As the new school year starts, an old complaint resurfaces. A recent opinion piece has said once again that US higher education is failing US employers. Students are graduating without knowing how to write, how to do a critical analysis, how to think. The complaint is that students are learning facts (or maybe not even learning those) but not how to survive in the real world.
In everything, it would seem, there must be balance. I have taught more than once our junior level course on professional issues. Part of the reason for this course is to have students learn and think about how to make professional decisions about policy in the computing world. Some of these students will become managers and administrators. They will have to decide how to distinguish between company use and personal use of company resources. They will have to work up policies for complying with law on intellectual property. And as managers they may have to learn how to deal with squabbles among the people they supervise.
I start this course each time with a list on the board of key phrases and references that are the background to how we create policy. “Peter Zenger”, “clear and present danger”, “due process”, “trademark”, “patent”, “trade secret”, “copyright”, “due diligence” and so on. I teach at a US university, and our background begins with US policy, so your mileage may vary, but there will be a similar set of standards wherever one happens to be. I also point them to my university’s policy statement that (unlike at some other institutions) says that the student owns his/her own work submitted as assignments for classes.
I don’t expect these students to become lawyers, and I usually do not have a specific policy position I expect them to adopt. I do hope, though, that they get a background in how policy is created. If they embark on a software project that includes work from other people or other companies, they will need to know something about how to judge who owns what. That, certainly, involves critical thinking. On the other hand (and this is the real point of this blog), critical thinking has to start from a background of history and of society’s accepted norms. When lawyers and money get involved, the wink-wink-nudge-nudge “I didn’t know that I had to care about that” argument no longer works. That’s where it would help to have a basic notion of what “we” consider “due diligence” in ensuring that what we are doing is ok.
Santayana had it right (even if misquoted often): “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” This extends beyond history. Those who cannot do arithmetic are unlikely to be able to analyze competing economic trends to determine a proper course of action. Those who don’t know examples, precedents, and past history cannot reason by analogy when confronted with new situations.
It takes both a knowledge base of facts and the ability to reason about those facts in order to be successful. Yes, there needs to be a balance between getting students to learn basic fact and getting them to think, but both are necessary.
Duncan Buell
CSTA Board of Directors

I recently read a really interesting article on interactive teaching in computer science by .
The article, appearing in ACM Inroads (Vol. 1. No. 2) was interesting to me because it concerned teaching style/pedagogy, which is a topic that is too rarely discussed in post-secondary computer science education.
In his article, Diagnosing your teaching syle: How interactive are you?, Clear puts forward the argument that the current environment for university level computer science education (academic workload, managerial policies and practices, pressure to expand research output) engenders “a stifling conformity and natural conservatism in teaching practice.” Clear further notes that “the increasing focus on consistency in a mass production model of teaching militates heavily against innovation” in teaching.
The body of the article explores Clear’s efforts to get a better sense of student perceptions toward his course and the extent to which those perceptions may be impacted by the extent to which other instructors or the program as a whole use more collaborative and interactive teaching styles.
I won’t tell you what he discovered because you really should read the article for yourself, but I will tell you that his statement that:
“We need to imbue the process of learning with some inherent discomfort and challenge to achieve meaningful outcomes, which is characteristic of truly transformative learning experiences.”
really resonated for me.
So, when you look at your own teaching, do you believe that you challenge your students with interactive and collaborative learning experiences and if so, how comfortable do they feel with these practices?
Chris Stephenson
Executive Director

I think many of us (including faculty at liberal arts colleges) hold a pretty outdated view of what goes on in different kinds of institutions. We tend to think that at the larger universities people walk into giant lecture halls, wax eloquent (or not) about loops and decision statements and stacks and queues, and walk out again, leaving behind a bunch TAs who try to finish up the “teaching” job. But there have been some changes in this model over the last few years. Yes, universities tend to teach much larger lecture classes than we do at small liberal arts colleges. Yes, they rely a lot on teaching assistants. But the downturn in CS enrollments nationwide has forced them to think a lot more about undergraduate CS education than they used to, and think about pipeline. And about what is going on in K-12, particularly in high school computer science.
So I was at lunch last week with several CS faculty from a state university, including the folks responsible for their undergraduate CS curriculum. And they started talking about the numbers of students entering their program, and then they started talking about who teaches high school CS in the local area. And then they thought “what if we invited all the high school CS folks to come here for a gathering?” Which led to the question of what the outcome of that meeting would be. Didn’t take much to seed the idea that 1) getting all the high school teachers in touch with each other would be fabulous and 2) encouraging them to create a CSTA chapter would be great too!
I know times are tough, but it doesn’t cost that much to provide coffee and lunch for a group of high school teachers. Nametags are cheap, and facilitating discussion is priceless. So if you are at a university or a college that has a number of high schools in the general area, start collecting names, pick a date, and invite some teachers over! If you are a high school teacher who really would like a way to get connected to other teachers in your general region, why not contact the university or college nearest you and encourage them to host a gathering.
Valerie Barr, Union College
CSTA Task Force Chair

