Recently I heard a British author on the radio lamenting that the world is more obsessed with what Lady Gaga wears (I would think it probably goes beyond her clothes!) than that the oceans are dying. How to turn that around? I don’t believe that young people are less idealistic than when I was young. So how do we transform that youthful obsession into action?
On a recent trip to the U.S., I saw a program on California schools taking students to glean a harvest (collecting the undersize, misshapen, slightly spoiled produce). The produce that the students collected was subsequently used in the school cafeteria to provide nutritious meals for the students. The farmers were happy, the students and teachers doing the gleaning were happy, and the whole school population benefited through healthier eating. Clearly this experience went far beyond the Lady Gaga range of engagement.
There is an opportunity to appeal to the more altruistic side of our students through computer science. The series of videos produced for CS Ed week (http://csta.acm.org/Advocacy_Outreach/sub/CSEdWeek.html) showcased the diversity of endeavours using and dependent on computer science. It would be great to build on that and reinforce the message that CS can be linked to doing good and solving the world’s problems.
I remember trying to convince a couple of girls who were in my programming club to take computer science as a subject the following year. “But I want to be a doctor”, “I want to do things for others” were their responses. I clearly did a poor job of letting them see that CS was in fact a means to bettering society.
It takes imagination and energy on our part as educators to go beyond, for example, the teaching of syntax or hardware specs. I heard recently of a volunteer program in Canada, for example, that uses Alice to help native students tell their history and incidentally learn to program. The volunteers are modeling the altruistic nature of education and helping students realise that their history is valued and valuable.
So the challenge is there for all of us. How can we use this amazing discipline we teach to excite the minds of young people to be more interested in saving the oceans, saving lives, saving the planet?
If you have any ideas or suggestions, please share them.
Margot Phillipps
CSTA International Director

This post is based on remarks I gave at the Town Hall session on K-12 CS-Ed at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, Atlanta, October 1-2, 2010.
My job here today is to make a case for talking across boundaries within the context of K-12 CS education, to make the argument that the complex problem of changing K-12 computer science education is best addressed by the combined forces of K-12 teachers AND college and university faculty AND people who work in the computing industry. We need to do a lot of talking across perceived boundaries, and make sure we do it effectively, along the way letting go of any suspicion, any disdain, any fears we have of the other. In particular, there are times when college people can be paternalistic and dismissive in comments about and treatment of K-12 teachers. Instead, we all must be respectful of the knowledge and experience our colleagues bring. We have to learn the meaning familiar terms have when they are used in a different context than we might be used to, learn the meaning of a new lexicon, and map known experiences and concepts into new venues.
We can make big changes happen in K-12, especially if we all get together and work on it. But I have come to understand over the past year that it is complicated and change will be slow. There are really two parts to changing K-12 CS education: curriculum, of course, and infrastructure. And there are roles we can all play in both of those.
For curricular change, the K-12 teachers know their students, their age groups, their grade band. They have a frame of reference that the rest of us don’t have, and are often quite expert in student engagement and the use of a range of pedagogic practices. They can help college faculty be realistic about what we can expect from entering college students, what their knowledge base will be. As we develop better working relationships that span K-16, we can all contribute to a curricular continuum vis a vis computer science education.
People in the academy or in industry must keep in mind that, even in tough economic times, you have institutional resources that K-12 teachers and schools do not have. Invite area K-12 CS teachers to your campus or company, provide breakfast or lunch, give teachers a chance to connect with each other and with you. Join CSTA yourself and encourage the area teachers to join. Encourage them to form a CSTA chapter. Offer them a place in which to hold chapter meetings.
What’s involved with infrastructure change? First of all, people outside K-12 need to understand that change has to happen state by state, and will likely require a different process in every state. We need to raise our voices to demand that the term STEM, when used by government people, must include computer science. We need to agitate for colleges to list high school computer science among the expected courses taken by applicants. We need to encourage states to allow high school CS courses to satisfy a requirement for graduation, as is the case in Georgia. We need to inform the appropriate officials in our states about the teacher education programs in Georgia and Indiana that lead to endorsements for teaching CS.
