for allIn 2018, the Department for Education in England awarded a contract for £80m for a 4-year programme of development of teacher training and student resources in Computing. Together with a mandatory curriculum for computing for all children aged 5-16 since 2014, this represents one of the most substantial moves towards educating all children in the discipline of Computing in the world. But what challenges does this bring? What are the major implications of establishing computing as a core and foundation subject? What can we learn from this endeavour? In this talk I will look at what we have learned about implementing computing as a foundational subject and the implications for the computing education research agenda.
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Sue Sentance works at the Raspberry Pi Foundation as Chief Learning Officer where she leads a team creating learning materials for formal and non-formal education and courses for teachers. She is also part of the National Centre for Computing Education project, a government-funded initiative to equip thousands of teachers with the skills to deliver the computing curriculum. Her research interests are programming pedagogy, the PRIMM pedagogical model, teacher professional development, and the use of physical computing. She is an active member of the Computing At School (CAS) Board where she set up the BCS Certificate in Computer Science Teaching and established CAS Research. She was a member of the Royal Society's Computing Education Advisory group and in 2017 was awarded the BERA Public Engagement and Impact Award for her services to computing education. |
Questions? Please contact Quintin Cutts (School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, Scotland).