Yesterday I attended the Computer Science & Information Technology Symposium that was held at the Omni Hotel in Atlanta, Georgia. For the past several years, I’ve been a speaker at this event and this was the second time that I’ve attended as a registrant.
I always look forward to this event because it gives me a chance to see some old friends and to meet new friends as well. In addition, it helps me learn new ways to teach computer science education. I attended sessions on robotics, the Grid World Case Study, programming with Alice, and on XNA. The Computer Science Teachers Association sponsored the event along with the support of Microsoft Corporation.
One quick observation that I made as I looked around the ballroom at the keynote sessions was that there are no young computer science teachers in the group that attended. In fact, the youngest that I saw in the crowd were Microsoft employees.
I’ve talked to several computer science teachers in past years who have retired and have told me that their school could not hire another teacher to replace them and that they don’t teach computer science at that school anymore. How sad for all those students who have the desire to learn about computer science education.
Much has been advertised about the lack of IT workers in the workforce and I was thinking yesterday about the future if there are no qualified computer science educators to teach our students in private and public schools.
Sure, there are industry professionals who have made the leap from industry to the classroom successfully but there are many that don’t too. I was talking to Linda Hayes who I’ve worked with on the Board of Directors at the Florida Computer Science Teachers Association and she told me that Kennesaw State University in Georgia where she now works has a program to help new computer science teachers who have worked in industry. According to Alfred Thompson who works in Academic Relations for Microsoft Corporation, Kennesaw has the only program that does this. I asked Alfred if there are any colleges/universities that are training college students on how to be a computer science teacher and he wasn’t aware of any.
Teaching computer science to students is very rewarding. I’ve been doing it for over 20 years. I left teaching after receiving my advanced degree to work in industry and I went back to teaching after a couple of years of working as Director of Education for a trade association and as a Systems Manager for a large CPA firm. High school students are a great deal of fun to be around I guess.
As a newly elected Board Member to the Computer Science Teachers Association I will do my part in trying to promote professionals to go into teaching. As a professional, try to even mentor a high school student as a start. Contact your local high school to see what you can do to promote computer science education.
Some day, you might experience the fun that I have working with teenagers.
Brian Scarbeau
CSTA 9-12 Teacher Representative

Note:
We do not usually run entire articles, but this one, from the University of North Carolina student newspaper The Daily Tar Heel was so informative and well written, we decided to break with tradition.
Our thanks to Tar Hell Asistant Unviersity Editor Whitney Kisling.
Computer science, business grads snag highest average salaries
By: Meghan E. Woods, Staff Writer
Posted: 4/26/07
If money talks, then computer science and business majors at UNC are listening loud and clear.
According to the annual First Destination Survey released by University Career Services, May 2006 graduates with a degree in computer science had the highest annual mean salary at $60,000. Graduates with a degree in business administration were next on the list with an average salary of $47,534.
“We didn’t really see anything eye-popping about the numbers,” said Tim Stiles, associate director of UCS. “The numbers are pretty true when you look at the national averages. People coming out with business, engineering and computer science degrees usually have high salaries.”
The survey is an accumulation of responses from 532 May graduates about their employment status, salary, and post-graduation activities.
The average annual salary for all graduates was $38,038, which Stiles said was good considering how the economy has been in recent years.
“I think we saw an improvement with the 2006 class,” Stiles said. “We’re coming out of that trough where we got stuck after 9/11 for a while. We’re seeing major college employers coming back and more jobs.”
The survey has been conducted for the past 21 years, Stiles said. UCS collects data on post-graduation plans from students in June, September, November and December of their senior year.
Postcards are sent to students’ parents to see if there has been a change in the students’ contact information. UCS also collects data from employers, particularly employers who recruit on campus.
In the surveys, seniors are asked about their employment status, salary, further education, job satisfaction and location.
Stiles said the survey’s findings are usually consistent.
“When you look at the percentage of students who are employed, it’s usually in the 60 to 65 percent range, and this year it was 64.4,” he said. “The percent satisfied is usually in the 80 to 90 range, and that was pretty true for this year. People are getting jobs and taking jobs that they want.”
More than 140 business administration graduates participated in the survey, compared to only four computer science majors. Although few computer science majors participated in the study, Stiles said they still have higher average salaries.
“Just looking at the national survey, there were 128 computer science majors and their average salary was $52,177,” he said. “You just have to look at the number of comp-sci majors graduating; it’s not that huge.”
The salaries of computer science majors might be high, but Jan Prins, chairman of the computer science department, said he has not seen a big change in the number of computer science majors.
“It’s going up a little bit,” he said. “But money is not our main selling point. We instill in our students that computing is part of every aspect of modern life.”
Prins said the high salaries of computer science graduates at UNC is partly attributable to the way the curriculum is designed.
“Our particular major has high entry and high exit requirements,” he said. “So in general, we graduate strong students.”

