Communications of the ACM

Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications, we’ll publish selected posts or excerpts.

efficient way to learn for Simon, and his concern was for motivation:

When, for whatever reason, students cannot construct the knowledge for themselves, they need some instruction. The argument that knowledge must be constructed is very similar to the earlier arguments that discovery learning is superior to direct instruction. In point of fact, there is very little positive evidence for discovery learning and it is often inferior ... Because most of the learning in discovery learning only takes place after the construct has been found, when the search is lengthy or unsuccessful, motivation commonly flags.

A teacher of introductory computer
science faces the tension between let-
ting students figure out complex situ-
ations and telling students the answer.
I’m going to describe the tension using
a generalized, perhaps even stereotypi-
cal description of what students want.
As Valerie Barr has pointed out (http://
bit.ly/2nFRSFx), teachers need to un-
derstand the students who are in their
classes, not generalizations. While the
generalization I’m using doesn’t ac-
curately describe all students, the gen-
eralization matches how CS teachers
think about their students (http://bit.
ly/2nYA3nE), which does explain what
we do in our classes.

A student who takes an introductory computer science course wants to make something. Even if the student doesn’t want to become a professional software developer, they want to create software, to design something digital. We want to go from where they are to producing something interesting. The challenge (as Briana Morrison and I describe in the November 2016 Communications, http://bit.ly/2iIFeEc) is that students enter CS class with less background in the discipline than any other STEM field. It’s difficult to design when you don’t understand the medium that you’re designing with.

We know students need to develop an understanding of what the computer does when it executes programs. Computing education researchers call that the notional machine (see the report from a Dagstuhl Seminar group on student learning about notional machines at http://bit.ly/2oy1KoO). To design and

Mark Guzdial
‘Figure It Out’ Isn’t
Enough: Striking a New
Balance Between
Understanding,
Problem-Solving, and
Design in Introductory CS Classes
http://bit.ly/2jvlDdO
January 9, 2017

A computing educator has to balance teaching efficiently and motivating the student. Efficient teaching means teaching abstractly, emphasizing practice, and preferring direct instruction over having students “figure it out.” Motivating the student means giving the students authentic situations, real-world complexity, and reasons to practice.

I recently wrote an essay describing this tension ( http://bit.ly/2nFRuGZ). Herbert Simon (one of the three authors of the Science article first answering the question “What is Computer Science?”; http://bit.ly/2nFIzpf) strongly believed in direct instruction, rather than problem-solving. Having students “figure out” the solution for themselves, to discover solutions to problems, was an in-