By Dave Reed
I recently ran across some statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau that I found interesting.
By 2008, the number of text messages sent on cell phones (357 per month, on average) exceeded the number of phone calls made (204 per month, on average). For teens, the gap between texting and calling is even more pronounced, 1,742 texts vs. 231 phone calls per month, on average. If anything, the texting gap has widened in the last two years as we hear reports of teens averaging 4,000 texts a month!
Clearly, smart phones and handheld devices are becoming the pervasive computer technology for young people. My guess is that desktop computers will soon go the way of the dinosaur, and that even laptops will decrease in popularity as many people realize that a Blackberry or iPad can give them all of the connectivity they need. The question remains as to how computer science education adapts (or doesn’t) to this shift. Will CS programs start to emphasize mobile computing, including the social implications of mobile technology?
Will programs continue to create courses on the development of mobile software (akin to Stanford’s iPhone class)? Can understanding mobile technology be the hook that interestsmore students to take a computing course?
Any thoughts, predictions, or experiences people want to share?
Dave Reed
CSTA Board of Directors

By Duncan Buell
I have just finished leading a three week workshop for faculty and grad students from the humanities. The topic was serious (digital) games for research and pedagogy. When we teach students about computing, we try to emphasize that computing usually starts with a good application, and that the nontechnical description and definition of the application is as much a part of computing as is the technical part of producing code. I have been struck in the last three weeks by how much this is actually true when one talks with people who have great ideas but will need help turning those ideas into working programs.
Some of our visitors, for example, were interested in building simulation games for teaching history. These would be games that provided a sense of history, a sense of decision making and the social dynamics that existed in different periods of history. Part of the goal of our workshop is to help frame these games and get their development started. To build out a history game like this will require graphics and animation, and of course there is some programming. But that’s only part of the process.
Although the imagery and the logic of the programs will be crucial, more important even than these technical issues is that the history be presented. To do that, the historians have to do something they don’t normally seem to do…present history as a set of rules. If you say nasty things about your unpleasant neighbor, then yes, you could get your neighbor banned from the village. But maybe your neighbor will call in some favors from the local baron’s manager, and instead you will find yourself up on charges of witchcraft.
The graphics and imagery are important, yes. Programming the rules may not be all that difficult. But sitting down with the historian to get all the rules spelled out. That could be tough. This isn’t just crunching numbers, whether for science or a business application. This is artificial intelligence, in that the goal is a program that simulates human behavior. And it is going to be hard to work out the rules for an experience that is both historically and culturally accurate but also rich enough and complex enough to be interesting and worth doing in a classroom setting.
Is this computer science? Yes, I think it is. Computer science is not just the programming of an application. It includes all the work that leads up to the programming. This involves quantifying the world and building out and organizing the rules that describe the world. If it can’t be described algorithmically, then it can’t be programmed. And who best to try to create that algorithmic description except someone trained in turning algorithms into programs?
Duncan Buell
CSTA Board of Directors

