Sometimes, if you wait long enough, new information comes along that helps you see things more clearly, or at least in a way that helps you gain perspective. For some time now I have been procrastinating on a blog response to the AP Report to the Nation, but a major report, released by ACM, has helped me find a way to articulate exactly why the AP CS results are so alarming.
The number of students writing the computer science AP examinations is continuing to decrease. In 2001, 23,422 students wrote either the CS A or B exam. By 2003, the number had dropped to 21,745. By 2005, the number of students writing the APCS exams had declined to 19,021. While one might argue that the percentage of the decline from year to year is not extreme enough to cause profound concern, the fact that there is a continuing pattern of decline clearly is.
This pattern tells us that students are loosing interest, they don’t think computer science has educational or employment value to them, or they do not have time to take AP CS because they are too busy taking AP courses in all those other disciplines. This worries me a great deal. But I have been putting off writing about it in fear of receiving the seemingly inevitable comment that there is nothing to worry about because all the jobs are being “outsourced” anyway.
This is why I was so happy to read ACM’s new comprehensive report called Globalization and Offshoring of Software. This report, developed by a team of internationally recognized computer scientists, industry leaders, labor economists, and social scientists, finally gives us a coherent, balanced, and rigorously researched view of the increasing globalization of the software industry and what this means for countries who want to maintain their technological edge.
The report notes that globalization trends in the software industry have been fueled by rapid advances in information technology as well as government action and economic factors. What it also found, however, is that, despite intensifying competition, offshoring between developed and developing countries can benefit both parties.
The study cites data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) which indicates that more IT jobs are available today in the U.S. than at the height of the dot com boom. This trend is evident despite a significant increase in offshoring over the past five years. In fact, U.S. IT employment in 2004 was 17% higher than in 1999, and the BLS data reveals that IT jobs are predicted to be among the fastest-growing occupations over the next decade.
So what does this mean for educators? The report also tells us that IT workers and students can improve their chances of long-term employment in IT occupations by acquiring a strong educational foundation, learning the technologies used in global software, and keeping skills up to date throughout their careers. In other words, they can ensure a better future for themselves by learning computer science. The brightness of the future for individuals, companies, or countries, rests on their ability to invest in building the foundations that foster innovation and invention.
Meeting this commitment begins with K-12 education. It requires us to improve computer science education in K-12. We must do a better job of helping students understand that there are opportunities open to them, that computing is the mechanism by which the greatest problems of this century will be addressed, and that they need to begin building their skills now, because the future is always closer than we think.
Chris Stephenson
Executive Director

With everything else they have on their plates right now, it is almost impossible for K-12 computing teachers to keep up with all of the research about computer science education that might be relevant to their classroom practices. In fact, just finding material that is relevant to K-12 is a considerable chore.
One of the major benefits of CSTA membership, however, is access to the CSTA virtual binders – a collection of top-notch, classroom relevant articles culled from ACM’s huge Digital Library.
So far, dedicated volunteers from the CSTA Board of Directors have put together three binders and the newest one, on Careers, just went live this weekend.
There are now three CSTA virtual binders, each covering a different topic: Careers, Equity, and Teaching Strategies. Each binder provides full-text access to up to 15 articles pulled from the very best professional and educational computer science journals.
CSTA members can access these binders directly from the CSTA website (csta.acm.org) by clicking on K-12 Virtual Binders in the Resources section on the left column. Once you get to the binders page, click on
Login for e-binders
and you can access the binders directly using your ACM Web Account. (CSTA members who have not done sor yet can simply follow the instructions to set up their free ACM Web Account.)
The CSTA Membership Committee, under the direction of Charmaine Bentley, has been spearheading the creation of the virtual binders, and plans are underway for at least three more themed binders to be developed over the next few months. If you have some ideas about good topics for new e-binders, please post a comment here and let us know!
Chris Stephenson
Executive Director

On the CSTA website, two of the benefits listed for CSTA individual membership are access to:
* free online training courses available through the Sun Academic Initiative, and
* the Career Resource Centre, ACM’s source for career articles, job board, and career assessment tools.
Links to both of these resources are available from the CSTA website (left side under Professional Development). Entry into either of the areas may at first seem intimidating, but the effort will be well rewarded.
Whether your exploration in the Career Resource Centre is through the career assessment tools or through the articles available, the investment in time will provide information that should be of use to you and to your students.
This is even more evident for the courses available from the Sun Academic Initiative. When registering, for any of these excellent courses, ranging from “Fundamentals of JAVA” to topics in Distributed Computing Concepts and more, the savings become readily apparent. These lessons are fast-paced, easy to understand, and more than justify the cost of CSTA membership.
Please, avail yourself of these benefits, and let us know how else we can be of service to you, the most important resource of CSTA, our members.
Charmaine Bentley
Membership Chair

