Experience in Introducing Computing into Schools

Abstract:

Bootstrap is one of the major efforts for introducing computing into US schools, having trained hundreds of teachers and with about 15,000 students using it every year. Ideally, any approach to introducing computing into schools would (a) be rigorous, (b) be scalable, and (c) address computing's huge underrepresentation problem. However, achieving even two of these simultaneously is difficult; some programs fail to attain even one! What is Bootstrap? Why is school-level computing so difficult to enter? How does Bootstrap achieve all three goals? And where is the program headed? These are questions I hope to answer in my talk.

Biography:

Shriram Krishnamurthi is a Professor of Computer Science at Brown University. With collaborators and students, he has created several influential systems: DrRacket and WeScheme (programming environments), Margrave (access control policy analyzer), FrTime and Flapjax (reactive programming languages), Lambda-JS and TeJaS (semantics and types for JavaScript), and Flowlog (software-defined networking programming language and verifier). He is now working on the Pyret programming language. He is the author of "Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation" and a co-author of "How to Design Programs" and "Programming and Programming Languages". He co-directs the Bootstrap math-and-computing outreach program. He won SIGPLAN's Robin Milner Young Researcher Award, and Brown's Henry Merritt Wriston Fellowship for distinguished contribution to undergraduate education. He has authored over twelve papers recognized for honors by program committees.