In your learning community, it is a part of the curriculum?
What do you know about computer science education? I have been involved in trying to bring it to K-12 for many years. I believe that the attention to this cause has mushroomed but not to the point where we as parents, as educators, as a community understand the importance of this subject.
I have been lucky enough to be involved in education for computer science at the supercomputing conference. Here is what I wrote in the Educational Technology Journal.
What is computer science education?
Overhauling Computer Science Education
It depends on who is discussing it. I think that this is a great way to share ways to think about making transformational change in education.
December 15th, 2011
Hello there Facebook friend! If you like this article, please help spread the word bysharing this post with your friends. Sylvia asks and so here it is. But wait. There is more.
“Students from elementary school through college are learning on laptops and have access to smartphone apps for virtually everything imaginable, but they are not learning the basic computer-related technology that makes all those gadgets work. Some organizations are partnering with universities to change that.”
THE Journal has run an important article about the efforts to overhaul Computer Science education in the U.S. (Overhauling Computer Science Education – Nov/Dec 2011.)
It’s long been a mystery to me that computer science isn’t being taught in U.S. schools. No, not computer literacy, which is also important, but often stops at the “how to use application x, y, or z” level. Why are we not teaching students how to program, master, and manage the most powerful aspects of the most important invention of the 20th and 21st century?
I believe there are two reasons, both based in fear.
1. Fear that adding a new “science” will take time away from “real” math and science. In my opinion, the US K-12 math and science curriculum has been frozen in time. It’s not relevant or real anymore, and needs a vast overhaul. But there are lots of forces at work to keep the status quo definitions of what kids are taught. And I do mean to draw a distinction between what students are taught and what they learn. For too many young people, what they learn is that math is boring, difficult, and not relevant, and science is about memorizing arcane terms. This is just a shame and waste.
2. Fear that computer science is too hard to teach in K-12. People worry that teachers are already stressed and stretched, that there aren’t enough computer science teachers, and that computer science is just something best left to colleges. That’s just a cop out. There are lots of teachers who learn to teach all kinds of difficult subjects – no one is born ready to teach chemistry or how to play the oboe, but people learn to do it all the time. Plus, there are computer languages and development tools for all ages, and lots of support on the web for people to try them out.
Please read this article – it covers a wide range of options and ideas for adding this very important subject to the lives of young people who deserve a relevant, modern education! Overhauling Computer Science Education
Sylvia
I would like to add my 2 cents worth.. We as teachers need, and some of us have had excellent support but we have often had to go to the professional development on our own. Since we as teachers do not make the decisions about curriculum, I believe that school boards, and community need to learn why we must broaden engagement.
SHODOR.org and their programs.
There are excellent resources available . Dr Robert Panoff has dedicated more than a decade in sharing resources. Shodor is a national resource for computational science education.
Our mission: to improve math and science education through the effective use of modeling and simulation technologies — “computational science.”
Shodor, a national resource for computational science education, is located in Durham, N.C., and serves students and educators nationwide. Our online education tools such as Interactivate and the Computational Science Education Reference Desk (CSERD), a Pathway Portal of the National Science Digital Library (NSDL), help transform learning through computational thinking.
In addition to developing and deploying interactive models, simulations, and educational tools, Shodor serves students and educators directly through workshops and other hands-on experiences. Shodor offers innovative workshops helping faculty and teachers incorporate computational science into their own curricula or programs. This work is done primarily through the National Computational Science Institute (NCSI) in partnership with , NCSA, and other NSF-funded initiatives.
A mentor works with students in the Shodor Scholars ProgramFor students from middle school through undergraduate levels of education, Shodor offers workshops, apprenticeships, internships and off-site programs that explore new approaches to math and science education through computational science.
Time and time again, Shodor has been recognized as a national leader and a premier resource in the effective use of computers to improve both math and science education.
Program to Offer “Computer Science Principles” Classes at High School, Undergraduate Leve
By Jan Zverina
The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and San Diego State University (SDSU), have received National Science Foundation (NSF) grants to jointly expand the computer sciences curriculum among San Diego’s high schools, community colleges, and universities.
The three-year grants, worth a total of almost $1 million, are for a project called ‘Computing Principles for All Students’ Success’ or ComPASS. The overall goal of ComPASS is to improve Southern California’s educational capacity for preparing high school and college students of all backgrounds and disciplinary interests to contribute to and participate in what has become a computationally driven economic future.
ComPASS contributes to a nationwide goal of training approximately 10,000 high school teachers to teach advanced placement (AP) computer science (CS) principles courses by the year 2015. This larger national program, the CS10K, was launched in response to national studies and task force reports identifying a crisis in U.S. workforce preparedness. The reports specifically cite a serious shortage of workers to fill workplace demands for trained, innovative computing experts and computational problem-solvers in every field. A brief presentation on the ComPASS project is on the agenda of the Wednesday, September 14th meeting of the San Diego County Board of Education.
“UCSD and SDSU are committed to addressing national challenges in computing education,” said Diane Baxter, director of education at SDSC and UCSD Principal Investigator for the ComPASS project. “This project strategically targets the critical elements necessary for offering stimulating and engaging college-preparatory computer science courses to all students in high school, when they are exploring directions and possibilities for their own futures.”
