CS Ed Week 2025: Celebrating Visionaries in Computer Science
CS Ed Week is a time to celebrate CS education and educators. We often start the week in reflection to express gratitude and honor the giants that above us. This is my story of my CS heroes.
I can still recall the day my dad brought the first computer into our house, a yellow-ish Compaq of the mid 90’s. I was in my first decade of life and naturally and instantly understood basic computer navigation, file systems, task manager, installations, and cable hookups; essentially I knew everything I could about the computer that one could learn on their own without additional resources. Since my dad worked long shifts at a water treatment plant and my mom worked in my elementary school, my interest in computers was paused through adolescence, and upon reflection, at the time, I didn’t even know there was more to learn.
My first CS hero is Dr. Frank Neubrander, a professor at Louisiana State University and the Executive Director and Chair of the Gordon A. Cain Center for STEM Literacy. In 2016, Dr. Neubrander encouraged me to join his recently launched STEM education initiative, the “LSU Pathways”. These pathways were designed to equip high school students with skills needed to succeed when studying disciplines such as CS, Engineering and Biomedical at LSU. At the time, I had just graduated with a undergraduate degree in Mathematics and still wasn’t even sure what Computer Science really was but Dr. Neubrander encouraged me to take a leap of faith and join in the CS pathway courses.
This leads me to my second CS hero, Fernando Alegre. In 2016, Mr. Alegre was the research assistant that was the program lead for the “Computational Thinking Pathway”. In other words, he was my first computer science instructor. He taught me to write program code in a graphical and educational environment called “CodeWorld” which uses a subset of the Haskell programming language. More importantly, he had a remarkable amount of patience as I would celebrate simple victories such as changing a color but struggled to understand syntax intricacies and the intricacies of different built-in functions. Mr. Alegre directly impacted my life as he believed in me when I needed it the most. Mr. Alegre indirectly impacted thousands of high school students in Baton Rouge as he taught secondary ed teachers the computational thinking skills, which in turn we would teach to the students of Baton Rouge and beyond.
In 2023, I was a member of the spring UW STEP CS cohort where I learned Computer Science through a new lens under the guidance of Dr. Amy Ko, my 3rd CS hero. At this time, I was feeling confident in my ability to write and teach basic programming skills that would enable a high school student to pass an AP test, create an interactive webpage, or run a mediocre autonomous robot cycle. During this spring semester, our cohort met almost daily and discussed how to teach foundational computing concepts in an accessible, inclusive, and joyful classroom environment. Dr. Ko respectfully challenged the historical practices of CS education and empowered me to upgrade my pedagogy as I now emphasize critical analysis of the technology that we use and create in our classroom, and beyond.
Admittingly, I am highly influenced by positive people that share themselves with me. The list of influential people in what I refer to as my “Computer Science world” continues to expand daily. I consider Dr. Neubrander, Mr. Alegre and Dr. Ko to be my CS heroes because for the past decade, these people have selflessly put their exceptional intelligence, resources, time, and network into expanding responsible, equitable and creative Computer Science Education for our youth and ultimately change our world for the better. I am guided by their wisdom, dedication (and grit) every day in my own teaching practices and life.
Who are your CS heroes? Become a member of CSTA WA today and share with us your story!
Michelle Laskowski is the President of CSTA Washington and a CTE Teacher at Fife HS (Fife SD)