One of the things I try to do for my students is to give them a chance to play with some of the really cool research that is going on in computer science. While algorithms are an important part of what’s happening, many computer scientists are focusing more on the integration of their discoveries into larger applications, as well as those applications themselves.
Today I went to a lecture given by Takeo Igarashi. Igarashi is a recipient of both Carnegie Mellon University’s Katayanagi prize and the ACM SIGGRAPH Significant New Researcher award for his contributions to computer graphics. His ideas are based in not making more complex graphics, but the interaction with the human during a “rough sketching” process.
I highly recommend checking out his website and playing with the tools that are available.
I also recommend that you look for things like this for your students to. While it is true that students have to learn the basics first (the need to understand simple things like decision and looping structures and basic principals of object oriented programming and design) it doesn’t hurt to show them some of the problems that “real” computer scientists are working on.
Not how to search for a name in a phone book. Foundations are exceedingly important, and we need to learn how to mix the batter before we can bake and eat the cake, but don’t you prefer the cookbooks that show you a picture of the finished cake?
Carnegie Mellon posts videos of these lectures on line and they can be found through links off the main
Leigh Ann Sudol
Communications Chair

Sometimes, it really is true that a crisis can bring out the best in both people and institutions and our current enrollment crisis in computer science is prompting a new spirit of cooperation between university and high school computer science educators.
A good example can be seen at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (a CSTA Instutitonal member) where the commitment to revitalizing the connection between K-12 and universities goes right to the top.
In a recent web posting , Anthony Skjellum, Chair of the Computer and Information Science Department declared his department’s intention of helping to revitalize computer science education in the state’s 480 high schools.
Skjellum also makes it very clear that his reasons for doing so go beyond the desire to simply increase enrollment.
“Why? Because the national trend away from Computer Science education at the pre-college level and the substantial decrease in Computer Science undergraduates in the USA since 2000 are bad for the US economy, competitiveness, and future. Computer Science is a vital career path for students in America, and Alabamians stand to gain hugely from first class education in our field.”
The University of Alabama at Birmingham is not the only university reaching out to high schools. I personally know of terrific programs at Indiana University, Carnegie Mellon, the University of Illinois, and Colorado School of Mines. And I am sure there are more out there (let us know if you have a program teachers in your area should know about).
All of these outreach efforts are important because the issues that need to be addressed are complex and require the attention and commitment of all levels of the education system. This really is a time where we either work together or all fall apart.
Chris Stephenson
Executive Director

The release this week of the American Innovation Proclamation is raising interesting questions about our current education system and whether it provides the kinds of knowledge and skills students need to drive innovation in the digital age.
This week I had the opportunity to talk to Robin Raskin of Yahoo Tech about the link between supporting computer science in K-12 education and addressing the critical drop in the computer science pipeline.
Today, Robin posted a thoughtful piece about this issue on her blog.
I strongly encourage you to check it out and to participate in this important discussion.
Chris Stephenson
Executive Director