By Barb Ericson
It has been a hard year for computing teachers in Georgia. Many school districts are operating with reduced budgets and have cut teachers. Even though Georgia teachers aren’t unionized, the cuts were made based on seniority. Often the computing teachers had the least seniority and several were let go even though no other teachers in the school have the background or experience to teach computing classes. Several math teachers who also teach Advanced Placement Computer Science A were told that they couldn’ teach as many computing classes this fall, as they will be needed to teach more math classes.
But, on a more positive note, Operation Reboot which is a NSF grant to retrain unemployed IT workers to be high school computing teachers, has picked a second group. We started training 9 unemployed IT workers in Dec of 2009 and they co-taught with the existing computing teachers in the spring of 2010. Three IT workers have quit the program, but the remaining six will co-teach in fall 2010. They will earn their initial teaching certificates in Dec 2010. We picked a second group of 9 unemployed IT workers in May 2010 and they have started training. They will co-teach during fall 2010 and spring 2011 and earn their initial teaching certificates in May 2011. We will pick a third group in May 2011.
We also have a huge number of teachers and IT workers registered for the summer Computing in the Modern World workshop at Georgia Tech (over 40). We have been offering free webinars on Alice, Media Computation, GridWorld, and Greenfoot (see http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/ice-gt/1387). We ran Alice and Scratch competitions and had over 100 students come to take a practice AP CS A exam at Georgia Tech this spring. We had over 300 high school students attend a Cool Computing Day at Georgia Tech this spring. We had 560 Girl Scouts attend computing workshops at Georgia Tech this year.
So things weren’t all bad this year.
How have things been for you this year?
Barb Ericson
CSTA Board of Directors

Steve Cooper
A couple of days ago, the Chronicle of Higher Education had an interesting article about Salman Khan, a fellow who quit his job as a financial analyst to start creating curricular materials on the web in various K-12 areas. (See http://chronicle.com/article/A-Self-Appointed-Teacher-Runs/65793/ for more details.) Unfortunately, he doesn’t have any CS materials on the web, but he does have several STEM content areas, and the couple of math videos I looked at seemed reasonable enough. His website is:
http://www.khanacademy.org/
I first came across him when it was announced he had won a Tech award in 2009
In an era of technology, it is interesting to explore its possible impact in education. (See, for example Allan Collins’ new book, Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology: The Digital Revolution and the Schools. While I disagree with nearly all of his conclusions, he makes an intriguing case for challenges to secondary schools in the US in the Information Age, and the role technology can play.) I am a fan of MIT’s open courseware project and the availability of actual videotaped lectures seems to be a natural extension. Khan keeps his lectures quite short (the few I saw were under 10 minutes), and has a chatty and informal approach I think might appeal to lots of students.
Forgetting about the difficulty of trying to consider how to teach programming in an environment which is not interactive (and programming seems to be one of those skills that is best developed by doing rather than by watching somebody else do), I am still concerned that the Chronicle article seems to imply that this is the wave of the future, to someday replace college (and potentially high school) with purely on-line versions, through technology. Certainly, there are currently many on-line courses available, as well as a few degree programs. Perhaps I am a Luddite, but I’m not sure I’m ready to give up face to face instruction, performed (at least at the K-12 level) by instructors trained in pedagogy in addition to the content area (something Mr. Kahn readily admits he is not). I think that such materials as produced by Kahn are a potentially wonderful augmentation to traditional face-to-face instruction, but not a replacement for it.
Steve Cooper
CSTA Vice President

By Margot Phillipps
Excuse me if you have already found this gem, but I was sent this link and immediately formed a strong view that I’d like to meet Michael Trucano:
http://blogs.worldbank.org/edutech/worst-practice.
Michael is a Senior ICT and Education Specialist at the World Bank. Working for the World Bank, he clearly travels and sees the same mistakes being repeated around the world.
I had to refrain from prostrating myself on the floor of ACM HQ when I visited last year, as I am so over awed by their foresight in writing the ACM Model Curriculum for K-12 Computer Science Education and assisting CSTA in its formation. So it is no surprise that I’d at least like to shake the hand of this gentleman!
The first mistake he notes is “Dump hardware in schools, hope for magic to happen”. This is still a mindset. In New Zealand, schools are probably past the dumping of hardware in schools phase. We are now in the dumping in schools of ultra-fast broadband. We suffer from relatively slow internet speeds and there is a project to bring ultra-fast broadband to every school gate.
But mistake number 9 is “Don’t train your teachers (nor your school headmasters, for that matter)”. And without training and adequate PD, and the principal’s really understanding the importance of that PD, new hardware or new bandwidth will achieve little.
And of course, related to this is number 5 “Don’t monitor, don’t evaluate”. With the best of intentions amounts of money does get offered to schools for ICT Professional Development (PD) projects or put into centralised PD project. What school wouldn’t hold up its hand for some relatively un-monitored money. But it is possibly money wasted as “credible, rigorous impact evaluation studies” are not done.
And my other favourite was Number 8 “Assume away Equity issues”. There is an argument that computers can level out those equity issues but as Michael notes “they don’t happen without careful proactive attention to this issue.”
He left number 10 free. Mine would be “Place people from other disciplines in charge of your discipline”. I wouldn’t assume I could manage the Social Science curriculum of a school or school district or state or country, because my background is in ICT. So do our subject the honour of having people who understand the subject drive it.
What would you make your number 10?
Margot Phillipps
CSTA International Director

