Saturday, 10:00AM EDT

Data-Centric Computing: The Educational Horizon Expands

Bio: Kathi Fisler is a Professor (Research) of Computer Science at Brown University and co-director of Bootstrap (a national K-12 outreach program for integrating computing into existing K-12 courses). She is broadly interested in various facets of how people learn and use formal systems. Her current focus is computing education, with an emphasis on how programming languages impact learning and pedagogy in computing for each of college students, K-12 students, and K-12 teachers. She was present for the birth of How to Design Programs, and has just graduated a PhD student (Francis Castro, WPI) whose work explored how students work with the Design Recipe. Outside of CS, she likes a good jigsaw puzzle, a bad pun, and the best that pizza has to offer.

The latest installment of the language wars for early programming education begins as a new player enters the scene: data science. Promising to bring engaging real-world applications to tired CS curricula, data science inspires new debates over which programming language is the best starting point for beginners. As the advocates for R, Python, and Scratch sharpen their arguments, functional programming fans spot an unanticipated opportunity. Data science could be playing into their hands, if they get their pitch right. Join in as an important strategic discussion gets underway in the higher-order headquarters ...