Rewind to 2012/2013…to the time in my doctoral studies at Stanford when I was creating curricular slides for the FACT curriculum. I started one of the early lessons with “A is for Algorithm”. I remember thinking as I looked down my list of topics to cover, “Boolean logic in a few lessons, followed by Conditionals! Hmmm….How cool would it be if, by the end of the 6 weeks, I could have a full ‘ABCs of programming’?” That never panned out, of course. But the idea stayed with me.
Fast forward to Summer 2018…On my father’s 1st death anniversary, I pondered over what I could do to cherish his memory. Many of my previous trips to India in 2016-2017 had been planned around conference keynotes and presentations. (The last time I saw him was when I went to India to present at the ICCE 2016 conference in Mumbai in Nov 2016). On each of those visits my father would ask some version of the question: “If your research is around how to teach programming in school classrooms, why don’t you write a book for teachers?” He was a publisher, you see—creating books with Indian scholars had been his life for 65 years after he started work at the age of 20 and went on to create one of most respected Hindi publishing houses in the country. He worked until his last day. He passed away in June 2017 at his office (pictured here).
And so began earnest planning to craft an enduring resource for K-12 teachers on teaching programming that would capture in one place all the key ideas of teaching introductory programming for K-12 drawn from classroom practice and from research— in CS education as well as the learning sciences. About 6-8 months after creating the skeleton of the book, sometime in Dec-18-Jan’19, I decided to make it an edited collection with contributions from other experts in the field. I believe it was an email exchange with Simon PJ that crystallized that idea. Thanks, Simon! The end result is so much richer and better for it!
This mammoth effort culminated in the release of the A-Z handbook in June 2020 (a few weeks ahead of the (pre-Covid) planned release at CSTA 2020 in DC).
I dedicate the book to the memory of my father.