When possible, take advantage of the opportunity to talk across groups. Discuss what the needs are in K-12 and how to help and how to ask for help. There are exciting efforts now underway: Exploring Computer Science is a wonderful high school CS curriculum developed in the Los Angeles Unified School District and available through the CSTA web site; keep an eye out for the new AP Computer Science course and test. The course is being prototyped this year at a number of schools, and there is also information on the CSTA web site about that effort; CS/10K is an effort to develop 10,000 high school CS teachers for 10,000 schools; another NSF effort is the solicitation released on Monday of this week, Computing Education for the 21st Century, which has a goal of engaging “larger numbers of students, teachers, and educators in computing education and learning at earlier stages in the education pipeline.” NSF is looking for efforts that target middle school, high school, and the first two years of college so today’s discussions are a great opportunity to begin to look for ideas and collaborators!; keep an eye on the Dot Diva / New Image for Computing (NIC) initiative, sponsored by WGBH and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), which is trying to create an exciting and positive image of computing for high school girls; check out National Lab Day and volunteer at a school near you; and lastly, help bring CS Ed Week activities into a school near you or into a school where you work in order to raise awareness of the role of computing and help increase student exposure to CS education.
Finally, a few words directly to those of you who are not K-12 teachers.
Consider some employment and salary data. Among women workers in the U.S. there are a lot of teachers. In fact, there are over 2 million women teaching in just elementary and middle schools. There are way fewer women in computer science and IT related jobs. But women in CS and IT jobs earn considerably more money than the teachers do, and more than half are among the top 10% of all full-time women earners in the country. In America, I think it is safe to say that the salary paid for a job category usually correlates with the prestige accorded to that job. The more you earn, the more prestige accorded to your job. The more prestige accorded to your job, the more people are likely to listen to you.
Unfortunately K-12 teachers earn much less than they should, and are accorded much less prestige than they should be. I want to argue that those of us not in K-12 should go against the tide, and set an example by valuing the contributions of our colleagues in K-12. But we can also exploit the fact that people may be more inclined to listen to us because we have job titles like software engineer, or information systems manager, or network systems analyst, or professor. Use the bully pulpit you have by virtue of position to fight for K-12 CS education. Help in the trenches with technology and curricular issues. But also engage with the infrastructure issues. Be a voice for K-12 CS education within your technical community, and within your political community, your local school board, your state. For those of you in industry, communicate to your company about how they can have an impact, encourage them to give money and support to efforts that really make a difference, not just to easy feel good activities. Ask people from the K-12 world, in what ways could corporate support help them. Become informed through collaboration with K-12 educators. When you use your position to advocate for K-12 CS education, people will let you talk because you are a technical person with expertise, but they will really listen to you if you are informed by collaboration with K-12 educators and you are passionate, truly passionate, about K-12 CS Education.
Valerie Barr
CSTA CT Task Force Chair

I was prompted after the last CSTA board meeting to write the following, which has now turned into a blog post.
My basic question is whether we are doing ourselves any favors by going for a variety of and proliferation of different courses in computer science.
My conclusion, of course, is that it’s a bad idea, or else I would have phrased the title question differently and would have started this out differently.
At the university level, where I teach, the usual term for the course I’m talking about is “CS0”, because that’s the way it was put many years ago by ACM in the definition of the standard curriculum. CS1 and CS2 are the first two courses in the major; CS0 is the non-majors course that many of us believe should be taken by all students as part of general education requirements.
I would argue that there are two basic reasons for a CS0-like course.
* Because there is general purpose computer science subject matter that all students should learn in order to function effectively as citizens in modern society.
* Because students who study a CS0 course might well want to take more computer science either as majors or minors, and the job predictions and national interests say that more majors and minors is a good thing.
Both of these are laudable goals.
The first question that arises, then, is the extent to which argument 1 is accepted by those in positions of power in the school systems. Given the Running on Empty report and what we all know to be true, the answer is: not much. For the most part, the education world doesn’t accept the contention that all students should study some basic computer science.
If reason 1 isn’t accepted, we don’t ever get a chance to argue reason 2.
