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ACM Urges Obama To Include CS In K-12 Core
jmcbain writes "The ACM issued a set of recommendations supporting Barack Obama's stated goal of making science and mathematics education a national priority at the K-12 level. The ACM is urging the new administration to include Computer Science as an integral part of the nation's education system. 'The new Administration can play an important role in strengthening middle school education, where action can really make a difference, to introduce these students to computer science,' said ACM CEO John White." Is CS such a basic subject, at the level of science or math, that it makes sense to (try to) teach its principles to every elementary school child?
I'd rather see something more abstract like symbolic logic classes rather than programming classes.
No sig for you!!
"To meet the nation's educational and professional needs in the face of insufficient numbers of undergraduates majoring in computer science"
LOL.
It's called $$$. Keep trying H1b visas. Typical of corporates who don't want to pay and want to too see lots of cheap labor. More CS workers = lots of competition for jobs.
You saw how IT industry turned out.
Math teaching should indeed include programming knowledge. It doesn't have to be intensive knowledge but it should be enough to teach logic flow and problem solving methods and procedures. We all learned PEMDAS in algebra class, but there is more that should be included as well. Not only comparative operators like greater-than, less-than and equals, but the other ones we use in programming like not-equals, greater-than-or-equals and the like. Binary math with AND, OR and XOR should be enforced in many areas as well.
These types of mental skills are good for math and science, of course, but these sorts of mental processing skills are very useful in day-to-day life in thinking and reasoning. Thinking and reasoning skills should be taught throughout K-12. Learning how to learn effectively is THE absolute key to a successful academic career. Right now, emphasis is on passing tests. That is just the wrong way to do it. Teaching how to learn and think will resolve the student success problems very naturally.
Some people will ALWAYS lack the capacity to learn and think effectively. That is unfortunate. But the whole of our nation's youth asset should not be compromised because a few will be left behind. "No Child Left Behind" sounds good... especially on a battle field. But it inhibits the potential growth for a massive amount of students. Talented and Gifted programs are all good, but the average student is far more capable than the regular school system is geared for.
Some schools have Lego Mindstorms, which have a primitive programming system. I mean, it's not hat hard to teach stuff like conditionals, loops, object, etc. The idea of anything taught at this level is to familiarize the student for higher-level work. We do spend 4 years teaching algebra, after all.
I guess there's two ways to slice it: software development versus algorithms. I think it would be very easy (and in fact quite beneficial) for algorithm development to be integrated into existing math and science classes. Something like VPython could be a tremendous aid in helping physics students visualize vectors and how mechanics and EM problems "look". While the ability to compute (not only does it help you solve the problem, it helps you understand the nature of the problem as well!) is just as critical as the underlying problems it helps you solve (core sciences, math, etc), skills that are more commonly thought of as "software engineering" definitely belong in specialty classes and electives.
Dear ACM and Computer Science Teachers Association, both of which I am a professional member,
STOP.
Please.
I know constitutional matters fairly well. I've got degrees in computer science and K-12 education. I see things from a younger yet informed, educated standpoint (I am in the first generation to be tested under the PA tests which satisfy No Child Left Behind).
Stop campaigning the federal government for educational things. The federal government has NOT been granted the right to deal with education in any way. Its current educational meddling in state-run schools should serve as evidence of this, and should be unconstitutional. Continued federal campaigning will only increase the amount of influence the federal government thinks it has and tries to have on public schools, an influence which is detrimental to the individual needs of students and the societal needs of their communities.
Instead, my dear ACM, please spend your time and money asking state departments of education, which move far, far quicker than the federal department of education, to include CS in curriculum. The federal department of education moves as a brontosaurus would, but the state department of education moves like a triceratops--still slow, but certainly quicker and more aware of its surroundings than a brontosaurus would be.
More effectively would be a grassroots campaign among ACM members to try to convince local school districts that CS needs to be included more in curriculum, especially in city and suburban districts where programming jobs are more available.
Asking the federal government to intervene is asking for something which will simply worsen the situation, and something which cannot be undone.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
I think "computer literacy" is more in order. In fact, just the other day I helped yet another person who didn't understand that documents written with a specific program didn't live exclusively inside that program. Understanding fundamentals like this are necessary to interact in a competent manner with computers, which are becoming a necessary tool for more and more fields.
