Rediscovering the Passion, Beauty, Joy, and Awe: Making Computing Fun Again, part 8

In his keynote at SIGCSE 2007, Grady Booch exhorted us to share the "passion, beauty, joy and awe" (PBJA) of computing. This led to a series of room-packed sessions at the following seven SIGCSE symposia to explore that idea from different angles. They have provided a forum for sharing:

While the initial PBJA sessions evolved from a need to understand and combat the enrollment crisis of nine years ago, we are now seeing an explosion of interest in our field. There are colleges where the numbers have vast exceeded historic highs, with computer science enrollments up 22% in 2014. This PBJA "movement" was born out of this enrollment crisis, but is not tied to it. There is always value in sharing novel best practices and advocating techniques to make computing fun for beginners.

This year we have gathered three educators who represent online, self-paced curriculum, platforms and community that together have reached millions of people. How does the online experience support or prevent PBJA in ways traditional classrooms don't? What innovative ideas did they employ to support collaboration, and how do they manage the "bad elements" of their user base? What is the right balance between easy-to-autograde, follow-me curriculum and wide-open, "be creative" experiences for the first-time user? Which works best, blocks-based or text-based programming? How can the "big data" from the mistakes of others be leveraged to give each user a personalized experience? The hope with this panel is to explore best practices of self-paced online offerings in these crucial early years, for participants of any age, in terms of extolling the PBJA of computing.