The Power of Analogies in Introductory CS Education (Abstract Only)

Abstract

To convey abstract concepts to students with little to no computing background, faculty members often adopt real world analogies to make CS concepts more relatable. Existing work on the power of analogies in CS education [1-2] has looked into the effectiveness and limitations of metaphors. However, there is no existing forum or repository that educators can share successful and interesting analogies. For this Bird of Feathers session, we invite all interested computer science instructors to share their successful (or unsuccessful) analogies with details on where and how the analogies were used, the related CS concepts, and how a particular analogy might fail to convey the instructor's ideas. We propose to focus on analogies for CS1/CS2 concepts because students in those classes may benefit the most from this teaching technique, and appropriate use of analogies for non-majors might help attract students to the field of computing. This BOF's topic relates to the general trend of teaching diverse groups of students in introductory programming courses and provides an excellent opportunity for CS educators to discuss successes and failures in using metaphors in our classes. The second purpose of this BOF session is to propose a suitable online medium where existing and new analogies can be shared with the CS education community. This BOF can be the beginning of a long-term online collaborative project where faculty members continue to share their metaphors with the community.