Like many, during the holiday season I consider the many things I have to be thankful for. High on my list this year is the CSTA. It is hard to believe the organization is only a year old!
So many exciting things are happening at all levels. Perhaps the most exciting thing to me is the creation of local chapters! What a great chance for local teachers to get to know each other and feel less isolated. I am so pleased for each area that had a person willing to step up and organize a meeting; I hope more chapters will form this year.
Being involved with the CSTA provides many opportunities: to learn about the status of CS education far beyond the local community, to think about best practices in teaching CS, to begin creating the change we want to see in the world. Personally, being on the board has provided numerous opportunities. Most important: the chance to work and become friends with some smart, dedicated, interesting individuals. One truth I have found about participating with this group is the more involved I am willing to be, the more I get out of it. I am so glad I was willing to take the leap to be more than “just a middle school teacher”!
I hope you will think about filling out an application for a position on the Board of Directors or volunteering to help on one of the committees. If you’re a computer science teacher or just interested in K-12 computer science education and you aren’t a member, why not join now?
Michelle Hutton
Equity Chair

I have never been much of a hardware geek. I like my computer to do what I want it to do with as little fuss as possible, but beyond that, I probably do not pay as much attention as I should. Sometimes, however, when something especially good happens, even I must acknowledge that hardware is a beautiful thing.
Since the day CSTA was first brought into being by ACM, we have been working on the dream of an online resource that would provide teachers with access to a rich repository of teaching and learning materials for K-12 computer science education.
Toward this end, a small but dedicated committee of volunteers has been collecting resources being developed at JETT (http://jett.acm.org/) and TECS (http://tecs.acm.org/) workshops across the country, developing a classification scheme based upon the Model Curriculum for K-12 Computer Science, and preparing the existing resources for entry into the repository. This Spring we achieved a major project milestone with the unveiling of our new user interface which was created by students at Villanova University, under the direction of Dr. Lillian Cassel.
The web repository is being built using DSpace, a highy-customizable open source repository facility created at MIT. The CSTA repository utilizes the standard Dublin core metadata so that the material it contains will be harvestable by other major repositories such as the National Science Data Library.
The really big news, however, came just a couple of weeks ago when Sun Microsystems Vice President Greg Papadopoulos (a member of the CSTA Advisory Council) offered to provide the equipment upon which this new repository will reside and all future development will be carried out.
And here is what Sun provided:
Sun Fire V210, 2 x 1.34Ghz UltraSPARC IIIi, 4 x 512MB DIMMS, 2 x 73GB Drive, 4 x 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet, ALOM Remote Manager, Single PCI Slot, 1PSU & Java ES & Solaris 10 pre-installed.
Localized Power Cord Kit North American/Asian
X-Option – Internal DVD-ROM Drive Slimline, for Sun Fire V210 and Sun Fire V240.
1GB Memory Expansion Kit (2*512MB) low-profile DDR PC2100 or faster registered ECC DIMMs for use in Sun Fire V210, Sun Fire V240, Sun Fire V440, Netra 240, Netra 440, Sun Blade 1500 and Sun Blade 2500.
Internal 146GB 10K Ultra 3 SCSI HDD, 3.5″ x 1″ drive with barrier plate
Solaris 9 CD-ROM media kit (latest release). SPARC Platform Edition.
Thanks to this most generous donation from Sun, the CSTA web repository is closer to being a reality than we expected. Our plan right now is to have it up and running and available to all CSTA members by the summer!
Thank you, Sun, for helping bring us so much closer to our goal!
Chris

Anyone who does not believe that teaching computer science is a tough job has never faced a row of student faces day after day or tried to keep all of the hardware and software actually functioning. And that does not even begin to address the increasing stress that all teachers are facing. So every once in a while, it is important to reflect upon what matters and why what you do is important.
Today our CSTA Equity Chair, Michelle Hutton, sent me a student course evaluation that she has been keeping since 2002. Here is what the student had to say:
“I’ve learned not to be afraid of computers. I’ve learned some of the fundamentals and code of CS. I’ve learned that learning computer science is a process where you need to learn one thing before you move on to the next. Once you have mastered a concept, creating something you’re proud of can be easy & fun.”
Even if they do not say it quite so well, my guess is that all of you have students who have felt the same way, and who, if not immediately then some day, have realized the importance and usefullness of what you are trying to teach them.
Chris

