Computers and Education

The Computers and Education research area provides training for PhD students in a CS department, which makes it one of the first in the US and internationally. The area admitted its first PhD students to explicitly focus their research in the area in the 2019-20 academic school year and hired its first tenure-track assistant professor in 2020. The area has diverse research interests, examining how students learn computing, broadening participation in computing, K-12 CS Education, scaling and spreading teaching innovations, using computing resources to improve students’ learning, and improving accessibility of education. While only three tenure-line faculty list this as their primary research area, the area is highly collaborative, incorporating many teaching faculty into research projects and providing support for teaching faculty to publish and mentor graduate students when there is interest. The research area has been helping the department and the College of Education navigate the process of creating new CS + Education undergraduate degrees that will help establish one of the first K-12 computer science licensure programs in the state of Illinois.

Although relatively new, the research area has already begun to distinguish itself in the Computing Education Research community. Faculty have won Best Paper Awards in the Research Track at the ACM SIGCSE annual conference (Nguyen & Lewis, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1145/3328778.3366805) the ACM International Computing Education Research conference (Lewis, 2012. https://doi.org/10.1145/2361276.2361301), the American Society for Engineering Education IL/ IN section (2018), and the ACM SIGCSE best paper in the first 50 years of SIGCSE (Kaczmarczyk, Petrick, East, & Herman, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1145/3324900). Faculty in the area have been recognized as leaders in the field, ser ving as invited authors for both the Cambridge Handbook of Computing Education Research and the Cambridge Handbook of Engineering Education Research. The research area has also been recognized for its excellence in teaching and promoting diversity in computing with awards such as the 2010 and 2020 Mac Van Valkenburg Early Career Teaching Awards from the IEEE Education Society and the 2016 Denice Denton Emerging Leader Award from AnitaB. org. Three PhD students have been awarded a Graduate Research Fellowship from the NSF. Faculty in the research area have been funded by NSF, NSA, Microsoft, and Google.