Inroads - December 2018

A Personal Narrative of My Relationship with SIGCSE

Trends and Reflections

Frankly, 1991 was a time of turmoil in CS education. There really was no consensus as to what should be taught in the first course. Curriculum 1991 was a step in the right direction, but educators still argued over what language to use in the first course. When the APCS was first instituted using Pascal, local high-school teachers were up in arms—of course Basic was the language to use. What was Pascal? Who ever heard of it? (I personally ran a worship to prepare high-school teachers to teach a course for the first AP exam. I wanted to talk about teaching concepts; they wanted to learn about Pascal.)

During the first twenty years of SIGCSE, there were other comput-er-education related conferences and many of our members participated in them. A listing looks like alphabet soup: WCCE, NECC, EDUCOM, ACM CSC, CCSC, AFIPS. At the time of the 1992 survey, the National Education Computer Conference (NECC) was still active. Twenty-nine percent of our members had attended an NECC conference, but only 12% in the last year (1991). This reflected NECC’s focus on pre-college education. However, most respondents felt that SIGCSE should stay involved with NECC in some way.

CHANGES IN SIGCSE

There were strong feelings that SIGCSE should sponsor summer activities—workshops, refereed conferences, and/or non-refereed conferences. Others cautioned that they could only afford one conference a year. However, in response to this strong support for a summer activity, the ITiCSE Conference was initiated and held in Barcelona, Spain, in June of 1996. This conference has been held each year since in Europe, Australia, Turkey, and Israel. There were no submitted papers the first year, only refereed workshops. The results of the workshops were published in the Bulletin.

The answers to the Free Response questions of the survey highlighted our professional diversity: • The papers are too technical/The papers are too low level.

• Having a paper accepted brings support for going to the
symposium, so take more papers/
The quality of the papers is poor, so don’t take as many.
• We need more papers on how to teach/We need more
technical papers.

• Symposium should be in cheaper places/The sites are dull.

So, how did we, as an organization, solve some of these contradictions? A look at the research areas represented in the survey gave us a clue—involved in technical research, 24.6%, involved in CS Education research, 21.4%, and focused only on teaching, 39.9%. There were two distinct audiences represented in the survey: the teachers and the researchers. Those

THE STATE OF SIGCSE IN 1992

In 1992, when I was Chair, Boots Cassel was Vice-Chair, and Harriet Taylor was Treasurer of SIGCSE, we got together to discuss the future of our organization: • Who are we?

• How do we rate current services?

• Where should we be going?

To find the answers to these and other questions, we devised a questionnaire or survey, which we distributed to our membership. Four hundred and forty-five SIGCSE members took the time to fill out the 6-page questionnaire. The following paragraphs give a summary of the responses and the changes that resulted from members’ suggestions.

It was not surprising that 88.7% of the respondents were associated with educational institutions. Others were in publishing, industry, government or some other type of institution.

The educational institutions ranged from high schools to PhD-granting institutions with most of the institutions four-year colleges. Of our members in teaching institutions, 41.1% taught all levels in the undergraduate program, 14.6% taught only lower-division classes, and 25.2% taught both undergraduate and graduate courses.

The first SIGCSE Bulletin was published in 1969. ACM Inroads was first published in 2010. Thus, the questions about the quality of our publications only reflected the Bulletin and the Conference Proceedings. First, we asked if the respondents read the Bulletin— 75.6% read at least the Table of Contents and selected articles; 15.5% read it from cover to cover; one person tossed it on the bookshelf without looking at it; 93.5% rated the Bulletin as good, very good, or excellent. The respondents seemed equally satisfied with the Technical Symposia and the post-Symposia workshops.

The questions relating to the future of our organization were broken into two parts—what should we be doing and where should we be doing it? Curriculum ’ 91 had just been introduced and obviously was of great interest to this group. A large majority of members were looking closely at the recommendations with intent to adopt some or all of them. As the recommendations are of only historical interest, I won’t go into them. However, the concept of closed laboratories was introduced there and did have a lasting impact.

Many of the SIGCSE members were interested in, and worked closely with, the Advanced Placement Exam in Computer Science (APCS). Many of our members had been on planning committees and graders for the APCS. During the time of this questionnaire, the APCS changed its format and split the exam into two parts: A and AB. The A part was supposed to mirror what was taught in the first course in CS, and AB was to mirror the second semester.