I don’t mean to be a piggy 10 year old, as you say, but I’m not quite sure what you’re talking about here. “There has been a lot of buzz in the past year of how we have aligned ourselves with the mathematics community.” We have? Who has? I’m a member of the ACM Education Board and the SIGCSE Board, and I’m not aware of either organization creating an alliance with the mathematics community. Is it CSTA? EPC? Do those organizations speak for all of CS Education? When I read Peter Denning’s columns in CACM, I see a community that sees itself as Science, Math, and Engineering. I don’t see this strong sense of alignment.

I know that Texas has decided that AP CS counts as a mathematics course, but in Georgia, the decision was to count AP CS as a mathematics course. Does that mean that Texas represents computer science? More than Georgia? Why would that be?

To be clear, while the standards are coming from the “Science Education Board,” their goal is “the core ideas in science in the disciplines of life sciences, physical sciences, earth and space sciences, and engineering and technology, cross cutting ideas and scientific practices.” If this is about “science, engineering and technology,” I expect to see some computer science. That’s certainly a space that computer science inhabits.

I share your goal for a (true) computing literacy course, but that’s not what I see at stake here. The NRC framework is describing “cross cutting ideas and scientific practices.” Even if that’s just in Science, that includes computer science. That’s what Scientists and Engineers use today. To not talk about it is a disadvantage to the Science students, whether or not they ever consider becoming a CS major.

Finally, I’m not beating up on any math or science educators. They rock. I’m responding to those setting the standards for the next ten years. Is it really the case that it will not be important for science high school students over the next ten years to know anything about CS? I don’t believe it.

Cheers,
Mark

I’m Melissa and I’m part of the team from http://www.zencollegelife.com/.

We recently posted an article about 50 Free Computer Science Classes Online on the blog. (Link - http://www.zencollegelife.com/2010/01/06/50-free-computer-science-classes-online/)

This gives a good list of courses about computers - from basic computing to programming, multimedia and artificial intelligence.

Please have a look and feel free to share it with your readers.

Thanks,

Melissa.

www.barbie.com/vote/

The student demand and schedule openings problem is so hard. Appealing to students can mean so many different things — challenging course, easy course, lots of flashy demos, projects — that may or may not fit an ideal vision of what computing education should be. I’m overwhelmed by how difficult of a balancing act this is as I try to get a new program under way.

I’m finding myself falling into the “what tools, what materials” trap a lot, unfortunately. There’s just so little time to think about overarching questions and skills when you teach all day and plan all night.

Barry Brown wrote:
>Such a curriculum exists! Have you heard of How to Design Programs and TeachScheme?

Sure. And these folks deserve lots of credit for energy, focus, etc., and a few good ideas. I haven’t seen the next generation of the IDE that you mentioned (but would like to).

It is always easier to praise than to give a really measured criticism, so I’ll bypass here what I think are the deficiencies of this approach.

I think Ann Sudol’s comments and analogies to Biology are directly to the point. What should it mean for a national curriculum to have “general biological literacy” as a goal for all students? To me, this is exactly the question to be asked about those subjects the society deems important enough to be taken out of “electives” and put into the much harder arena of teaching and learning where there may not be much initial interest and predispositions.

We can make analogies to “big deals” like reading, writing, literature, etc., and “lesser deals” such as learning to drive a car.

As she says, it’s not about what professionals do here that is the issue, but about the thresholds of fluency required to “be in the real conversation”, to “sit in the band”, etc., to “play the sport”, etc., rather than do the “air guitar”, “Guitar Hero” or “Fantasy Football” versions of these.

A key notion about biology is that it is neither about its terms nor about the 6 or so kinds of atoms that are the bricks for life. Similarly, I posit that computing is *not* about *data and the functions that manipulate them*.

One perspective to take on various curricula that have lots of work (and often quite a bit of the worker’s identities to the point of religious zeal) invested in a particular approach, is to compare it to the history of Pascal.

In my opinion, this was one of the biggest dead-ends and distracters in the pedagogy of computing. And the timing of it was even more unfortunate — most of the 4000 4 year institutions were just starting to jump on the computing bandwagon (despite there being only a few hundreds of real computer scientists at the time).

I think Pascal made its way largely because (a) Klaus Wirth can really write documentation, (b) it was very easy to implement (c) most people who were looking for something to teach computing with were very unsophisticated about computing and where it was going.

I think (c) is still the huge factor today, and this makes (a) and (b) carry much more danger than they should.

So, we can imagine that the combination of easy availability, popularity out in the world, and pre-done materials that take teachers off the hook, will again carry the day.

To go back to the analogy (and real parallels) with Biology, it’s hard to imagine that more than a few 8th or 9th grade bio teachers will have the knowledge and outlook to override text books and canned curricula when this is a good idea. And much harder (for me at least) to imagine this kind of curriculum building from K-12 teachers of computing.

So having great materials and tools and guides, etc., seem to be the most important thing to do, and again we have to give the DrScheme folks real kudos for putting their time and effort where their beliefs are to produce a full set of stuff.

The other analogy I’d like to bring up is in my opinion a really important and (to me) somewhat frightening one. Two pretty opposite poles in general education are “Back to Basics” and “Learn by doing and understanding”.

The Basics faction is well represented by books and materials by E.D. Hirsch and William Bennett. These could hardly be better written for their intended audience of parents and teachers. (I think they are way off and disastrous.)

However, it is much much harder to write materials representing the other perspective, and it is difficult to point to really good screeds which help parents and teachers understand what is really needed and how to go about making this happen. For one thing, the Basics track doesn’t really require parents and teachers to understand the subjects (nor does it require or achieve this with the students). Whereas, the “learning by doing and understanding” does require lots of understanding to happen everywhere.

Another analogy (which could be a little offputting for some) is between religion and science. Do we want students to *believe* modern knowledge, or do we want them to *understand it*?

Best wishes,

Alan

The same could be said of physics, astronomy, engineering, and the like. Those fields have the additional advantage of being immediately relevant to the lives of intro students. We can simply look around and *see* biology, physics, chemistry, and astronomy happening right before us! So the intro material seeks to explain physical phenomenon in terms that the average person can understand.

One aspect of the problem is that computing isn’t readily seen, heard, or felt. Most of it is in our heads in the form of mathematics. Consequently, CS doesn’t seek to explain computing phenomenon — we (humans) created all of it. CS seeks to invent new computations. We, as CS educators, tend to be dazzled by the latest inventions, whether they be hardware or software, because that’s what our field is all about.

In order for our field to mature, we need to take a moment to answer the question: what is computation? If we can answer that, I think we’ll be well on our way.