Which hat are you wearing today? Enabling perspectives while learning computer science

Computer science has a wide variety of applications in a wide variety of fields. Yet computer science education focuses primarily on the theoretician´s perspective. We believe that if a variety of perspectives are brought in during learning, learners´ intrinsic motivation can be increased, and learning computer science can be made more engaging and personalized. In this work-in-progress paper, we propose the concept of `hats´ for augmenting computer science learning material with different perspectives. Hats are different perspectives which can be donned by the learner while learning computer science. We propose examples of hats such as Programmer, Historian, Job Seeker, Troubleshooter and Visualizer. To enable the use of hats while learning, we propose a web-based interface to augment base learning content such as textbooks with additional learning content classified under different hats. To provide scale in populating hats, we propose algorithms to automatically find content from the internet that can be categorized under different hats. We also present the results from a pilot study conducted using the hats interface.