History of the Center

In 2016 President Obama launched the CS for All Initiative demonstrating the foresight that computing education is a new fundamental literacy in American education. He declared not only that computing education was in the best interest of the United States in the emerging global technical economy, but that it had to be deployed equitably, justly and fairly. Computing education would not be exempt from the correlation of race and geography with quality and access that are chronic characteristics of American education. Hence, the challenge to American education institutions. The then president of Georgia Tech, Bud Petterson, and the incoming dean of the College of Computing, Charles Isbell, reaffirmed that Georgia Tech is a public institution with a responsibility to the whole public, and sought to heed the call of the CSforAll initiative. 

The Constellations Center for Education in Computing was founded in 2017 in response to that challenge. Its founder and Senior Director, Kamau Bobb, was a program officer at the National Science Foundation at the time, in the Directorate for Computing and Information Science and Engineering. He helped shape the national research agenda on the best and most equitable structures to deploy national-scale CS education, and reconceive the relationship between K-12 and higher ed institutions in service of that goal. The center has since focused on building the infrastructure for computing education in the metro-Atlanta area and around the state, and has engaged hundreds of students, teachers and faculty, and is positioning itself as a national thought leader in democratizing computing education.