The following is a guest blog by Vasant G Honavar, Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Member, Edward Frymoyer Endowed Professor of Information Sciences and Technology, Professor of Computer Science, and Director of the Center for Big Data Analytics and Discovery Informatics at the Pennsylvania State University. It has long been recognized that many routine or manual blue collar work has been, and will continue to be, automated. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report predicts widespread disruption not only to business models as well as labor markets, due to the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” unleashed in part, by the advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, robotics, among other fields. The […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has issued the following Dear Colleague Letter calling for proposals that will advance STEM learning and explore solutions to global challenges. Dear Colleague: The National Science Foundation (NSF) is the place where science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) discoveries and discoverers begin. Nationally and internationally, cities and communities face deeply interlocking physical, social, behavioral, economic, and infrastructural challenges. For example, we face complex challenges in providing sufficient food, clean water, and energy for all, while sustaining a healthy environment. Solutions will require ingenuity and expertise from across all domains, including the sciences. Learners can be Change Makers, identifying and working to solve problems that matter […]

The organizing committee for the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Computer-Aided Personalized Education has released their workshop report. The workshop, held in November 2015, brought together over 50 researchers in the fields of education, computer science, human-computer interaction, and cognitive psychology to address the challenges and future directions of computing-based educational tools. This growing agenda in computing research includes formalizing tasks such as assessment and feedback as computational problems, developing algorithmic tools to solve resulting problems at scale, and incorporating these tools effectively in learning environments. The report examines emerging trends, such as logical reasoning, machine learning, student-computer interaction, and learning science in order to come up with a research […]

The time is now for computer science education! With the shifting economy, educators are increasingly recognizing computer science as a new basic requirement. In his final State of the Union address, President Barack Obama said that “helping students learn to write computer code” is among his goals for the year ahead. Jim Kurose, the Assistant Director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) released a letter to the community acknowledging the excitement in the community but also noting to “please stay tuned as the Administration announces new steps in the coming weeks to support efforts to expand access to computer science education across the Nation.” White House Office of Science Technology Policy U.S. Chief Technology […]

The following post was co-authored by Andrew Lan, a PhD student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Rice University. Andrew recently attended the Computing Community Consortium Computer-Aided Personalized Education Workshop in Washington, DC.  The demand for education in STEM fields is exploding, and universities and colleges are straining to satisfy this demand. In the case of Computer Science, for example, the number of US students enrolled in introductory courses has grown three-fold in the past decade. Recently massive open online courses (MOOCs) have been promoted as a way to ease this strain, but scaling traditional models of teaching to MOOCs poses many of the same challenges observed in the overflowing classrooms, […]

The CCC Computer-Aided Personalized Education (CAPE) Workshop will be held in Washington, DC on November 12-13th. The demand for education in STEM fields is exploding, and universities and colleges are straining to satisfy this demand. In the case of Computer Science, for example, the number of US students enrolled in introductory courses has grown three-fold in the past decade. Recently massive open online courses (MOOCs) have been promoted as a way to ease this strain, but scaling traditional models of teaching to MOOCs poses many of the same challenges observed in the overflowing classrooms, namely, assessment of students’ knowledge and providing meaningful feedback to individual students. To tackle these problems […]