I received a great email this morning from Brian Scarbeau, a computer science teacher at Lake Highland Preparatory School in Orlando Florida, telling me about his recent encounter with Microsoft head Bill Gates.
Brian is a great person, a wonderful volunteer, and a tireless advocate for K-12 computer science education. He has presented sessions at our annual Computer Science and Information Technology Symposia, helped on CSTA projects, and even convinced the City of Orlando to officially proclaim December 8th (Grace Murray Hopper’s birthday) as as Computer Science Education Celebration Day. He is also currently running for the CSTA Board of Directors.
This week Brian attended the Microsoft VIP Summit, which included a presentation by Bill Gates, followed by a question and answer session. Brian took advantage of this opportunity to talk to Gates about the importance of Microsoft’s support for a number of key computer science education projects and elicited Gate’s promise to look into some funding cuts that Brian believed appeared to indicate Microsoft’s dwindling support for K-12 computer science education.
This encounter is a perfect example of how teachers can be great advocates. Not everyone has the chance to talk to a Bill Gates, but we all can talk to parents, principals, school administrators, and our state and federal representatives about the importance of supporting K-12 computer science education.
What we do is important. Computer science is the heartbeat of innovation, it is that science of science, and it is the career of the future. We need to take advantage of every opportunity to let people know.
Chris Stephenson
Executive Director

Women university students studying computer science are now making the most of their media savvy to provide information and resources to other students interested in computing, and providing a cool new resource for computer science teachers.
Students at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania have created a series of computer science podcasts on topics such as genetic algorithms, zip code encoding, encryption, searching and sorting in MySpace, and my personal favorite, malware.
The podcasts are all part of the “Where is the Software” series, feature student-delivered mini-tutorials on interesting computer science concepts and run from about seven to fifteen minutes.
The production team of Sara Joseph, Charmagne McKinney, Logan Kennedy, Elizabeth Jones, Natasha Gunasekara and Tina Bledsoe who are part of the WiCS (Women in Computer Science) group at their university, originally envisioned the podcasts as a way to reach out to local high school girls to help them see computer science as both interesting and challenging.
These podcasts, however, also make great mini-tutorials that you can use in the classroom to highlight concepts that you may be covering in class or to give students a better idea of the breadth of the computing disciplines.
You can access the podcasts at:
http://whereisthesoftware.podshow.com
The students say that they are planning to produce a new podcast every month.
Chris Stephenson
Executive Director

When I was a little girl, I always wanted to be a Boy Scout because
they got to go camping and build stuff. We got to make “campfires”
out of celery sticks and marshmallows. That’s why I’m so excited to
see this article in the Daily Texan about efforts by
the Girl Scouts to interest and inform girls about science and
technology through hands-on experiences.
Computer science isn’t offered at so many schools that I think
popular non-school entities picking up the slack can only help. If we
want our population to understand our discipline and be able to make
informed decisions about things like funding (never mind filling jobs
in the many awesome careers out there) they need as many
opportunities as possible to learn how fun and interesting it is and
what it is about. The Girl Scouts also have a fun website at GirlsGoTech.org.
I’m sure the Texas Girl Scouts aren’t the only ones with a program
like The EDGE. One of our local troops has had our librarian in to
talk about internet safety. I’m excited to see computer scientists
reaching out to kids. I wonder what else is out there?
Michelle Hutton
CSTA Vice President

