We can't achieve CS for All without CS departments.

How can Computing and Information faculty support CS for All?

K-12 teachers are beginning to teach both dedicated CS courses, as well as STEM courses that integrate CS. School districts are hiring CS teachers. Colleges of Education around the country are beginning to prepare CS teachers. U.S. states and territories are beginning to change policy and fund teacher preparation. Non-CS departments in higher education are integrating CS concepts into their college curricula. And research funders like NSF and the U.S. Department of Education are putting tens of millions of dollars into CS education research, to ensure CS for All efforts are inclusive and effective.

However, CS departments are largely absent in these efforts, when they should be leading.

There are many ways CS departments can lead:

• Support current tenure-track faculty who have interests in CS education. Encourage them to shift their research, teaching, and service to support CS for All.

• Hire new tenure-track CS education faculty, who do research on computer science education, who will not only advance the state of the art of CS teaching, but also help organize state, national, and international CS for All efforts. They might even improve instruction in your department.

• Support teaching-track faculty to conduct K-12 outreach in their local teaching communities.

• Ensure admissions requirements are compatible with state policy.

• Develop course equivalencies for the growing diversity of CS courses being taught in Washington state high schools.

• Encourage alumni to volunteer in schools to CS through programs like Microsoft TEALS.

Without engaging, the world will build K-12 CS education infrastructure, it will just build it without broad engagement from the discipline of computer science.

Is computing education research really CS research?

Yes. Like all applied areas of CS research, it's a combination of CS and other disciplines, such as education research, learning sciences, and HCI. There many kinds of CS education research contributions, including new educational technologies to scale CS education, empirical studies of learning and teaching. In this way, it is similar to HCI, which makes both technical and social science contributions.

To learn more:

• See the frequently asked questions page about the field, maintained by professor Amy Ko at the University of Washington, Seattle.

• See the list of tenure-track faculty engaged in computer science education research on the Communities page.

• Review the Cambridge Handbook of Computing Education Research, written by a global community of leading computing education researchers.

• Attend either the ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (which brings together teachers and researchers) or the ACM International Computing Education Research Conference (which primarily attracts researchers).