Without these basics, "Computer Science" is somewhat hopeless; I would rather have these basics be required. One thing that needs to be improved is the ability for people inclined towards computer science ideas to be exposed to advanced concepts . . . but it should not be compulsory. I am a CS major, but had my first programming class my 2nd semester and thought I was really computer-savvy specifically because I knew that files were independent of the program that created them. However, I was interested in programming for a while before that and just never had the opportunity to explore it.
And here we go again: confusing math with arithmetic. Long division is basic arithmetic, not math. Math involves manipulating concepts, a far broader concept than just numbers.
That said I am interested in introducing a Computer Science curriculum starting in middle school but only insofar as it clearly calls out the notion of an algorithm. Way too much of today's middle and high school education allows kids to get away with doing well by simply being good at rote memorization: contrasting this with the notions of deduction and logic by being forced to capture them formally in an algorithm of sorts that can be followed by a computer introduces a level of rigor not otherwise enforceable.
PaulW, IT Consultant
Huh. My keyboarding class is the part of my high school curriculum that I value the most. It got me to where I can type almost as fast as I can think, and that's useful.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
It's not talking about teaching programming, or even computer use - but Computer Science. At the basic level very little has changed in Computer Science since Turing. You can spend an entire year just on designing very basic algorithms for very basic things - and not in any current computer language - and teach far more to children about logic than current mathematics does.
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The core computer science topics won't be obsolete anytime soon - consider that many places still teach the basics using Lisp, a language that's been around since 1958. Computer architectures haven't changed much either. Sure, instruction sets have evolved, but we're still using von Neumann archtectures. None of the paradigms used to program them is ever really obsoleted.
Basic Computer Science is far more useful than teaching 'American History from the Revolutionary War to the Civil War' for the fourth year in a row in Elementary School. You can drop one of those years for a course in 'Logic for Children' and get far more out of it.
Three year old children learn about Queues. It's called 'waiting in line'. They also lean about Resource Sharing (you did learn to share right?) and Binary Logic (True is not False).
There's no reason that can't be expanded upon to form the concept of Proof (Children finally getting answers to 'why?') and even Algorithms (You get green by mixing blue and yellow).
It's all there already - it just needs to be pointed out and used properly.
Except for the bulk of students (easily 99% of them) it IS office suits. And they dont even do that well.
Computer Science is NOT something that should be taught any sooner than 9th grade IMHO. And certainly should not be a general ed requirement. It is not a general skill most people need and certainly should not be thought of as that way. I know this is slashdot so people are going to disagree with that, but the honest truth is its hard enough now to get kids to learn real life skills, teaching them something from a field most dont even have a inkling of want to be in and those who do will already know more than any teacher will be able to teach them is just another subject that waters down basic education.
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Not a bad way to be!
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Darn right it will start, continue, and end badly if done via a programming approach. True CS is not language programming but how to develop algorithms.
So three authors should be key here. Not the whole ball of wax but an abstraction of what these authors present.
Donald Knuth and his books, "The Art of Computer Programming" (3 volumes).
Andrew S. Tanenbaum; "Computer Organization".
John L. Hennesey and David L. Patterson; "Computer Architecture".
Good luck,
Jim
The first twelve grades should be devoted to communication skills, history, natural sciences, and the like. You know, the real basics in which our high school grads are already demonstrably deficient. How exactly will mandating CS at these grades do anything to produce more functional citizens? We might get a wonderful crop of idiot savants, but is that what we really need? If a given student has a distinct attraction to CS, they will naturally pursue it outside of the classroom.
Even the ACM counts as a "special interest group" that has "lobbyists", and here they are trying to push their own agenda to the exclusion of more important things.
You do realize, don't you, that we're talking about K-12 here, not college?
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I'm sorry, but what you said is invalid. No math teacher can make a student a genius, only show that student what is known. Likewise, for CS, a teacher can only show a student what is known and curriculum usually lags behind reality by several years. No teacher will ever successfully create a CS genius. All they can ever do is show a student the philosophies and generalities. Do you know a philosophy of computer science? Didn't think so. So what should a teacher teach? While you and everyone else cannot define it, a teacher cannot teach it. Sure, they can teach java or C++ but they cannot teach computer science, or the gestalt of computing. It is not defined.