“A solid conceptual understanding of the ideas, logic, and principles that underlie computing will benefit all of our students, not just the computer science majors,” said Leland Beck, Chair of the Computer Science Department at SDSU and SDSU Principal Investigator for the ComPASS project. “It will also provide an excellent background for soon-to-be teachers in all fields.”
The ComPASS initiative adopts and adapts one of five national pilot versions of the CS Principles course developed through the CS10K program, guided by the content and standards established by The College Board’s CS Principles project (http://csprinciples.org/).
Then there are the strides made in Texas. Dr. Paul Resta has access to TACC , but also has his own center. The Conference SITE.Org is offering two tours of facilities to share and show computational science initiatives with those attending the conference.
Tuesday, March 10, Times TBA:
Education Visualization Lab and Visualization Center, The University of Texas at Austin – The Learning Technology Center Educational Visualization Lab is focused on the use of visualization technologies to understand patterns and relationships in massive educationaldata sets. It will also include a visit to the TACC Visualization Center that includes, Stallion, the highest resolution tiled display in the world; Longhorn, the largest hardware accelerated, remote, interactive visualization cluster. Was used by NOAA in predicting path for Katrina. (Limit 30)» Newsletter
Wednesday, March 11, Times TBA:
East Austin Academy College Prep – This middle school is designed to help low-income minority inner city students prepare for college and success in the future. All students participate in an innovate program known as Globaloria. Globaloria is a social network for learning, in which they learn to create educational web-games for social change. East Austin College Prep Academy is the first charter school to integrate the Globaloria network and curriculum as a school-wide teaching and learning opportunity, and offers required daily curriculum to all students starting at 6th grade. (Limit 30)
Thursday, March 12, Times TBA:
Texas Advanced Computing Center – Texas Advanced Computing Center is a leading resource provider in the NSF TeraGrid and operates two of the most powerful high performance computing systems in the world, which are used by thousands of scientists and engineers each year to perform research in nearly every branch of knowledge. TACC’s largest supercomputer, Ranger, can perform 579.4 trillion operations per second (or teraflops), and is nearly 30,000 faster than today’s desktop computers. TACC’s newest system, Lonestar 4, which went online in Feb. 2011, clocks in at more than 302 teraflops and offers nearly 200 million computing hours per year to researchers around the world. (Limit 30)
Finally there is this paper that some of us wrote to share the idea of computational thinking.
Computational Thinking, Computational Science and High Performance Computing in K-12 Education: White Paper on 21st Century Education
by
Raymond Rose, Rose & Smith Associates, Inc.
Henry Neeman, University of Oklahoma
Bonnie Bracey Sutton, The Power of US Foundation
Vic Sutton, Emaginos
Executive Summary (full paper, posted on etc journal can be found here)
The 2010 National Educational Technology Plan says “…technology is at the core of virtually every aspect of our daily lives and work…. Whether the domain is English language arts, mathematics, sciences, social studies, history, art, or music, 21st-century competencies and such expertise as critical thinking, complex problem solving, collaboration, and multimedia communication should be woven into all content areas.”
The US has, since the late 1990s, been trying to describe what a 21st Century education should look like. Futurists are trying to divine the skills that will be needed for jobs that do not yet exist, employing technologies that have not yet been invented. However, a careful look around can allow us to see many areas that have been virtually unnoticed by those who are focused on 21st Century Skills.
Supercomputing – sometimes called high performance computing – is not a new technology concept, but the supercomputers of 25 years ago were about as powerful as a cell phone is today, and likewise the supercomputers of today will be no better than a laptop of 10 to 15 years from now. As the world of the biggest and fastest computers has evolved and these computers have become increasingly available to industry, government, and academia, they are being used in ways that influence everyday life, from the cars we drive, to the food in our cupboards, to the movies we enjoy.
Supercomputing is not an end in itself, but rather the technological foundation for large scale computational and data-enabled science and engineering, or computational science, for short. It is a collection of techniques for using computing to examine phenomena that are too big, too small, too fast, too slow, too expensive, or too dangerous to experiment on in the real world. While problems with small computing footprints can be examined on a laptop, the grand challenge problems most crucial for us to address have enormous computing footprints and, thus, are best solved via supercomputing.
As a result, in order to be competitive as a nation, we need to produce knowledge workers in far greater numbers who understand both what supercomputers can do and how to use them effectively to improve our understanding of the world around us and our day to day lives.
The thinking about large scale and advanced computing has evolved, too. Today, we realize that, while not everyone will be using big computing in their jobs, they will need to understand the underlying concepts.
These concepts collectively are referred to as “computational thinking,” a means of describing problems and how to solve them so that their solutions can be found via computing (paraphrased from Jeanette Wing, Jan Cuny, and Larry Snyder). Computational thinking includes abstraction, recursion, algorithms, induction, and scale.
The Power of Us 
Alexander Repenning says:
December 21, 2011 at 2:58 pm
A quick reaction to your statement “It’s long been a mystery to me that computer science isn’t being taught in U.S. schools.”
We ARE teaching CS in U.S. Schools. Our Scalable Game Design project has explored how to bring CS education to middle schools in inner city, remote rural and Native American communities in the USA. The results are overwhelmingly positive with an average of nearly 50% girls participating. Have a look at our results. It can be done. We even have early indicators of evidence of transfer between game design and simulation building activities. Here is a video showing some of the teacher training:
http://www.9news.com/news/local/article/202987/222/Teachers-play-video-games-for-science-
Dr. Repenning replied to this in an email