Welcome to the inaugural Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Global Computing Education Conference (CompEd). CompEd is sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group for Computer Science Education (SIGCSE).
When it was created by the SIGCSE Board, CompEd was envisioned as an opportunity for SIGCSE to reach new audiences around the globe. The proposal was inspired by the very positive reaction to temporarily moving one of our other conferences from Europe to South America. That experience made it clear to the SIGCSE Board that there were people who wanted to be a part of our community but who could not travel to any of our existing conferences on a regular basis. It was our hope that CompEd would serve those people by expanding and connecting the computing education community around the globe.
It is difficult to imagine now, but the SIGCSE Board voted to create CompEd in February 2017. It is a testament to the dedication and hard work of the CompEd steering committee, organizing committee, and program committee that the conference has come together in the way that it has. I would especially like to thank steering committee chair Brett Becker, steering committee members Susan Rodger, Boots Cassel, Alison Clear, and Ming Zhang, conference co-chairs Ming Zhang and Bo Yang, and program co-chairs Steve Cooper and Andrew Luxton-Reilly. You have created something that was only a dream fifteen months ago, and I and the rest of the SIGCSE Board are in your debt.
As an attendee at the first CompEd you have a unique experience ahead of you. The conference offers all of the things you would expect at a SIGCSE conference, including paper, poster, panel, and birds-of-a-feather sessions, a keynote, and working groups taking place prior to the start of the conference. CompEd is also co-located with the 2019 ACM Turing Celebration Conference (TURC), which gives you the opportunity to see talks by Turing laureates and other notable computer scientists. Finally the conference offers the opportunity to see the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding, something that I highly recommend. I expect that we will all leave the conference energized about the experience.
CompEd 2019 is the first conference of its kind for SIGCSE. The conference organizers and the SIGCSE Board would appreciate hearing what you enjoyed about it, and you should complete your evaluation so that we can use your ideas to shape the next conference in 2021. We anticipate that this will be the first of many wonderful experiences in computing education communities around the globe.