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I agree - up to a point. I don't agree that schools are all doing a miserable job. You know the phrase "garbage in, garbage out"? It really does apply to K-12 students.
I've taught 10th-12th grade for 4 years now at an inner-city style school (59% minority rate, 78% free/reduced lunch), over a variety of Math/CS subjects, including Precalculus, AP Calculus, Honors Physics, and AP Computer Science. You'd think I would have the top of the stack, the elite students, if you will. If I do, it demonstrates the problem with some U.S. Science & Math students in the 21st century: the students at some schools (at least mine) have no desire to put in the effort required to master a difficult subject.
Students are looking for classes they can pad their schedule with that look good on college transcripts, but which require very little work. If it's an AP class, they want the AP teacher that gives out extra credit like candy, assigns 3-5 problems a night for homework, and gives "open book" tests.
I came from a tougher school of thought, so in return I expect work from my students; I assign 1-2 hours worth of work every night, every test is "closed book", every quiz is unannounced, and there's no such thing as extra credit. You should hear the crying of unfairness and cruelty. (The funny thing is for the 4 years I've been at my school, my AP class has had the highest passing rate of all AP courses taught at our school.)
My AP Comp. Sci. course, for 3 years in a row, was filled with ambitious MySpace, Facebook, or other "texters" who thought a CS course was going to be something where we sat around all day and wrote the next "How L33T are you?" quiz. Some thought we'd be writing the next Line Rider game the 1st class. When I tried to get them to understand OOP, or to think of what a Model & View architecture really meant, it blew their minds. A simple assignment (almost pointless, but done anyway to try to get something out of them) of picking an everyday real life object and writing down all of the things it's made of and things it can do, netted me about 20 papers all describing a pencil as being made of lead, eraser, and plastic, which can write and erase. Deep stuff.
You should have seen how well they handled writing a simple "Guess a number" game. Basic IF structures (logic) completely eluded them.
It's not their math skills that was hurting them (although you'd be scared to see how many AP Calculus students I routinely teach who can't grasp working with reciprocals or fractions in general work) - it was their inability or lack of desire to employ critical thinking skills. If it wasn't something that could be put on the back of an index card (to cram the night before) or typed into their cell phones (to cheat from the day of the test), they wouldn't do it.
We have to get past that laziness, that lack of work/study ethic, in K-12 education before we tack on anything else. CS, done well, cannot be learned in any meaningful fashion if there's no desire to use reasoning, deductive logic, or problem solving skills.
I pray it's not this bad at other K-12 institutions around the country, but I'm fearful that it's the same everywhere. It's the chief reason I'm pressing onward with my MA or MS to get my foot into the door of college teaching. I know you still get your share of lazy students there as well, but they might just want to work hard and pay attention, and I won't feel like I'm just spinning my wheels every day I try to teach another young mind. And I'm fully aware that I'm not helping the problem, if I'm even able to, by "bailing" on the K-12 arena, but there comes a point when your work begins to feel like an ice-cream salesman standing in Fairbanks, Alaska.....you just have to move your stand to somewhere you can get something done.
P.S. This year the county canceled my AP Comp. Sci. class and rolled my BC Calculus course into my AP Calculus course as an "independent study". Due to budget cuts, having 12 or less students means the class gets folded. So much for even the wannabe texters...
Londovir
They can't learn what they can't follow, either. Knuth isn't written as a primer, it's written as a reference work for professionals and advanced students.
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teaching philosophy in middle school is no more unrealistic than teaching chemistry or biology in middle school, which is pretty much standard here in California. a 14-year-old is fully capable of grasping informal fallacies or the difference between kantianism and utilitarianism. and unlike learning about meiosis and mitosis, the rules of logic have very practical uses in the pursuit of knowledge by helping students distinguish truth from fallacy. being familiar with basic rules of logic also means students won't be so easily manipulated or misled by blatant sophistry--something which has great societal benefits.
and why is it so hard for you to reconcile teaching non-trivial programming with high school? perhaps if our school system weren't in a habit of always selling students short, you wouldn't have such a dim view of high school students. setting low standards is a sure-fire way of guarantying low performance.
throughout much of my K-12 education i was involved with mentorship & peer-tutoring programs. most of the students i worked with in high school were in ordinary prep classes or even remedial classes. my experiences have taught me that using the right teaching methods, almost any student can far exceed most people's expectations. even most kids in remedial classes aren't inherently stupid. and quite often the only difference between an honors/AP student and a college prep student is simply better motivation and more self-confidence--which is usually instilled into a child at a young age.
the genius myth has been thoroughly & repeatedly debunked by educational and developmental psychologists. studies show that giving a child a head start--whether in school or sports--early on gives them the lead they need to develop more self-confidence and become more self-motivated, which in turn causes them to practice more than their peers, turning their small lead into a huge skill disparity by the time they're in their 20's. so it reasons that setting higher expectations for students in middle school will cause them to become more accustomed to meeting higher academic standards later on.
