Editorial

Abstract

This issue of Computer Science Education is themed around collaboration. With technological advances bringing remote collaboration to K-12 classrooms and higher education on a broad scale, educators and researchers face new challenges and questions. The six papers in this issue address quite different aspects, and we hope that you will enjoy these perspectives just as we did. Schulz, Berndt, and Hawlitschek open this issue with a qualitative study on how educators and learners experience teamwork in teaching and learning arrangements. In their article Exploring students’ and lecturers’ views on collaboration and cooperation in computer science courses – a qualitative analysis, they present results of their analysis of a set of semi-structured interviews with participants from three German universities. Findings include that most students preferred teamwork, and the few risks they mentioned were related to different levels of skills and engagement within a team. Instructors, on the other hand, were concerned about the effectiveness of students’ learning of technical content and about assessing teamwork, an indicator that research results and best practices regarding collaborative learning have not been as widely received as one might hope for. Some criticism raised by students addressed lower levels of support from instructors than was considered to be needed and technical problems with tools. With respect to this latter point, we note that this study was conducted at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, so teaching and learning environments may have changed since then. It will be interesting to compare this snapshot to lived experiences during and after this disruption. Starting with a focus on young learners, the second article in this issue, Developing computational thinking collaboratively: the nexus of computational practices within small groups by Huang and Parker investigates collaborative learning in a middle school context. In their qualitative analysis of video observations, the authors study how middle school students engage with activities aimed at fostering Computational Thinking over the course of a five-week curriculum. Their work was driven by the observation that Computational Thinking practices and collaborative learning align well and, thus, several activities from the Creative Computing curriculum were adapted to leverage this connection. This study indicates that individual students can indeed acquire Computational Thinking practices when working in small groups; this can be seen as a response to one of the concerns documented in Schulz et al.’s article discussed above. Huang and Parker also provide vignettes documenting middle schoolers’ leveraging Computational Thinking practices while developing a solution to a given task as well as while testing and debugging their solution. These vignettes can serve as points of reference for future studies in this emerging area of research. Moving on to higher education, the work of Hawlitschek, Dietrich, and Zug is related to one of the findings from the qualitative study of Schulz et al. Their article, Effects of COMPUTER SCIENCE EDUCATION 2023, VOL. 33, NO. 3, 315–317 https://doi.org/10.1080/08993408.2023.2251331