DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE COLLOQUIUM SERIES Mark Guzdial Georgia Institute of Technology, College of Computing Meeting Everyone's Need for Computing Tuesday, January 5, 2010, 12:30pm, 70-1445 ABSTRACT While interest in computer science degrees has declined, interest in computer science continues to grow across campus. Some estimates suggest that by 2012 there will be some 13 milion end-user programmers in the United States, compared to an estimated 3 million professional software developers. In this talk, I argue for more attention to that much greater number, for having an impact by making the non-professional programmer more successful. I will present historical evidence that our field has had a goal of teaching the non-professional programmers for over 40 years, that end-user programmers want what we have to offer, but that we need to develop new kinds of classes and new kinds of approaches to teaching CS to meet their needs. I will present methods for teaching computing that have improved success rates for non-computing majors (while still including programming), such as contextualized computing education. I will present evidence that non-computing majors want more computer science than we might expect. BIOGRAPHY Mark Guzdial is a Professor in the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. His research focuses on learning sciences and technology, specifically, computing education research. He has published several books on the use of media as a context for learning computing. He was the original developer of the "Swiki" which was the first wiki designed for educational use. He received the Ph.D. degree in Education and Computer Science from the University of Michigan in 1993. He serves on the ACM Education Board as vice-chair, and is on the editorial boards of the "Journal of the Learning Sciences," "ACM Transactions on Computing Education," and "Communications of the ACM."