Why does it always feel as thought we are moving one step forward and two steps back?
After holding an annual summer camp in January (Yes, here in New Zealand it is summer) for 23 students in various stages of programming expertise, I was heartened by the way that the participating students have continued working and helping each other via a Google group. The more experienced students are helping out the newbies and encouraging them along. Students who have come to camp in past years have built a training site. And another former student is rebuilding our organisation’s website and wants to get an alumni organised.
I was also heartened by a new summer camp in Computer Science, held for 14 year old girls. This camp was held in conjunction with a CS4HS workshop for teachers. The girls had a great time and learned heaps. Many staff and students at the university gave up their time voluntarily in their summer holidays to help out. All this gives a sense of moving forward.
Today, however, one of the students from the programming summer camp reported to me that he wouldn’t be able to get supervision at his school for a contest he needs to participate in so that he can be selected to represent New Zealand in the International Olympics in Informatics. “They have told me that they take no part in computer sciences, as it’s not a part of their curriculum”, he said.
So I am sad to say that despite our occasional wins and the clear interest, enthusiasm, and dedication of our students, the war for our subject to be fully accepted isn’t won.
Thank goodness for all those students who plough on, regardless of the lack of formal tuition, support, or community.
So when you look around your programs, where do you see the wins and losses?
Margot Phillipps
CSTA Board of Directors
International Representative

I’ve recently come across two perspectives on undergraduate enrollments, one about STEM disciplines, one specifically about CS. Both warrant comment.
First, there’s a recent posting on the SLATE Moneybox blog that looks at general STEM enrollments. The author, Matthew Yglesias, counterposes efforts to recruit more students into STEM undergraduate majors against the research interests of some STEM faculty and the research funding model that supports many universities. He suggests that there are STEM faculty who do not want to see enrollments grow, based on the following logic (I’ve added some detail, consistent with his picture): more undergraduates will require that more graduate students will have to work as teaching assistants, which means there will be fewer graduate students available to work on faculty research, which means research will progress more slowly, which means that faculty will have to take more time between grant applications, which means that less research money will come into the universities.
Clearly this is a very contradictory situation. We have an incredible need for more STEM majors. In particular, there is tremendous demand for CS majors, far outstripping the numbers currently graduating. We need to encourage students who have nascent interest, not drive them away. And we should not mortgage our long term research and innovation possibilities, and our ongoing ability to apply technology to ever more areas of life, because of fears about short term research slowdown. Perhaps, as Yglesias says, reviewing the financing model for research and for graduate students at colleges and universities is called for.
There’s a second enrollment related issue that’s also brewing. At some colleges and universities CS enrollments are booming. This is great news and problematic at the same time. And the picture is not uniform. Eric Roberts addressed the situation in a 2011 blog post, hypothesizing reasons for Stanford’s booming enrollments. We get a small college perspective from a recent article in the Swarthmore College Daily Gazette. In both cases, enrollments are straining the teaching capacity of the department.
The difficulties inherent in addressing rapid enrollment increase are very real and require some amount of administrative creativity, faculty nimbleness, etc. The overall gap between supply and demand in industry is quite large, and is not likely to be satisfied by a few years of increased enrollment at a few schools. However, I urge those at schools with these increases to recognize, as Roberts did in his posting, that the situation is not the same at all schools, and in some cases irreparable harm has already been done. The combination of low enrollments and a tight economic situation put CS departments on the chopping block at several institutions. We can’t expect to see those departments return any time soon. At other schools the CS major was eliminated, leaving behind minimal CS faculty and just a minor program. Some schools are just “doing okay”, modest enrollments, justifying their faculty lines, but that’s about it. Furthermore, small schools have limited ability to adjust to enrollment swings. At a small college that favors small class size and highly interactive hands-on pedagogy we cannot simply shoehorn more students into a class when enrollments go up. There simply is not room, so we rely on the willingness of faculty to teach overload sections, which is an unsustainable strategy for the long term.
I could go on at length about the vagaries of college and universities, and a model that makes it difficult to adjust staffing in response to enrollment shifts, but that would take us too far afield. Suffice it to say that the current CS enrollment picture, still uneven across the country, is complex, and nobody should draw conclusions about the whole picture based on their local situation.
Valerie Barr
CSTA Task Force Chair

I am currently serving on a committee where I am the only public school K-12 educator. The other members are college educators. The educators on this committee are spread throughout the U.S. During a recent teleconference, we were discussing mobile devices and one of the participants made the statement that within six months every student in school will have a mobile device. I was taken aback by that statement because I had hoped to use Poll Everywhere in my math class but not enough students have access to the Internet through a mobile device. I also mentioned to the committee participant that my school does not have wireless access. He seemed genuinely surprised. Additionally, I did not think that within six months all of my students will have a mobile device. I asked the question, “How can we deal with equal access?” My question was not addressed.
I spoke to Joanna Goode, CSTA Teacher Education Representative, about his statement and her response was that if it is question of owning a mobile device or putting food on the table, the family will choose not to purchase the mobile device. I also read an article in our local paper (the Orange County Register) which reiterates Joanna’s comment.
http://www.ocregister.com/articles/home-325490-ezequiel-family.html
The family that is highlighted in the article had given up nearly all of their technology because they just could not afford it.
I really thought my colleague’s comment was isolation until I read the Winter 2011 issue of OnCUE, a publication for members of Computer Using Educators (CUE). In his article Mobile Devices and the Future of Learning David D. Thornburg states: “Educators are starting to realize that every child is coming to school with a powerful mobile device. If this is not true in your school, it will be in six months.” Thornburg does not address Equal Access. I assume he did not feel he needed to since every student will have a mobile device.
In another article in the same publication, Tm Landeck makes the statement: “Of course this requires that all students have a cell phone, but then what happens when a student’s cell phone is dead, forgotten at home, or they just don’t have one?” That is a question I really needed an answer to, but his article never gave an answer.
Equal access is something I deal with in my computer class. I have students that don’t have computers at home or have a computer at home and no Internet access. Is my school that unique? I supervise the computer lab at lunch and after school to accommodate these students. We don’t have a loaner problem and when I mention it to my administration I receive a negative response.
How do you deal with equal access?
What is your reaction to the statement, “All students will have a powerful mobile device within six months”?
Myra Deister
CSTA At-Large Representative

Each year, the College Board provides state-by-state statistics for each Advanced Placement (AP) exam, broken down by various demographics. The numbers of women taking the AP Computer Science exam in 2011 are illustrative of the continuing gender imbalance in computing. The table linked below organizes the 50 states and District of Columbia according to the percentage of AP CS exam takers who were women. The percentages of women across all AP exams are also listed for comparison, as well as the overall percentage of exams that AP CS constitutes for each state.
While nearly 55% of all AP exam takers are women, the percentage for AP Computer Science is much lower, only 18.9%, with a median percentage across all states of 15.4%. It is interesting to note that two states, Texas and California, account for more than 31% of all AP CS exams and both have higher than average participation by women (24% and 21%, respectively). If the numbers from these two states are omitted, the remaining percentage of AP CS participation by women for the rest of the country is 17.1%.
The numbers in this table are collected from the College Board state-by-state data files at:
http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/ap/exgrd_sum/2011.html.
The table of state-by-state results (both pdf and Excel versions) are on the CSTA website at:
http://csta.acm.org/Research/sub/CSTAResearch.html
Dave Reed
CSTA Board of Directors