A Release Date 8 Years in the Making: The Definitive K-12 CS Teacher’s Guide on Teaching Programming

Outside of my doctoral dissertation, this is the undertaking I am most proud of! My heartfelt gratitude to everyone involved!

(Also grateful to Simon Peyton Jones and Hadi Partovi for previewing the book and providing advance acclaim for the back cover).

As teachers & members of the global CS education community become aware of the #A2ZK12CS handbook, and start to read it (or use it in various ways) as part of teacher PD, I figured I’d share some fun facts and stats 😉

How ’bout some fun facts and stats 🙂

• • 8 years as an idea, 24 months in the (actual) making and this 300+ page handbook with 26 A-Z chapters is finally in print!
  • To me the stats most worth sharing: 40 contributors joined me on this wonderful journey—21 are women and 19 are men (woohoo!)—each one deeply engaged in K-12 CS education. These figures include Mark Guzdial who graciously authored the Foreword—Inventing Computing Education in Schools.
  • The authors represent classrooms in 7 countries—USA, UK, Canada, Australia, Germany, Finland, and Switzerland.
  • The 26 chapters in A-to-Z alphabetical order address 10 foundational programming concepts, 4 key programming practices, and 12 well-researched pedagogies based on classroom practice and 3 decades of CS education and learning sciences research.
  • These chapters are color coded in orange for concepts, green for practices, and blue for pedagogies (in the color version of the book). They can be read in any sequence, but readers would benefit from starting with Chapter 11 (‘Knowledge, Skills, Attitudes, and Beliefs: Learning Goals for Introductory Programming’), Chapter 10 on programming languages, and Chapter 14 (‘Naïve Conceptions of Novice Programmers’).

• That stunning cover?! Some years ago, I had come upon an article about Julie Alice Chappell’s beautiful bugs and winged insects that she made of discarded circuit boards. When it came time to work on the cover with the book designer, Bob Vizzini, I contacted Julie Alice (who lives in Portsmouth, England) through her Etsy shop. To me, the cover art embodies the spirit of the book— how coding in K-12 is about letting your imagination fly, and also how working with bugs is part and parcel of coding. Love it!
• QUOTES! Every chapter starts with a quote relevant to (the essence of) the chapter. (Do check them out!).
  • Thanks to Dan Garcia and Josh Paley for planting the seed with this pithy quote from Prince— “There is joy in repetition.”  at the start of their chapter (Repetition and Recursion).
  • Thanks to Yasmin Kafai for pointing out how few famous (CS) quotes are by women, and for pushing me to try to add more quotes by women. She and Debbie Fields used “All sorts of things can happen when you’re open to new ideas and playing around with things.” by Stephanie Kwolek, for their chapter (Hard Fun With Hands-On Constructionist Project-Based Learning).
  • The Preface starts with a quote from Maya Angelou—“When you learn, teach. When you get, give.” It captures well the spirit in which this book was created.
  • The Preface ends with a quote from Grace Hooper—“..programming is more than an important practical art. It is also a gigantic undertaking in the foundations of knowledge.” It’s why so many of us believe in teaching children to code.
  • Apart from these 3 quotes by women, quotes by Maria Montessori, Ada Lovelace, Jane Margolis, Helen Keller, Brenè Brown grace the start of 5 other chapters.
  • Famous CS persons quoted (besides Grace Hopper and Ada Lovelace) at the start of chapters include Alan Perlis, Seymour Papert, Hal Abelson, Gerald Sussman, Brian Kernighan, Charles Babbage, Edsger Dijkstra, John Cormack, Linus Torvalds and Donald Knuth.
• Coordinating 26 chapters (12 of which I was involved in closely- as sole author or co-author) was…(ummm, how shall I put it delicately)… a thrill and a challenge 😀
• Juha Sorva was the first to submit his completed chapter—Chapter 14: ‘Naïve Conceptions of Novice Programmers’ in June 2019. (Not that it was a competition :), but receiving the first contributed chapter was indeed a fun milestone!)
• To Baker Franke who recently sent me this spectacular photograph with the question, “Curious Shuchi, what’s your favorite chapter — after Data Structures, of course?” (fyi, Baker and Rich Kick authored Chapter 4, ‘Data Structures’ :-)) — I love how each and every chapter turned out! I turned to people who I knew were experts at—and would do justice to—the topic.
• Of course, each chapter has it own backstory. As Mike Zamansky wrote in his blog post, I first DM’ed him on Twitter, and actually discussed his chapter for the first time on a phone call while I was at an airport waiting to board a flight. Mike went on to write Chapter 13: Modularity with Methods and Functions along with Jens Mönig, and his longtime Stuyvesant colleague, Jonald Dyrland-Weaver.  (I skyped with Jens Mönig about the same chapter from a hotel in Hongkong!)
• As we engage with the movement on anti-Black racism in schooling, I am especially grateful to the 5 women scholars who authored Chapter 12: Learner-centered and Culturally Relevant Pedagogy, for lending an important perspective on teaching programming in ways that uplift historically marginalized students of color.
• The 2000+ actual hours spent on (authoring, editing, designing, producing… and emailing about) the book meant that this project has consumed a fair amount of my life this past 1.5-2 years. But the idea first came to me several years ago—here’s a little peek into the genesis of this book that has been 8 years in the making!