What We Do

Our group at Brown Computer Science works in all three areas of computing education:

Research

We study how students learn in various settings, from middle-school to upper-level undergraduates to school teachers to working professional programmers. We investigate everything from plan composition to notional machines to error messages to temporal logics to Rust ownership.

Outreach

Though we've been involved in several outreach efforts, we're best known for running one of the largest computing outreach programs in the US, called Bootstrap. Bootstrap is the leader in integrated approaches to computing education: embedding computing in other disciplines.

Teaching

We design and offer a variety of courses from introductory to graduate. These both supply us with problems and perspectives, and serve as a test-bed for innovations.

Our Philosophy

Our group has a few characteristics that, if not unique, at least set us apart from most other computing education research:

• We're really deeply in love with programming languages, one of the most beautiful and powerful forms of human expression. We believe the power and elegance of formal methods deserve to be far more widely used.

• We're computer scientists. That means we don't shy away from advanced computer science ideas, reading or inventing what we need. This ensures our work is not hampered by limitations in the state of the science.

• We're software engineers. That means we are willing to build all the systems we need. We don't believe in being hampered by the constraints of the tools others have built.

• We recognize that progress requires studying principles, concepts, and theories in areas like cognitive science, educational psychology, and sociology to inform our work.

• We take the long view. We understand that progress requires fixing some guiding principles, and then steadily accumulating ideas and effort. Some of our projects are over 25 years old and are still very much works in progress.

Who We Are

Our primary faculty members are

Will Crichton

Kathi Fisler

Shriram Krishnamurthi

Our current PhD students are Siddhartha Prasad, Skyler Austen, and Gavin Gray. We also do research with several post-docs, visitors, summer students, and undergraduates.

We collaborate with several other professors in the department, such as Tim Nelson, Rob Lewis, and Milda Zizyte. In general, and somewhat unusually for a research university, Brown CS has long had a deep devotion to computing education at various levels, so it forms a happy environment to think hard about the subject.

Naturally, we also work closely with the other members of the Bootstrap team.

Outside Brown, we collaborate closely with Joe Politz, Ben Lerner, Nancy Pfenning, Ann Renninger, Steve Weimar, Colleen Megowan-Romanowicz, Rebecca Vieyra, and others.

Joining Us

Thank you for your interest in working with us. We enjoy working with students at every level (from early in college through post-docs).

If you haven't yet been admitted to Brown, see Shriram's contact page.

If you have been admitted to Brown (whether you're already here or not): our work requires background and expertise. Students usually acquire this by taking upper-level (1xxx or higher) courses with us. Therefore, it is most effective to talk to us after you have had such courses (and ideally initiate your discussion with the professor you took the course from). Some of our lower-level courses may announce opportunities too; if you're in one of those courses, keep an ear open for them. We don't work with students who haven't studied with us before; there is simply too much preparation required, and the best way to acquire it is through our courses!

What We've Written

Our publications can be found on our respective Web sites (not limited to computing education):

• Will's page

• Kathi's page

• Shriram's page

• "Data-Centricity: A Challenge and Opportunity for Computing Education", our position on how introductory computing courses need to evolve

• What Does It Mean for a Curriculum to Succeed?, our analysis of the criteria that outreach programs should follow

• Why Computer Science Doesn’t Matter, our controversial article about computing in schools (which, a decade later, proved to be dead on)

Our chapter Programming Paradigms and Beyond (from the Cambridge Handbook of Computing Education Research) gives a sample of how we take a programming-languages perspective on computing education.

Our group research blog has articles about several of our projects (which are not limited to computing education).

We've also authored several books, some very influential and widely used:

• A Data-Centric Introduction to Computing

• Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation

• Programming and Programming languages

• How to Design Programs

• Our modified version of The Rust Programming Language

• Our C++ to Rust Phrasebook

Watch and Hear Us

Several of our talks are publicly available.