NO!!! I like the ACM, but this is totally WRONG.
Rant 1:
Bring MATH up to par with other nations. Its acceptable for me to say "I can't do math" but I dare not admit "I can't read" or "I can't do english." Its cultural as well as systematic.
The US students have mental blocks on math (NEVER mention math,) they don't understand the use of experimentation, and have been shuffling paperwork and jumping thru tutorials for so long they are shocked when I get my hands on them... Their demands for the old-school methods have resulted in the degradation of other courses over the long term (a few like myself hold out against the trend - its not just the natural understanding gap increasing between instructor and student that makes me see a downward trend.)
I've seen inner city schools doing things ONLINE that create disadvantages for poor students without internet or computer access. If you really want to help, get kids access to a safe internet and a computer that facilitates exploration and experimentation.
Philosophy of Science would be widely useful. Actually, Critical Thinking -- one could fit in Science, Logic, and even some Ethics into that class.
Rant 2:
The computer is just a tool for teaching things that is completely misunderstood and under utilized while at the same time being thoughtlessly applied to education without any supporting evidence for its educational benefits!
The only real work on computers for actual learning that I've seen was done in the 80s and early 90s with LOGO, MECC, and Carmen Sandiego. These all tried alternative methods to use the computer as a tool to teach or build critical thinking skills... NOT teach CS. (Yes, LOGO did do everything.) More RESEARCH based tools should be encouraged like the brain-research that led to EyeQ or Nintendo's Brain Age. Speed reading would seriously change lives.
I've seen girls learn to type fast on their cell phones. They don't need a cell phone typing course to do that. They shouldn't be required to WASTE time learning typing on a computer when they will eventually figure that out. This is a great example of how misused computers in schools are (not to mention the waste of typing-only computer labs when 100 year old typewriters would suffice.)
Rant 3:
Bigger areas are being ignored. they are more important.
Creativity is a whole other area sorely lacking; my mother is an art teacher and the stories she tells sound like we are entering an age of mindless consumer drones. Studies have always shown that right-brained classes like art resulted in better scores in the left-brained classes... Until they wreck these courses (and for 8 years boy they have been trying) those courses will continue exist. I would HATE to see right-brained courses be replaced with more left-brained courses.
BTW: Einstein played an instrument.
Promotion of curiosity wouldn't hurt either... Some form of Omnibus course wouldn't be a bad idea; especially, if it helped find interests that could be leveraged in less interesting courses.
How about Business? Accounting? People can't manage their own credit cards and its pathetic. Nobody learns how to do taxes or run a business... and the LAW or even the constitution-- forget it...
Rant 4:
Students are institutionalized to memorize and do tutorials. Programming problems without example code is a huge break from the mundane norm of the current educational system; however, instead of jolting students with something new to make up for a degraded system (not that the US system was that much better in the past) why don't we improve the existing subjects to be more engaging? I managed to ace 3 years of spanish without learning any spanish! It was the perfect example of the path of the current system.
I DO think learning C++ should count as a foreign language. Would be a better use of time for most students; for all the reasons the ACM states. (If one must learn a language thinking it helps your english then why not learn latin then?)
Rant 5:
Obam
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Basic Computer Science is far more useful than teaching 'American History from the Revolutionary War to the Civil War' for the fourth year in a row in Elementary School. You can drop one of those years for a course in 'Logic for Children' and get far more out of it.
What elementary school did you go to?!? We didn't touch American History until we were well into 7th/8th grade, where we browsed it for a total of 2 semesters, memorizing the Preamble, the Bill of Rights, and the Schoolhouse Rock "I'm just a Bill" song. Oh yeah, most of us also learned somewhere along the way that the North won the War (although many of my classmates may have been confused about which War), Abraham Lincoln was tall (and there might have been some short dude named Douglas something-or-other), and that the Shot Heard Round the World was, probably not, literally "heard round the world".