By Joanna Goode
Thanks to the hard work of the ACM Education Policy Committee and other organizations working to strengthen national policy support for computer science, there have been many important policy victories for computing education at the federal level. Issues of teacher certification, professional development, and curriculum have been highlighted as major topics which need to be addressed and strengthened.
As a community, I think we also need to start thinking hard about assessment. How can we measure student learning in a computer science classroom? How can we quantify what students know and can do? This is a challenge for a variety of reasons:
* Grant agencies and local educational agencies often want to see test score improvements to rationalize the existence of computing courses. So far, they often suggest looking at whether standardized test scores in math and/or science increase as a result of taking a computing course. To me, this seems to be measuring the wrong content knowledge. We don’t assess geography knowledge by seeing how literacy scores raise, right?
* Traditionally, computer science courses rely on one programming language and assess learning through the writing of programs. But, as we move away from a programming-centric version of computer science towards a more comprehensive model, how do we assess the rich breadth of the field without relying on writing programs in a particular language?
* There has also been an emphasis on the creativity of computing. How do we measure creativity in computing on a standardized test in which there is typically only one “correct” answer?
In thinking about this problem, I have come up with two different approaches to solving our assessment problem in computer science education. First, I think that much like art, a portfolio approach might be a good measure to show students’ breadth of knowledge about computing, while also highlighting the creative solutions that we want students to derive as part of their learning. Second, I think we might want to develop some test-type items that are aligned with the items offered on the NAEP tests, which currently assess student learning in a variety of other subjects (arts, civics, economics, geography, mathematics, reading, science, US history, and writing). These could be given to students as pre-tests and post-tests when they enroll in computer science courses, to demonstrate whether or not they are developing computing knowledge and skills as a result of the course.
What other ideas do CSTA members have about assessment?
How do you assess learning in your class?
Joanna Goode
CSTA Board of Directors

By Mindy Hart
I get the pleasure of teaching a service-learning based course at the university each semester. Within this course, undergraduate students are trained to conduct educational programs that fit the mission of our outreach program. And sometimes, for fun, I like to make them do work! One of the hardest questions we answer when working with the K-12 students is What is Computer Science? So as a final assignment this semester, I thought I’d ask my service-learning students to answer that question. Here is what they had to say.
Computer Science is
* A broad topic
* A challenge
* A deterrent to your social skills.
* A field where everyone can find a place
* A field with a 50+ year history
* A multinational multicultural field
* A team effort
* A very open environment where students cooperate and professors are integrated into their classes
* A way to change the world
* A way to innovate the way people operate in their daily lives
* About understanding
* Awesome
* Challenging
* Communicating effectively
* Creating the next generation of software
* Embracing new technologies
* Engineering
* Frustrating
* Fun
* Hard to teach correctly
* Helping the global community become integrated with technology
* Here in the USA as well as worldwide
* Innovative
* Logical thinking
* Magical
* Mathematical
* Misunderstood
* Multi-disciplinary
* Needed in many professions
* Problem-solving
* Programming
* Really tedious
* Research
* Respectable
* Rewarding
* Rife with social events to help with networking for future careers
* Somewhere to learn very diverse fields
* Still a young field
* Teamwork (collaboration of a diverse group of people)
* Useful for every branch of science
* Well-paying
* Whatever you make it (to an extent)
* Worthwhile
So what else would you add to the list?
I think this is actually one of the hardest questions for us to answer, but is imperative for creating an identity for computer science. I think our tendency is to offer non-examples such as “it isn’t just programming” or “it’s not just sitting in a cubicle.” And while these non-examples are helpful for delimiting ideas, it still does not give us a concrete idea of what it is. However, maybe we do not need a concrete idea of what it is because I think there is a reason for that (and it is stated in the next to last point in the list above) computer science is whatever you make it. It is important to note that it does involve aspects such as teamwork and problem-solving, but the more important message to send out about computer science is that it can encompass multiple interests and there is an element of computer science in many more disciplines than ever imaginable.
So, what is computer science to you?
Mindy Hart
CSTA Board of Directors