ABSTRACT
CS education research is inevitably interdisciplinary. The nature of CS, and of the
knowledge we aim to transmit in the course of education, is rooted in
mathematically-derived, computational, analytic science. However, the
circumstances of the classroom, the nature of education, and models of teaching and
learning, are areas that are amenable to investigation only through the human
sciences. This means that our specific area is theory-scarce and we have to look to
other disciplines for a theory base. The tensions of different perspectives make
coherent integration of the components of research-question, theory, method-
tricky. At worst, this can mean inappropriate use of “borrowed” ideas and
techniques. At its best, however, CS education can resolve these tensions into a new
and distinctive way of working. Peter Galison (Galison, 1997) has a construction of
how new areas of working can arise:
I intend the term “trading zone” to be taken seriously, as a social, material,
and intellectual mortar binding together the disunified traditions of
experimenting, theorizing, and instrument building [in subcultures of
Physics]. Anthropologists are familiar with different cultures encountering
one another through trade, even when the significance of the objects traded-
and of the trade itself-may be utterly different for the two sides.