So let’s look at CS0 as defined by and supported by CSTA and ACM. By my count, we have at least four different statements of what could be, at the high school level, the CS0-like material that “everyone” ought to know.
* The Level 2 standard of CSTA;
* Exploring Computer Science;
* The new AP CS Principles course.
*CS0 as a university course defined by the standards of the professional organizations;
I look at all of these as being sufficiently similar that if we could get any one of them accepted on a mass scale, we would be very much farther ahead than we are now. No, if we had only one such course accepted, we would not be able to accommodate all possible students and interests. But if we are starting from zero (or nearly zero), then yes, getting to 50% is a win. If we are starting from zero, and we cannot make the case for any change whatsoever, then we aren’t getting a win.
In addition to the CS0 courses that are not intended as part of a computer science undergraduate major, there is a plethora of courses that could be considered to be CS1, the first course in the major:
* Visual Basic;
* C++;
* Python;
* Java;
* AP Computer Science;
* and then there are other courses in Alice, and Scratch, and so on.
My arguments are fairly simple.
* The issue of getting CS into K-12 is not an intellectual issue of content, but rather a marketing issue (distinguishing real computer science from the use of computer applications; and making it clear that real computer science has serious value) and a logistics issue (displacing other desiderata in a world of scarce resources and a scattered and distributed world of largely public education).
* We have not been successful so far in convincing the bureaucracy that CS is really “there”. I would maintain that if we cannot be coherent in our message about what real computer science is and how it should be taught, we will be unable to convince administrators that it is necessary.
* We do damage to our position by offering a plethora of CS0 options, because what we are doing is asking the school administrators to become the experts in computer science education in order to know what is best for their schools. We are the experts, not they. Their past position has been “no”. If we require them first to become experts, we won’t ever get them to “yes”.
* We cannot lament the isolation felt by K-12 CS teachers if we contribute to that isolation. It has been said many times that the infrastructure costs (time, hardware, software, re-tooling, professional development, etc.) are much higher for CS than for other disciplines. By promoting five different courses, each of which requires PD, software, etc., we are creating a situation in which we need to be five times as successful (in terms of numbers) as other disciplines, in getting into the schools with teachers and classes, in order to generate the same sizes of teacher communities. Yes, we know that once one learns Spanish and French, Italian isn’t all that hard, and once VB and Alice are mastered then Java can be dealt with. But we are at the zero to one step, not the two to three step, and that first step is a lot higher than the rest.
Summary:
That which gets us closer to a general acceptance of argument 1 is a good thing.
That which doesn’t get us closer is not a good thing.
A plethora of general courses increases costs, isolation, PD needs, …, and makes us look like True Believer fanatics instead of professionals with an established discipline.
Duncan Buell
CSTA Board of Directors

I just completed Douglas Rushkoff’s new book, Program or be Programmed, and found it an interesting read. He is a well-known author, having written several books on new media and popular culture. He writes in a style that is understandable to “non-techies.”
In this book, he identifies “10 commands” with respect to the digital age, clearly a play on the Judeo-Christian notion of 10 commandments. I found it interesting that many related to what Fred Brooks identified in his classic article No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering as essential conceptual constructs in software engineering.
Brooks’ must-read article (a copy of which can easily be found by Googling ‘Brooks “No Silver Bullet”) identifies four essential difficulties with learning to build software: complexity, conformity, changeability, and invisibility. Brooks, widely regarded as the “father of software engineering”, argues that there is no Silver Bullet (with obvious reference to the folklore beliefs of how to kill werewolves) with which to kill all that plagues poor software projects. And Rushkoff, likely unaware of Brooks’ classic article (as it does not appear within his bibliography), builds several of his commands around these four “essences” of software engineering.
Rushkoff’s most interesting command (at least to me) was his tenth: arguing that everyone needs to know how to program. Rushkoff divides the world into 10 types of people: those who can program and those who cannot (the bad binary joke is mine). He argues that those who cannot program, will themselves be programmed by their computers. And while he argues simply that this is bad (with a chapter full of reasons why), this command got me thinking about the possible implications for “computational thinking” in K-12. While programming does appear as one of the 7 Big Ideas of the NSF-funded AP-CS principles group (http://csprinciples.org/bigideas.php), it is not clear that the authors expect that programming is intended for all — they are simply creating a series of pilot courses built around these 7 Big Ideas that will possibly become a new AP CS course. I am left thinking about several questions:
1) Should programming be a key component of “computational thinking” skills (whatever these should mean) in K-12?
