[A transcript of the SIGCSE 2010 conference: Table of Contents]
This panel aimed to start the discussion of how we might identify which CS education papers have had the greatest influence on our practice of CS education. Each panelist produced a short list of candidates and also suggested criteria and principles that the community might use over time. Mike Clancy made explicit the idea that we should consider both papers that affect how we teach and papers that affect what we teach. This is an interesting= process that most areas of CS eventually approach. A few years ago, OOPSLA began selecting a paper from the OOPSLA conference ten years prior that had had the most influence on OO theory or practice. That turns out to be a nice starting criterion for selection: wait ten years so that we have some perspective on a body of work and an opportunity to gather data on the effects of the work. Most people seem to think that ten years is long enough to wait. You can see the list of papers, books, and websites offered by the panelists on this page. The most impassioned proposal was Eric Roberts's tale of how much Rich Pattis's Karel the Robot affects Stanford's intro programming classes to this day, over thirty years after Rich first created Karel. I was glad to see several papers by Eliot Soloway and his students on the list. Early in my career, Soloway had a big effect on how I thought about novice programmers, design, and programming patterns. My patterns work was also influenced strongly by Linn and Clancy's The Case for Case Studies of Programming Problems, though I do not think I have capitalized on that work as much as I could have. Mark Guzdial based his presentation on just this idea: our discipline in general does not fully capitalize on great work that has come before. So he decided to nominate the most important papers, not the most influential. What papers should we be using to improve our theory and practice?