As a certified soft touch, I’m constantly running into the problem of students asking for extensions on their work. It is hard to deny a motivated student additional time to keep working on a problem rather than admitting to failure.
I think this may be more of a problem in CS than in other classes. In most classes, it is fairly straightforward to tell when a problem is finished and fairly difficult to know if it is correct without the answer key. In math, if I have an answer to the equation, I’m done, whether or not the answer is accurate. In humanities, I know if the paper has said what I have to say and whether I hit the page count, whether or not I was blowing hot air or completely wrong about the causes of WWII.
In CS, students have the golden test – does the program run? Until it will compile without errors and fulfill some approximation of the requirements, it is clearly not done. For a dedicated student who is used to working until the work is complete, it can be difficult to learn when to walk away, especially when the grade depends on the assignment. The difference between an overlooked missing semicolon and a significant logic error can be indistinguishable to a novice.
How can we better support our students in learning when to give up, when to persevere, and how much time to allot for assignments?
Michelle Friend Hutton
Equity Chair

I have to admit that I’m a bit of a Sudoku addict. Rarely has a morning gone by that I don’t play one or two of the many on-line versions of Sudoku that are available across the internet.
If you’ve somehow missed the Sudoku craze, it is a very simple number puzzle. You are given a 9×9 grid with some of the squares filled in with numbers between 1 and 9. Your job is to complete the grid so that each number from 1 to 9 appears once in every row, once in every column, and once in each of nine 3×3 subgrids.

For example, in the above grid, you can confidently put a 5 in the shaded box. Here’s why. You need a 5 somewhere in the second column. Because there’s already a 5 in the top-left and bottom-left 3×3 subgrids, the 5 must go in the middle-left subgrid. And in the middle-left subgrid, the 5 has to appear in the fourth row. (As a good teacher, I’ll leave it to you as an exercise to figure out why!)
To solve a puzzle, you fill in all of the empty squares by process of elimination. Depending on how many squares have already been filled in for you, this can be very easy or very hard.
So what does this have to do with computer science?
The other day I was talking with some fellow Sudoku fanatics when one of them mentioned that her daughter was particularly good at solving these puzzles. She said, “My daughter has this innate ability to recognize the patterns that occur.”
And then in her next breath, she said, “I wonder what sorts of careers would use that talent.”
Bingo. (The exclamation, not the career.)
“Has she considered computer science?”, I asked.
“Computer science? Gosh no. The last thing my daughter wants to do is to sit in front of a computer screen all day.”
Naturally, this was my opportunity to tell her about what computer science really is. It’s not just programming (though a typical computer scientist does some of that as well). Rather, it’s about problem-solving and algorithmic thinking. The pattern recognition skills her daughter has in Sudoku will serve her well as a computer scientist.
Finally, the thrill we Sudoku-lovers get when we finish a challenging puzzle is the same excitement I get when I solve an algorithms problem that has been particularly vexing. That satisfaction is what makes computer science so enjoyable.
While I’m not sure that my friend’s daughter is going to rush out and sign up for a computer science course, I feel fairly confident that she’ll at least consider the possibility the next time she has to sign up for classes. It’s conversations like this one that will help people to understand what computer science is and help to strengthen the role of computer science in K-12 education.
Robb Cutler
President, CSTA

