Computing education (CEd) is important, everyone agrees. President Obama committed hundreds of millions of dollars to “Computer Science for All” (White House, 2016); governments have developed curricula and made computing a school subject across the world (see Chapter 18); online providers compete to teach coding (such as Code Academy, code.org, the Hour of Code, Khan Academy and Coursera); and tech giants put money into supporting CEd projects (CISCO supports the BlueJ and Scratch initial programming environments and Google funds substantial professional development programs and has produced a series of CEd research reports – one of which forms the basis for Chapter 3).
With all of the effort and resources going into Ced, it would be comforting to think that we know what we are doing – that the problems of teaching and learning computing topics are well understood, that the solutions are known, and that best practice is widely shared. But this ideal picture is very much a work in progress. We still don’t know enough about how students learn computing subjects, what effects different teaching approaches have, or how to equally engage people of all races and genders in the field. Ced research (CEdR) is how we work to understand and improve this. In order to make the most of the resources currently going into Ced efforts around the world, CEdR is an important and timely field