/., and we do so love to revel in the glory of our own achievements/greatness and belittle things proportionally to their distance from our own sphere. So by all means, continue to build a cultural of arrogance and superiority akin to the ones used by academia/law-enforcement/politicos to insulate themselves from tribulations of the masses they are so willing to manipulate/bully/deceive when it serves their purposes.
Also, the statement that Basic Computer Science (however it might be defined) is More Useful than $SUBJECT_I_HATED can only have meaning after the purposes of basic (K-12) education have been defined and prioritized. Without agreed upon ends, there can be very little, if any, meaningful discussion on this matter.
If you would like to propose that the primary purpose of basic education is to obtain a career in the CS industry, I don't think many would argue with you about the greater usefulness of Basic CS over something as inapplicable as History. If you took a more moderate stance, and said that the primary purpose of basic education was to train the minds of the youth to be able to approach the problems of the adult world (and life) in general, well, I personally know some historians who would disagree with you about the usefulness of replacing some of the History classes with Computer Science classes.
But this is
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
From the abstract of the referenced paper:
All teachers of programming find that their results display a 'double hump'.
"pretty strong evidence" my ass. First, any claim that this test identifies "innate" ability is nonsense. There's no part of the associated studies which even approaches a "nature" vs "nurture" type result. First clue of no real results: ZERO application of statistical analysis in the paper. This submission would be a big laugh to any serious social sciences forum. A population split is claimed, and a proposed test to identify that split is presented. No claim as to why that split exists is made. (If it exists! The paper far from proves that.)
For example, that data (if correctly gathered, is statistically meaningful, etc.) might simply reference the quality of the mathematics education the students received well prior to taking this CS class. If that were the case, it'd be VERY STRONG reinforcement for the ACM's case. Likewise, such a test might then indicate required remediation for students rather than kicking them out of CS entirely.
E.g. did the students have to really learn long division in school? That's their first exposure to a rigorous CS-style algorithm. How was the student's algebra education? That's the introduction to the abstraction of variables. The computer scientist who doesn't deeply grok abstraction gets precisely nowhere. The list goes on. These are core skills which allow a student to find success in CS work. These can be likened to the "literacy" requirements to comprehend Computer Science topics... are we simply producing "illiterate" students? We don't yet know, and this work, while stimulating, doesn't provide any answers.
I had a calc teacher who was just the same as you are, the problem was she didn't know calc well enough to teach it, so instead she assigned homework after homework that she couldn't fully explain to you once you even asked her. As for your "teaching" skills in CS... it's highschool, my god when I went through programming in highschool 10 years ago, my guy taught us cobol, and did nothing to get us really interested in programming, which is now your little paper essay was looked at by your students. You need to re-examine your methods of teaching. You sound like you think you know to much and they know nothing, when it all reality yes in highschool your job is to teach fundamentals and at least try to get everyone interested in the topic. Because lets face it, after highschool, if it was anything like my time at college, they will all have to relearn how to do things some other way. And remember, the smart ones that want to go to college are padding there class schedule to look better to schools, because of fucking jokers like you at the highschool level that think they are teaching at big time school, so they put the screws to everyone, by giving out back breaking work loads and pointless bullshit papers. I don't blame them, AP classes are all a joke to begin with, but boy do they look good on a college app.
TAOCP? Computer Org? Are you kidding? I'm a 3rd year CS student, and most people who went to my high school, probably including myself, could never get through ten pages of Knuth. The math background to start out with theory just isn't in place in high school, where the highest level math class available was entry-level Calculus. I learned C++ on my own in middle school without ever having heard of "Discrete Math", and learned Java in high school before I even knew what a register was. But once I knew how the high level stuff worked, I could then delve deeper into another level and learn a little more, and then a little more. You have to learn incrementally, not by starting a HIGH SCHOOL kid with the hardest (albeit "fundamental") stuff and working your way from there. That's like learning trig simply by giving the students a bunch of proofs to look at before they know how the mechanics work.
isn't economics already taught as part of the social studies curriculum at most high schools? i know my high school offered AP Econ, which taught micro and macro economics. and i'm not sure but i think there was a college prep class as well.
