Emergency Remote Computer Science Education in Brazil during the COVID-19 pandemic: Impacts and Strategies

At the end of 2019, there was an outbreak of pneumonia in Chinese territory that quickly spread across the globe. Due to its infection characteristics, several face-to-face activities that brought many people together had to be rethought. In this critical scenario, teaching was abruptly changed into a modality called Emergency Remote Education (ERE). Thus, many professors had to adapt materials and resources from traditional teaching to the ERE modality without any previous planning and organization. The main goal of this study is to present how ERE has been conducted by professors in the field of Computer Science in Brazil. To achieve this goal, we prepared an electronic questionnaire, which was answered by 137 professors from 69 Brazilian educational institutions. The main results achieved by this research include the impacts observed and the strategies that have been practiced by such professionals. In short, we identified that ERE provided a rupture in Computer Science Education, as the lack of pedagogical strategy and absence of remote learning experience. Many of the problems are the result of the pandemic, but the lack of efficient crisis management by political entities and the social inequality made ERE more challenging for CS professors in Brazil.