I read a very interesting article about student cheating in Communications of the ACM recently that reminded me that finding ways to subvert the system is still very much a part of the mindset for many students and led me to wonder how much effort we can and should put into discouraging it.
I never really thought very much about cheating among computers science students until the late 1980’s when I was working in a computer science department at a very large university. When discussing this issue, the faculty tended to fall into two camps: the “perpetrators should be punished” camp and the “boys will be boys” camp. What surprised me, however, was that more of the faculty tended to fall into the latter than the former group.
What I found particularly irksome was the opinion among these folks that somehow computer science students were different or should be treated differently than other students in the university. Being a fine old institution, our university had a history of being particularly harsh in matters relating to plagiarism. A student in the English department caught passing off a couple of borrowed sentences as her or his own in an essay would be publicly disgraced and dismissed from the program and from the university. Why should the case be different for computer science students?
Keep in mind too, that this was back before the days when we began to look at our teaching methodologies in light of industrial practices relating to software development. There was no groupwork as part of the curriculum. There was just stealing, and the magnitude and creativity behind it was almost staggering. In those days people trooped off to the Computing Center to run and print their programs. Printouts were stolen with great regularity. Some students became seasoned dumpster divers, rifling through the cast off paper in the garbage for bits of useable code they could steal.
Sometimes, desperate times call for desperate measures. In order to curb what he perceived as a growing tendency toward “unofficial collaboration” one colleague of mine adopted a particularly successful strategy called “one cheats, two fail”. When he found duplicate code on individual assignments, he called both students into his office and told them that both of them would fail unless the copier confessed. Both students were humiliated, the student who did the original work learned to protect it more carefully, and rough justice was often administered to the cheater who refused to admit to the act.
In the 1990’s I also worked for an educational publisher and I would frequently receive email from students posing as teachers requesting copies of textbook teacher guides so that they could have the answers to the class assignments. Over time, I developed an almost uncanny ability to spot the pretenders. Usually it was their appalling grammar.
These days, students simply comb the Internet for snippets, applets, or entire applications to submit as original work. Some folks still defend this as justifiable on the basis that code reuse is a highly efficient and effective use of programmer time. Others remain vigilant.
How about you?
Chris

Sometimes we get so wrapped up in our own challenges that it is hard to extend our focus beyond our immediate concerns. For some reason, though, just when we are buried about as deeply as we can be in the issues of the moment, something comes along and hits us over the head and reminds us of the limitations of our viewpoint. This summer there have been two events that have brought this home to me in a profound way.
On June 28, I took part in a special panel session at NECC focusing on international perspectives on high school computer science curricula. This session, chaired by CSTA Curriculum Committee Chair Anita Verno and sponsored by the National Science Foundation, is part of a larger project to help us find successful models for developing and implementing a national computer science curriculum.
The panel featured several speakers from different countries, each of which had already begun implementing a comprehensive curriculum for computer science. Anita spoke about CSTA’s efforts to support the ACM Model Curriculum for K-12 Computer Science, Dr. Judith Gal-Ezer discussed Israel’s highly successful CS curriculum, Jackie Martin described Scotland’s national curriculum, Mike Chiles addressed South Africa’s new national curriculum, and I spoke about the comprehensive curriculum implemented in Ontario, Canada, in 2000.
As each speaker addressed the implementation phase of her/his curriculum development process, it became increasingly clear that countries who were further ahead in this effort than the United States had discovered several key factors that needed to be in place in order for the curriculum to succeed. These included a reasonable implementation time line, access to adequate resources (functioning hardware, support materials, textbooks), and professional development for teachers.
All of these are important considerations for CSTA to address as we attempt to improve computer science education. But something else happened at the presentation. Mike Chiles, the Director of Information and Technological Services at the Western Cape Education Department in South Africa, reminded us, in the gentlest of ways, of the cost of focusing too closely on our own concerns. South Africa, he explained, faces a unique challenge in its efforts to ensure an adequate supply of trained computer science teachers. The HIV/AIDS pandemic raging across Africa is taking the lives of so many teachers, and so many technically skilled people in business and industry, that it is not possible to find enough teachers for the classrooms. And then it hit us, speakers and audience alike. It is not just some “them” dying in a far away place. It is “us.” Teachers are dying. And I do not know what to do.
And now, we have a similar reminder much closer to home. A part of this country lies in ruins, families lost, homes destroyed, children, adults, and even pets displaced and afraid, their lives in tatters. This hurricane and its aftermath are testing as at our most foundational level, and in a country as generous as this, I do not believe that the people will be found wanting.
In Texas, everything is big, including the hearts of its people, and our friends at TCEA are already putting together a Task Force to help schools get their technology back up and running. This is the right thing to do. To offer what it is we know how to do best in the service of others. And I have promised TCEA’s Executive Director Ron Cravey (cravey@tcea.org) that CSTA will be there to help in any way that we can.
Right now, there are important things that you can do. Donate money to the Red Cross, to the Salvation Army, to the Humane Society, and to the many organizations that are tending to bodies and souls. Organize something in your school, your community, or your city. And when we let you know how you can help us help them, please answer our call.
There are things we can do to help and doing something is always better than doing nothing. Find a way to show how thankful you are for all that you have by helping those who now have nothing.
Resources:
www.unicefusa.org
www.tcea.org
www.redcross.org
www.salvationarmyusa.org
www.hsus.org
Chris