Computing has a large and growing impact on education. It is improving classroom  interactivity, increasing accessibility, facilitating personalized learning inside and outside the classroom, and providing a platform for exploring fundamental questions about how people learn.

At the same time, there are important questions in Computing Education Research (CER) about how to teach computer science in ways that are both effective and equitable. This requires both understanding how people learn computer science and creating best practices for teaching specific computing topics.

Our faculty and MS and PhD students study broadly in both of these facets of computers and education. We build new systems, run them at scale, and design interfaces and study the human impacts of technology in the classroom. We gather and analyze data about student behavior and experiences to better understand the learning process within CS education and education more broadly.

Weekly Meetings

We hold two weekly meetings where many faculty and students from the area attend. Participants are both in-person and virtual.

• Research group: Where we give feedback to someone’s research in progress, or listen to a guest speaker.
• Reading group: Where we reflect on a paper.

Updated timings, topics, and meeting links/location will be posted in our area Slack channel. Contact Geoffrey Herman, Colleen Lewis, or Craig Zilles for access to our Slack.

Faculty

See https://cs.illinois.edu/research/areas/computers-and-education