2) Are programming skills, or for that matter any skills, the right way to think about what “computational thinking” should mean?
3) How might anything done with respect to programming in a high or middle school programming class (offered to all students) have any impact on students’ lives if there were no reinforcement in other classes, or in other activities with which they are involved?
Steve Cooper
CSTA Vice President

Many dedicated and resourceful individuals have been working on inspiring the public school system to adopt a computer science friendly curriculum in grades k-12. While Google’s efforts in California have begun to see some glimmer of promise, we’re still left with a large portion of the country that’s ill-prepared to make such an unprecedented commitment to the future of education.
With all of the budget-cuts, protocol and red-tape, how could computational thinking ever stand a chance in that ever-growing pile of educational paperwork? Instead of putting the whole cause on pause while we wait to get through the endless layers of formality, I suggest that we try resorting to some guerrilla tactics! It’s time to go straight to the students to help them be prepared and eager for the changes coming their way. We can begin planting the seed for the importance and fascination of computer science before students are ever able to sign up for a CS class. But how is such a lofty and magical goal obtained? The Internet!
If we want students to seek out computers, first computers have to seek them out. We’re attempting to do exactly that with Picture Me in Computing, a worldwide digital flashmob that will be taking over the most popular social networking sites on November 10th, 2010 (111010.) Picmecomp is a campaign that was started as a way of bringing computer science to girls by simultaneously overwhelming every facet of social media. Our goal is to have every technical professional and supporter of women in computer science join in by tagging all of their tweets, blogs, Picasa, Flickr and Youtube uploads with #picmecomp. If enough people participate and get their friends to participate, we should be able to reach a significant portion of today’s teens, as the majority of them belong to at least one online social networking channel. The key word “picmecomp” will link the pieces of social media to picturemeincomputing.org where students can browse around and find out more about a life enhanced by computer science.
If you have a resource to contribute or if you’d like to find out more about how you can be a part of the digital flashmob this Wednesday, please visit:
www.picturemeincomputing.org
Kiki Prottsman
Women in Computer Science
UO CIS Graduate Teaching Fellow
(541) 701-WICS

Massachusetts now has a local CSTA chapter! The first meeting of the Greater Boston CSTA chapter took place on October 23. Kelly Powers and Padmaja Bandaru, the co-presidents of the chapter, along with the support of the two event sponsors, the Commonwealth Alliance for IT Education (CAITE) and the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative (MTC), organized an effective, motivational first meeting.
Fred Martin and Holly Yanco of UMass Lowell were invaluable in organizing the day and leading parts of the event. Steve Vinter of Google was another big supporter and participant in the meeting. The response was excellent, with forty people attending the Saturday meeting.
The morning was spent with introductions and brainstorming topics for future chapter meetings. Chinma Uche, the president of the Connecticut CSTA chapter shared her experiences with us about starting a local chapter. Attendees ate lunch together, then broke into groups for afternoon workshops. Half of the group attended a CS Unplugged workshop led by Karl Wurst of Worcester State University. The other half participated in an un-conference where eight topics were generated on the fly and groups met on those topics for half-hour periods.
It was encouraging to see such enthusiasm on the local front. It seems that every teacher in the room had been craving this sort of collaboration and networking and now, the opportunity had finally arrived. Knowing that there are organizations, universities, and corporations in our area behind our efforts and willing to help in any way they can, is inspiring and reassuring.
The next meeting will take place on November 30 in Marlboro, MA. The meeting topic will be Computer Science Education Week, which takes place December 5-11. Any teachers interested in attending, in person or virtually, can email [email protected] for more information.
Hopefully, Massachusetts can sustain the interest and enthusiasm of this first meeting to make the local chapter a constructive and productive organization for years to come.
Karen Lang
CSTA Board of Directors