Computer Science Class of ’60s Colloquium – Kathi Fisler ’91, Brown University

Kathi Fisler ’91 survived her early attempts to learn computing through the patience and support of the Williams CS faculty. She headed to graduate school after being ovewhelmed at a summer internship interview and never looked back (though she still misses the purple mountains). She is currently a Professor (Research) of Computer Science at Brown University and co-director of Bootstrap (a national K-12 outreach program for integrating computing into existing classes). Her current research focuses on computing education, with an emphasis on how people reason with and about formal systems. Outside of CS, she likes a good jigsaw puzzle, a bad pun, and a nice hike.

Friday, November 22 @ 2:35pm in Wege Auditorium

“In Defense of Little Code”

Big Code is all the rage. IDE builders and people who know static analysis see a wealth of opportunity to generate data to study how people program. What better way to identify coders’ skills and confusions than to harvest their IDE interactions, compilation attempts, error messages, and code evolution within and across assignments? Won’t this also revolutionize programming education? Unfortunately, this tool-builder’s dream often leaves instructors without essential information: why are students doing what they do? Unpacking this requires understanding students’ design choices in focused contexts, using Little Code and qualitative methods.

This talk will present several studies on how students learn program design through Big and Little Data about Big and Little Code. We’ll discuss how students choose program structure, how language choice
interacts with program structure, and what misconceptions students have about semantics. We’ll also discuss possible implications of machine learning for K-12 and introductory college CS education. The
talk aims to raise appreciation and questions about balancing the Big and the Little for improving programming education at many levels.

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