in any case, i don't think economics is quite as essential as philosophy, which i would rank up there with math and English. you can apply philosophical logic to all fields of learning (including economics), whereas knowledge of economics can only be applied within the social studies curriculum. that's not to say that social studies aren't important, just that they're already adequately covered in the current high school curriculum; though perhaps civics isn't given as much attention in secondary education as it should be.
i also wouldn't say that economics is the reason why we live better today than in the past--quite the contrary actually. social/cultural progress, scientific/technological progress, medical progress, etc. have all improved living conditions for society at large. better ways of accumulating wealth has, in contrast, only improved the quality of life of a rich minority while creating greater socioeconomic inequality that has harmed most of the population.
i mean, it's not bankers, stockbrokers, CEOs, or economists that are driving societal progress. it's the scientists, teachers, engineers, doctors, political reformers, social activists, etc. who are making the world a better place. if anything, our society needs fewer people obsessed with the accumulation of power and wealth, who have traditionally been the root cause of social problems like war, colonialism/imperialism, ecological/environmental destruction, social exploitation & inequity, etc.
But programming is /fun/. CS without programming is not fun. Getting a computer to do what you tell it is, I think, a real eye opener for young people. If you just teach them language X and some graphical API they can write their own programs! 'Look ma: I wrote my own notepad, isn't it cool?'
Teaching CS without programming is pointless. You need programming to apply what you learnt in CS. Without it you're not going to get all that you can out of CS - it's just a bunch of algorithms with no practical use. If you can play with the computer ('programming') you can design your own algorithms for things, see how they work, see what doesn't work: you can learn.
What ever happened to bein' a kid?
Well... actually kids never were 'kids'. They used to work down a mine or in a farm for 12 hours every day from as early an age as possible. It's only in recent times that we've had enough wealth that kids can spend their time mucking around
I was taught to program in BBC BASIC at school when I was 7. It was a single term of one (half hour) lesson a week, but it was enough to motivate me to go and learn some other languages in my spare time. By the time I got to university I'd learned PL/M, C, a bit of C++ (no one ever knows all of C++), Pascal, Java, a bit of Z80 assembly (which I've now completely forgotten to the extent I couldn't even tell you how many registers the chip had), OPL, and a few other dialects of basic.
Learning Prolog in my first year was an eye-opener, as the first language I learned that wasn't related to the Algol-family, and so was learning Smalltalk a bit later (no one understands OOP before they learn Smalltalk, but a surprising number of people think they do).
Over the course of my PhD, I drifted a bit more towards the theory. The motivation for learning any kind of science is understanding how things work. Programming shows you how applications work, but the theory shows you how programming works.
That said, I'd be in favour of teaching more discrete maths at school. I've used graph and game theory far more for non-work-related things than I've ever used calculus.
Your post, really, is just advocating the scientific method. Science is an iterative process of observe-theorise-test. The theorise step starts off very small and becomes much larger as the observations become more complex, and the test stage should always be applied. I would recommend Dan Ingalls' 1981 article in Byte about Smalltalk for anyone who wants to understand why computer science is really a science (and why a lot of it isn't).
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Typing faster than you can think is the current Internet requirement.
I'm with you on everything except for the 1-2 hours of homework a night.
Any student who actually does care is taking 6-7 courses in a year. If everyone follows your philosophy they're staring down 6-12 hours of homework after completing a 7 hour day that includes another .5 to 1 hour commuting. So your kids are down to 4 hours of sleep assuming that they don't bother eating or showering.
I don't buy any of the crap other people are saying about "letting kids be kids," but you do need to assign something that fits into the actual physical hours they have to study.
Make them do some hard stuff, but give them a day or two to schedule it around the things the other teachers are piling on them.
As for your pencil example... it's a bullshit exercise. You should have spent five minutes doing it in class. As a student, I would have filled that in a quickly as possible so I could get on with actually learning something. Being hard on the kids is half of being a good teacher - and if your test scores are accurate you are at least a decent teacher. But you have to give the kids some reason to take your abuse. I've mentored high school engineering projects where we had to force the kids to go home at midnight on a school night so their parents wouldn't yell at us the next day, because they wanted to be there and wanted to put in that work. You've got to give them some motivation other than just "well, we're theoretically learning something, and I'll get a good grade." Robotics is a little easier to make that much fun than math probably is for most people, but CS should be easy.
