The History of Computing Education Research

Abstract

Teachers have been educating students about computing for many years. For almost as many years, computing education researchers have been studying, in particular, how students learn programming and how to improve that process. Programming languages such as Fortran (1957) and COBOL (1959) were originally invented to be easier than assembler and other early notations so that programming could be made available to a wider range of programmers. Programming languages such as BASIC (1964) and Pascal (1970) were invented explicitly to ease learning how to program. In the late 1960’s, researchers started gathering data, studying how learners were learning programming, when they did not, and how they experienced programming.