The Future of Computer Science Education …

Abstract

There was always a sense of social experimentation embedded in the production of this book. None of the authors knew of the nature of other chapters taking place within it. The intention was to use this situation to present a concluding chapter that would summarize the contributions of the authors, reflecting on where they converged, where they diverged, and on whether or not any coherent images of the future of computer science education had formed. However, the process of engaging with the material that had been submitted for this book resulted in a change of heart. The intention to summarize proved too constraining. Repeatedly my attempts to extract the essential themes from the authorsé work resulted in a sense of frustration; while the explicit themes were easily identified, the implicit ones on which they rested were often hard to isolate. One of the recurring issues was in determining just how much had I imposed upon these more ethereal themes; to what extent was I, the reader, embedded in the material that I was attributing to the authors? Furthermore, reading the chapters would frequently stimulate ideas about the future of computer science education that I knew were entirely tangential to, or even absent from, that which the authors were addressing. Frustrating indeed, until the obvious finally dawned. This stimulation was exactly what had been hoped the book would generate in its readership. It was difficult to summarize something that I was responding to. The task of summarizing the contributions to the book—of somehow drawing it to a neat conclusion—proved to be essentially flawed. That process belongs to each of the readers, and there is little to be gained by packaging it as an editorial. There are some interesting themes that I extracted from my involvement with this book. Some are readily identifiable as issues that have been openly addressed by the authors. Other themes simply grew from some small, unidentified seeds scattered within the pages, or perhaps from some neural hiccup that took place between sentences. On occasion I felt that important things had been left