> In your research area, is there a significant textbook or summary paper you would recommend that summarises current findings well?
It depends on what you're referring to by "research area". My focus is specific to novel CS exercises like typing exercises, Parsons Problems, coding problems, etc. In that regard I really like Teaching Tech Together [1] as a broad, here's a blanket review of CS education and its exercises. If you mean more generally to just CS Education, then Teaching Tech is still starting point I think, as it provides a nice literature review of the domain as well.
> What would you recommend to a complete amateur orienting themselves?
It'll depend (again) on what you mean here. If you mean learning about CS Education research, then the link above will be great. Then its about going down rabbit holes from the citations to read in more detail about those findings.
If you mean simply learning CS, the biggest recommendation I can make is carve out 1-4 hours a week (depending on your schedule) and commit to learning to code via MOOCs, tutorials, videos etc. Find a CS1 syllabus from a university that has a schedule on it and follow that. A lot of learning can be traced back to "time on task". Ignoring the recent HN post about how years of experience doesn't equal most skilled coders, that article is looking at what research calls "experts" vs. "novices" (beginners). We know spaced repetition works, we know cramming (trying to learn it all immediately) doesn't. Following the syllabus' schedule will space out your learning, force you to recall the information, and produce better learning in the long run.
The idea is to make it a part of your weekly "routine" to the point where if you DON'T do it, you feel weird. For example, I've trained martial arts for 15+ years. Somewhere in that time, I'm so used to going to train that when I take nights off, its weird because I'm just USED to training. Even my body wakes up cause its used to needing adrenaline. That needs to be a part of any learning process.
Oh I've definitely figured out the trick to learning CS, tékhnē.
No worries there.
I'm simply curious about the state of the art of the pedagogy.
CS education is a fascinating situation. You have an interaction of strong mathematical, socioeconomic, and generally academic backgrounds, and often the complete opposite studying it. Plus very little institutional knowledge around pedagogy or anything else relative to almost all other fields of academia. And yet, there are all sorts of interesting factoids around the place, like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J-wCHDJYmo.
I don't pretend get how it all fits together.
Thank you very much, Teach Together looks like the perfect starting point, and I can follow the citation breadcrumgbs from there.
It depends on what you're referring to by "research area". My focus is specific to novel CS exercises like typing exercises, Parsons Problems, coding problems, etc. In that regard I really like Teaching Tech Together [1] as a broad, here's a blanket review of CS education and its exercises. If you mean more generally to just CS Education, then Teaching Tech is still starting point I think, as it provides a nice literature review of the domain as well.
[1] http://teachtogether.tech/
> What would you recommend to a complete amateur orienting themselves?
It'll depend (again) on what you mean here. If you mean learning about CS Education research, then the link above will be great. Then its about going down rabbit holes from the citations to read in more detail about those findings.
If you mean simply learning CS, the biggest recommendation I can make is carve out 1-4 hours a week (depending on your schedule) and commit to learning to code via MOOCs, tutorials, videos etc. Find a CS1 syllabus from a university that has a schedule on it and follow that. A lot of learning can be traced back to "time on task". Ignoring the recent HN post about how years of experience doesn't equal most skilled coders, that article is looking at what research calls "experts" vs. "novices" (beginners). We know spaced repetition works, we know cramming (trying to learn it all immediately) doesn't. Following the syllabus' schedule will space out your learning, force you to recall the information, and produce better learning in the long run.
The idea is to make it a part of your weekly "routine" to the point where if you DON'T do it, you feel weird. For example, I've trained martial arts for 15+ years. Somewhere in that time, I'm so used to going to train that when I take nights off, its weird because I'm just USED to training. Even my body wakes up cause its used to needing adrenaline. That needs to be a part of any learning process.