The alignment of computing education with neoliberal logics has limited its epistemological, ontological, and axiological goals. It normalizes the delinking of computing from politics, economics, and social realities, turning computing classrooms into sites for erasing marginalized voices and production houses for software labor. The instrumental ideology that attacks public education and teachers has reduced computing teaching to the acquisition of value-free and abstract skills, and teachers’ roles to the transmission of discrete concepts. We present two counterstories developed with six high school teachers to demonstrate resistance to the normative ways of doing, being, and valuing within computing education through their three-year-long curricular collaborative design (co-design) work. We employed composite counterstory methodology to create fictional characters from our collective teacher experiences while protecting our identities. Drawing from qualitative analysis of video recordings and transcripts from five online teacher reflection sessions at the end of the co-design work, we developed composite counterstories to understand: (1) How have teachers resisted the normative role that computing education plays in introductory computing classrooms within their curricular design? (2) How has the co-design process supported teachers in becoming transformative intellectuals in computing education? We developed narratives to illuminate emergent themes from the analysis and demonstrate how teachers questioned the abstractness of the discipline, compartmentalized identities promoted among learners and teachers, and resisted software labor production as the end goal of computing education. They identified co-designing as an opportunity to have a voice in educational transformation, continue to grow professionally, foster trusting relationships, and build solidarity towards joy and possibilities.
Unplugged activities can broaden access to introductory computing in schools with limited technological infrastructure, but their representational design varies considerably. This paper examines how unplugged activities can be reworked with embodied elements such as theater, narration, and choreographed movement to support short-term understanding of introductory computing concepts among secondary-school students aged 13–17 in Brazilian public schools. We report six embodied adaptations addressing error detection, cryptography, binary numbers, image representation, finite automata, and sorting. Our contributions are: (1) a design rationale grounded in unplugged pedagogy and embodied learning; (2) a documented set of embodied adaptations, including notes on their origins and representational mapping; and (3) an exploratory evaluation based on two focal school implementations, with a pre-/post-test (52 students) in one school and an exit questionnaire (40 students) in another. Descriptive results show consistent immediate gains across all six concepts, with larger gains for image representation, cryptography, and binary numbers. Qualitative responses suggest high engagement and perceived accessibility, while also indicating uneven depth across concepts. We interpret these findings as context-bound evidence of feasibility and short-term promise, not as proof of causal superiority, and we discuss implications for representational design, observer versus performer embodiment, and future comparative research.
This article offers a critical analysis of the role of the body in the development of AI in the field of education. It challenges the dominance of symbolic and disembodied AI models based on abstract information processing and advocates for a paradigm shift toward embodied AI grounded in situationality, emergence, and sensorimotor coupling. Drawing on post-cognitivist frameworks, the article highlights the cognitive and experiential limitations of current GenAI systems, such as the loss of proprioception, multimodal agency, and the devaluation of embodied practices. It proposes a redefinition of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) centered on a perceptual-affective choreography. The article advances a more inclusive and emancipatory vision of AI in education, aimed at fostering creative, critical, and situated learning through a set of embodied design principles.
In one of the significant results from early computing education research, Pea identifies a computer-as-mind metaphor that novices use in ascribing mental properties of personhood to the computer, which causes students considerable conceptual confusion. In characterizing this as students' superbug, Pea uses a mind-as-computer metaphor, the converse metaphor to the one that students use. In doing so, he makes visible a metaphor that has become one of the predominant metaphors of mind in mid-to late-20th century theorizing in psychology and the cognitive sciences. I take both of these metaphors (computer-as-mind and mind-as-computer) to be the superbug that plagues not only student attempts to program but also computing education more broadly. The purpose of this article is to argue that these computer-mind metaphors are a steady undercurrent that runs from the cognitive sciences through computing education and the research on it, what is problematic about these metaphors, what causes this metaphorical affliction, why we might want to cure ourselves from it, and how we can do so. Key to this cure is to counter disembodied views of human reasoning and action, epitomized in first generation cognitive science, with embodied and enactive theoretical perspectives, epitomized in second generation cognitive science and in multimodal and embodied approaches to the social sciences.
Programming anxiety is a well-documented challenge in introductory computing courses, particularly among students with no prior exposure to programming. Scaffolding strategies such as pair programming, Parsons puzzles, and starter code templates are widely used to reduce anxiety and build confidence during the early stages of learning. Although starter templates often include explanatory comments and partially completed code, the relative effectiveness of these different scaffold types in mitigating anxiety has not been systematically examined. This article reports findings from a controlled experiment conducted during the first laboratory session of an undergraduate C programming course for students from different engineering and science disciplines. Pairs of students were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: a control group using blank templates, a comments-based scaffold group, and a code-based scaffold group. Coding anxiety was measured using a questionnaire with subscales related to self-efficacy, partner interaction, and peer judgement. Contrary to our expectations, the control group showed a greater reduction in coding anxiety than either scaffolded group, and students in the comments-based condition reported larger decreases in anxiety than those receiving code-based scaffolds. These findings suggest that for beginners, even well-intentioned scaffolds can temporarily increase the perceived difficulty in task completion.
