engages students in discussion about recent literature that relates to HCC.

For me, HCC is an excellent way to prepare computing education researchers. People have always developed theories of how their worlds work, from ancient mythology to modern science. How are people explaining their computerized world to themselves? How can we help them develop a better and more useful understanding? What gets in the way of that understanding? Answering these kinds of questions requires knowledge of computer science (if only to recognize correct from incorrect understandings), but also of how people learn and how to study humans and their learning.

Not all HCC students address issues of computing education research, but even when that is not the explicit focus, HCC research often offers lessons about how people learn about computing. People always learn, and in a world filled with computing, that is often what they are learning about—though not always well, clearly, or efficiently. Here are stories of three HCC graduates whose dissertations inform us about how people learn about computing.

Reframing the Computing

Betsy DiSalvo (now an assistant professor at Georgia Tech) starts from an interesting observation. Many computer scientists (who are mostly white or Asian, and male) say they became interested in computing because of video games. No demographic group plays more video games than African-American and Hispanic teenagers and men. But few African-American and Hispanic males become computer scientists. Why was that?

DiSalvo explored her question with ethnographic methods. She observed African-American teen males playing video games and talked to them about how and why they played. She found they were playing video games differently than white teen males. Her participants never used “cheat codes” or modified their games in any way—they used video games like athletic competition. Manipulating the football or the field is cheating, so why would you change the video game? She used design research activities to explore how different ways of describing computing would make the technology more

unlike science
or mathematics,
undergraduates
often come to
computer science
with a poor
understanding of what
computer science is.

salient while still appealing to the audience she wanted to attract.

DiSalvo built the Glitch Game Testers project. Glitch successfully engaged African-American teen males in computer science by training and hiring them as game-testers. Game-testers must see video games as a technology with flaws. Glitch students learned computer science, motivated to become better testers. Glitch attracted students who loved video games, and kept them involved because it was a paying job. Most of her students went on to post-secondary computing education.

DiSalvo designed Glitch through a human-focused design process. She did not design a technology. She designed a new way for her students to think about computing. Her design research activities explored different ways of describing computer science with different lenses. Through that iterative design process, she found a reframing that could change who builds computing in the future.

impact of Not
understanding Computing
Unlike science or mathematics, un-
dergraduates often come to computer
science with a poor understanding
of what computer science is. Mike
Hewner (now an assistant professor
at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technol-
ogy) wanted to know what the impact
of that misunderstanding of computer
science had on students who chose to
major in computer science. Hewner
interviewed 33 students at three differ-
ent universities. He used a social science
method called grounded theory to iden-
tify themes, create abstractions, and
eventually come to a well-supported
understanding of how CS majors make
educational decisions.