CS Ed Research Book Club is a monthly get together of teachers, educators and academics who are interested in research about computer science education. The Book Club is an hour to discuss and unpack one or more papers in depth with colleagues, and then think about how the insights and findings might be applied, whether that be practically in a school, theoretically in future research or synthetically to an individual’s overall knowledge of a subject.
In June, we looked at a paper called “Fostering Program Comprehension in Novice Programmers – Learning Activities and Learning Trajectories” (currently freely accessible in the ACM Digital Library as of June 2020). This paper is the multi-authored output of a working group which took place at ITiCSE 2019.
We started the Book Club with an overview of the paper presented by Jane Waite, who had generously synthesised the paper into a summary of key points. Actually, to be completely accurate, we started the Book Club with a run down of the drinks and snacks we had brought along – and then we dived into the research! We were also fortunate to be joined by Rodrigo Duran from Aalto University in Finland, one of the authors of the paper, who shared his experiences of taking part in the working group and answered questions about the findings.
By the power of Zoom, we then split into two smaller groups to discuss the paper in more depth. The group I was in had a mixture of primary educators, secondary educators and researchers which made blend of different perspectives that easily kept the 20-minute chat going. We rounded off back in the main Zoom room.
CS Ed Research Book Club helps me to discover new papers that I wouldn’t necessarily choose to read on my own, and to tackle more challenging aspects of papers, such as critiquing the methodology or diving deeper into the implications of findings or proposals. It’s easy to connect via the CAS Research Facebook group or via the #csedresearchbookclub hashtag on Twitter and everyone is welcome!
CSEd PhD 