Computer Science Class of ’60s Speaker – Kathi Fisler ’91, Brown University

Kathi Fisler ’91 survived her early attempts to learn computing through the patience and support of the Williams CS faculty. She headed to graduate school after being ovewhelmed at a summer internship interview and never looked back (though she still misses the purple mountains). She is currently a Professor (Research) of Computer Science at Brown University and co-director of Bootstrap (a national K-12 outreach program for integrating computing into existing classes). Her current research focuses on computing education, with an emphasis on how people reason with and about formal systems. Outside of CS, she likes a good jigsaw puzzle, a bad pun, and a nice hike.

Thursday, November 21 @ 8:00pm
Wege Auditorium (Reception to follow)

“Curriculum Design as an Engineering Problem: Lessons from the Field”

New computing curricula are being created every day. Seemingly every permutation of words like “teach”, “kids”, “code”, and “CS” has been turned into an organization (or company). Technologists everywhere are either being drafted to weigh in on curricula…or are doing so anyway.

Everybody’s got an opinion or three. But in the current and foreseeable reality of computer science education in the USA (and in many other countries), what does reality look like and how can we be
effective in it? Might it even be that by working with reality, we may actually get better outcomes than if we ignored it?

This talk will distill lessons from Bootstrap, one of the largest computing outreach programs in the USA.

Joint work with Emmanuel Schanzer and Shriram Krishnamurthi.

 

Friday, November 22 @ 2:35pm
Wege Auditorium (TCL 123)

Kathi will give a second talk for the Department of Computer Science Colloquium, “In Defense of Little Code.”

More information: https://csci.williams.edu/class-of-60s-speaker-kathi-fisler-91/