Michael E. Caspersen returns to CS
Since 1st January 2016, Michael is back at CS. Michael is associate professor (in programming and programming didactics) and have been employed at the department since 1998. For the past seven years Michael served as director of Centre for Science Education (CSE) and before that for almost six years as director of It-vest, Networking Universities at AU.
During his years of absence, Michael has maintained a close relationship to the department, and for 12 years (2003-2014) he taught Introduction to Programming in 23 instances for more than 5,000 students.
Michael's research area is computing education and he is member of the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE). Over the years, Michael has chaired 10 computing education conferences worldwide (of these, three in Aarhus).
He is involved in computing education policy as member of the ACM Education Council and as vice-chair of the joint ACM Europe and Informatics Europe Committee on European Computing Education (CECE).
For many years his research focus was exclusively on computing education in higher education, but since 2009 he has become heavily involved in computing education in high school.
Globally we are currently facing radical changes regarding computing in school, and many countries now have a national curriculum. Michael has recently received a grant for a Center for Computational Thinking where he'll work to develop and consolidate computing education in school with the ultimate goal that computing becomes a mandatory subject.
Michael will be teaching two first-year courses: Web Technology (Q3) and Computer Architecture (Q2); furthermore, he'll develop and teach courses in computing and computing education for high school teachers.