Everything You Need to Know About CS Education: Open Results from a Survey of More Than 18,000 Participants

TL;DR

This paper presents comprehensive survey results from over 18,000 learners worldwide, providing insights into CS education trends, challenges, and emerging formats like AI and in-IDE learning, supported by an open dataset for future research.

Contribution

It offers an extensive, updated dataset and analysis of CS learners' experiences, highlighting new trends and challenges in the evolving landscape of computer science education.

Findings

Diverse global learner representation

Emerging interest in AI and in-IDE learning formats

Identified key challenges in CS education

Abstract

Computer science education is a dynamic field with many aspects that influence the learner's path. While these aspects are usually studied in depth separately, it is also important to carry out broader large-scale studies that touch on many topics, because they allow us to put different results into each other's perspective. Past large-scale surveys have provided valuable insights, however, the emergence of new trends (e.g., AI), new learning formats (e.g., in-IDE learning), and the increasing learner diversity highlight the need for an updated comprehensive study. To address this, we conducted a survey with 18,032 learners from 173 countries, ensuring diverse representation and exploring a wide range of topics - formal education, learning formats, AI usage, challenges, motivation, and more. This paper introduces the results of this survey as an open dataset, describes our methodology and the survey questions, and highlights, as a motivating example, three possible research directions within this data: challenges in learning, emerging formats, and insights into the in-IDE format. The dataset aims to support further research and foster advancements in computer education.