Don't start with OO - start with one of bug killer algorithms. Give them something they can see do something cool, something where they can compete. Then after they've had to slog through several pages of their own crappy code, show them how OO will make their lives easier. The only way to make someone care about CS techniques is to a) show them something cool they can do with it or b) show them how they will make their lives easier. If you show them the solution before they've lived the problem they will either accept it tautologically, or not care, and neither of those results in learning.
I'm sounding harsher for this than I mean to - but teachers need to realize that students aren't going to high school because they want to learn. They're going because they're stuck there, and it is the next pre-requisite for for whatever they want to do in life. But that doesn't mean that you can't convince them to enjoy the one hour they're stuck with you ever day and maybe actually learn something in it. Hold them to high standards, but realize that you're only one out of about ten things they've got going on right now and it's your job to make them want to actually make your time a priority.
The best teachers I had motivated and commanded the respect of even the troublemakers in the class. Unfortunately they are few and far between.
Do READING first. Then we'll talk about CS.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
As someone closely associated with post secondary education, who has seen "computer science" curriculum at the community college level devolving into either Microsoft® or Cisco® application classes at the behest of Those-Who-Don't-Know-Better, I am leery of any effort, no matter how well intentioned, to add anything to a system already overburdened, underfunded, and saddled with failed standardized testing mandates.
The temptation to go from teaching that Copy/Paste is basic and accessible in all operating systems, to "This is a Wizard®, just click here" in order to keep test scores at acceptable levels would be too much for most public school administrators.
The ACM would do well to formulate a curriculum on its own that generates excitement in students, place it in select schools and get other schools to adopt it after results were shown.
Anything else smacks of throwing more public dollars at a perceived problem and then having to pick up the pieces later.
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
1) Oregon Trail. Famous government designed video game that taught prioritization and long term planning to kids. (it was sold to private industry where it died a slow death; educational software is not that profitable and provides little benefit when its privately run and designed. I'm merely stating history.)
2) Lemonade Stand. free game on Apple ][. Teaches K-3 level business concepts. I believe it resurfaced about 5 years ago as a turn-based drug dealing business game. I forget the name of it.
Anyhow, stuff existed but failed to get noticed and maintained. Open source research tied games used by public schools would continue past the life of the non-profit (MECC) government funding (MECC) or the platform (Apple ][e)
3)
Everybody blames teachers. I think its largely because americans won't take any blame on themselves!
Teachers do everything... Teachers can't create the tools that currently do not exist.
MOST teachers are like mechanics; if you need something designed you get an engineer not a mechanic.
They do not NEED technology to teach anything in standard K-12 education-- but I'd say that the technology is largely no good and its not the teachers fault. It is however their fault outside of the technology; I won't say they don't use technology as a scape goat because they sometimes do.
A greater problem is GREAT teachers are not properly promoted or evaluated. My BEST teacher was nationally recognized; but they didn't use her skills to help others after giving the award. She was instead FORCED out by politics when she'd be teaching wonderfully until she dropped dead. She washed her hands of the whole mess and still isn't being used!
Now, she'd not have won the award, because the test scores wouldn't be high. The principal gave her all the disturbed or failing kids; she had the worst of the school and they all made so much progress it was unreal (some more than others; still it was miracle work.)
Missing RANT)
Technology and Business are not models for use in education. Just because you have a good hammer doesn't mean you can treat everything like a nail... Education isn't analogous anything else.
Zero tolerance policy and standardized PAPER exams for example fit a square peg into a round hole by making something FUZZY like education RIGID like... technology. If it worked (which it doesn't) then we could replace teachers with computers, robots, and online learning. (I don't mean current online learning where humans are involved in the class...besides those are for adults anyhow.)
I TRY hard to observe students doing some of the work so I can help them; because just turning in homework and getting back a score is something a machine could be doing someday soon.
Rant 6) non experts. Would you like Obama telling you that you MUST run MAC OS on your computer? Sure it would help most the nation (windows users,) but it wouldn't make sense on plenty of computers; and be silly on embedded systems. Education shouldn't be pushed around by people who don't know jack but think they have a clue simply because they went to school. (ex: I've used a computer so therefore I know enough to outlaw everything but windows XP...)
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