We live in a world that is increasingly full of hate, cruelty, and violence. These cultural forces are destabilizing schools, colleges, universities, libraries, and other places of informal learning, and every learner, teacher, and leader in them, threatening education and democracy in the U.S. and worldwide. What is our role, as computing educators and scholars, in resisting this hate? In this talk, I argue for love. A kind of love that shows up not as an abstraction in our values, but in the concrete ways that we teach computing, in the questions we ask about learning computing, in the technologies we create to support computing education, and in what we choose to teach about computing. To make this case, I examine my own experiences with love in computing education and then offer a conception of love in computing education, drawing upon a rich history of scholarship on love and learning. I then deconstruct some of the fundamental tensions between love, computing, and computing education culture. I end with several examples of loving computing education from scholars in our community, each showing us how we might reimagine our teaching, research, and institutions around love. Through this transformation, I hope we might inspire a generation of youth to help create both loving uses of computing, a loving society more broadly, and perhaps a more loving scholarly community for ourselves.

Amy J. Ko is a Professor at the University of Washington Information School and the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering (courtesy). She directs the Code & Cognition Lab, where she and her students study computing education, human-computer interaction, and humanity’s individual and collective struggle to understand computing and harness it for creativity, equity, and justice. With her collaborators, she’s invented many tools and programming languages to support debugging, program understanding, reuse, and learning; founded and sold a venture-backed startup; developed numerous ways to weave equity and justice into computing education pedagogy, culture, and technology; and impacted local, state, and federal K-12 CS education policy through community organizing and advocacy. Her work spans more than 130 peer-reviewed publications, with 19 receiving paper awards and 4 receiving most influential paper awards. She is an ACM Distinguished Member and a member SIGCHI Academy, for her substantial contributions to the field of human-computer interaction, computing education, and software engineering. She received her Ph.D. at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in 2008, and degrees in Computer Science and Psychology with Honors from Oregon State University in 2002.