Conference Banquet Address - Friday March 28, 2008

Mark Guzdial Professor, School of Interactive Computing College of Computing Georgia Institute of Technology

Computing has grown in importance throughout our society and academia. The real importance of computing is not in providing applications. Computing provides the metaphors, notations, and mechanisms for describing processes that have become critical in science and other disciplines. In the last decade, we have struggled to make that work. We have learned how computing is valued and used in different disciplines. Our challenge has been to motivate undergraduates to pursue their computing education, even if they are not in a computing major. This talk describes some of that history, our current best efforts, and results from studies of these classes.

Biographical Sketch

Mark Guzdial is a Professor in the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology ("Georgia Tech"). He is a learning scientist who focuses on computing education research and collaborative technologies. His Ph.D. is in Education and Computer Science from the University of Michigan in 1993. He has authored and co-authored four textbooks on using media as a motivation for computing educaiton, including two on Media Computation--an approach to introducing computing in the context of media manipulation. He is the Director of Project "Georgia Computes!" whose goal is improving computing education and increasing diversity in computing across the state of Georgia.