At the risk of looking a little too hard for that silver lining in the big black cloud, I am beginning to think that some very good things might come out of the current bust in computer science education.
If you have been living on another planet for a while, you might not be aware that there is a crisis in computer science enrollment in university and college computer science courses across the country. Current research indicates that enrollment in postsecondary courses has dropped by 40% with some suggesting that the drop in applications to these programs may be down by as much as 60%.
These figures are worrying for a number of reasons. Prestigious programs that have traditionally attracted far more applicants than they can accept, now have a smaller body of well-qualified students from which to choose. Many middle-sized computer science programs have had to reduce the number of students they admit (fewer students in each class, but also fewer courses, and less revenue for the department). And at some small colleges, computer science is at risk of disappearing all together. Of course, these are just the short-term problems.
In this increasingly technology-based and globalized economy, long-term failure to produce enough qualified workers is a sure path to the economic backwaters. Few realize that computer science is not just the backbone of technological innovation. It is the engine that keeps every single industry up and running. Try to imagine the drug companies, the hospitals, the banks, the insurance companies, even education, without skilled computing professionals.
So why on earth is this a good thing? These same dropping enrollments are engendering discussions that are long overdue. In the light of diminishing student interest in computer science, computer science educators have finally begun focusing on our failure to teach computer science in a way that engages all students.
In a recent issue of the ACM SIGCSE Bulletin Inroads (Vol. 38. No. 4), Lisa Kaczmarczyk muses that the very ubiquity of computing may be the greatest problem facing computing education. “Computing studies do not appear cutting edge to the majority of students and the public – not in a way that appeals to their passions.”
Computing education she argues, needs to be reenergized. “The world of possibilities beyond the external, beyond the metal box and blinking screen, is what we need to instill in the public and in our students. It has to happen in every class that we teach, so that our students become entranced with the potential of computing.”
Kaczmarczyk then poses three important questions for educators.
* What course do you teach?
* Can you make it truly interdisciplinary? (No exceptions, no excuses, no hall pass.)
* How are you exciting your students to become more passionate about computing?
These are core questions and it is very exciting to find that more and more educators are raising them, in middle schools, high schools, colleges, and universities.
Dropping enrollments are providing a powerful and long-overdue incentive for reenvisioning computer science education.
At CSTA, we have just released a second edition of the ACM Model Curriculum for K-12 Computer Science with a new foreword that explores how a number of different educators are creating new instructional practices to make our discipline more relevant and engaging to today’s students.
What are you doing in your school?
Chris Stephenson
Executive Director

CSTA member Greg Lampard from Cherrie Hills Christian School sent me a copy of the recent report published by the Conference Board and the Partnership for 21st Century Skills entitled Are they Really Ready to Work: Employers’ Perspectives on Basic Knowledge and Applied Skills of Entrants to the 21st Century U.S. Workforce.
The report focuses on the skills considered important for success in the workplace. The good news is that all of the employers surveyed agreed that Information Technology Application Skills (with an emphasis on using the correct tools for problem-solving) were very important. The bad news is that high school graduates received only an “adequate” rating on three very important skills: Information Technology Application, Diversity, and Teamwork/Collaboration.
I find this very interesting for two reasons. The first is the extent to which studying computer science in high school supports the acquisition of these three key skills. At its foundation, the study of computer science is the study of problem solving and the selection of appropriate technological tools to solve real-world problems. The second is that computer science educators in K-12 are increasingly using project-based learning to ensure that students learn to plan appropriately, work cooperatively, communicate effectively, and manage time wisely, thus improving the likelihood that their students will be better prepared for today’s work world.
What I find especially disturbing, however, is that if current trends continue, it will take very little time for this barely acceptable “adequate” rating to slip to “inadequate”. The sad reality is that computer science is increasingly under pressure in K-12 and very much in danger of disappearing altogether.
As far as we can tell, this is happening for four reasons.
1. Schools are increasing the number of mandatory courses that students must take, and because computer science is an elective course, students simply cannot fit it into their schedules.
2. Despite all of the evidence to the contrary (the Bureau of Labor Statistics), students and their parents believe that there are no opportunities for jobs in computing.
3. Schools attempting to meet the requirements of the No Child Left Behind legislation are pulling computer science teachers out of the computing classrooms so that they can teach remedial math and either replacing them with inexperienced teachers or not replacing them at all.
4. There are far too many misguided school officials who have no idea what computer science is, and so mistakenly assume that it lacks the rigor of current math or science courses.
CSTA is working on all of these issues. We are producing policy and briefing documents for school administrators and policy makers. We are developing new sources of careers information and making them available to teachers, school counselors, and students. And we are working with industry folks to help them understand that if students are to graduate with the skills that will make them ready for the workforce, they have to have the opportunity to acquire these skills as part of their K-12 education.
If the authors and organizations behind this report are serious about improving students’ preparedness to meet the needs of this globalized 21st Century economy, they need to begin convincing schools that canceling classes in the one discipline that can guarantee that students will acquire these skills is a very bad business indeed.
Chris Stephenson
Executive Director