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Google Suggests Separating Students With 'Some CS Knowledge' From Novices
theodp writes To address the challenge of rapidly increasing CS enrollments and increasing diversity, reports the Computing Education Blog, Google in November put out an RFP to universities for its invite-only 3X in 3 Years: CS Capacity Award program, which aims "to support faculty in finding innovative ways to address the capacity problem in their CS courses." In the linked-to RFP document, Google suggests that "students that have some CS background" should not be allowed to attend in-person intro CS courses where they "may be more likely to create a non-welcoming environment," and recommends that they instead be relegated to online courses. According to a recent NSF press release, this recommendation would largely exclude Asian and White boys from classrooms, which seems to be consistent with a Google-CodeCademy award program that offers $1,000 bonuses to teachers who get 10 or more high school kids to take a JavaScript course, but only counts students from "groups traditionally underrepresented in computer science (girls, or boys who identify as African American, Latino, American Indian or Alaska Native)." The project suggested in the Google RFP — which could be worth $1.5 million over 3 years to a large CS department — seems to embrace-and-extend a practice implemented at Harvey Mudd College years ago under President Maria Klawe, which divided the intro CS offering into separate sections based upon prior programming experience to — as the NY Times put it — reduce the intimidation factor of young men, already seasoned programmers, who dominated the class. Google Director of Education and University Relations Maggie Johnson, whose name appears on the CS Capacity RFP, is also on the Board of Code.org (where Klawe is coincidentally an Advisory Board member), the K-12 learn-to-code nonprofit that has received $3+ million from Google and many millions more from other tech giants and their execs. Earlier this week, Code.org received the blessing of the White House and NSF to train 25,000 teachers to teach CS, stirring unease among some educators concerned about the growing influence of corporations in public schools.
I don't think they should be called native American at all. They immigrated from Asia, as did others, some from Europe, some from Africa etc. Who cares? IMO anyone actually born in a country is "native", anyone born in another country are immigrants. Regardless discriminating against people because of their race, whether or not it is to right a "wrong" or not is itself wrong to me. If a particular ethnicity has issues with their relative proportion of certain professions let them start their own programs to encourage their kids to go into those fields. Having the government or corporations create university programs that exclude the others to try to help the minorities out is condescending at best "Hey poor little black boy here's an extra scoop of opportunity I sure hope it helps." and encourages discrimination to continue since it reinforces the idea that people should be treated different depending on what their background happens to be.
Anyways find this even worse in some ways in Canada where I live. We don't generally call ourselves American though I have ran into that a fair bit with europeans some of which that call the whole continent the Americas and people from there American. Anyways makes me laugh when I run into a "proud African-American" supporting affirmative action in Canada.
Stanford had a good approach to this, at least when I went there (probably still do).
The intro-CS courses were offered in two parts (CS106A/B) or a single accelerated course (CS106X), with the requirement that students taking the accelerated course have previous programming experience.
All students end up covering the same material (which is important, since high school instruction varies greatly in quality), but you don't have half the class getting bored and the other half lost at the same time.
The university where I studied and, briefly, taught, began splitting Intro to Programming three ways, all three groups were self-selecting and migration to the other groups was unlimited and without penalty. Intro is a first year course and thus has no effect on your overall degree rank, it matters only that you can pass it.
- A high flyer group. Virtually all students who'd written a non-trivial program before applying tended to start in this stream. This group covers the assigned work very quickly, and then immediately goes "off piste" to explore things that are related but won't be covered in the main course. If you don't understand the material required for the assigned work, you're in the wrong stream! Questions are allowed to diverge from the intended topic, because the people who need the most help aren't present and having their time wasted with the diversion.
- Normal. The rest of the students tended to start themselves in this stream. This group spends one whole weekly session on teaching new material, and one on walking through this week's assigned work. Questions must stay on topic. If you can't follow this week's new material because you turn out not to have understood last week's after all, you need to be with the strugglers.
- A struggling group. This group gets extra weekly sessions, talking through last week's solutions line-by-line, and more 1-on-1 Q&A available. This stream costs the most to teach, but it's also the most important, because some kids are going to fail the entire course just because they didn't ever end up really understanding variables, or loops, or whatever and then they were never able to catch up. If we can rescue them, they may go on to do great things.
Anybody who can _really_ write programs ought to be able to be a "high flyer" all the way through. At worst there might be a week when some paradigm-shifting idea is introduced and they have to work a little harder. Continuations, multiple inheritance, that sort of thing. But in practice nearly every kid will drop out of this stream because their "years of experience" turn out to be undisciplined hacking and they're actually missing a lot of core ideas and principles that the Intro course wants everybody to understand. Plus of course partying is more fun than extra study, isn't it ? In its last few sessions high flyer class can be held in a two table meeting room instead of a lecture theatre. And at times about a third of the students will be in struggler stream, unable to handle some particularly vital yet tricky aspect of the course and needing an army of postgrads to answer their smart-and-yet-still-dumb questions.
Doubtless among themselves students are a little embarrassed to be among the strugglers, or even to "fall out" of high flyers as the material becomes too advanced, but overall the effect of these streams was very positive.
As a CS professor, I can't tell you how many times we've lost students with great potential in CS because they had no prior experience but were comparing themselves to inferior students with a year or two of programming experience in high school. If you get the students who have prior experience into a "fast track" class (e.g. that compresses the first year into a single term) then both the "experienced" and "naive" students can actually learn at their own pace. Fortunately, I teach at a small college, and so most times we can identify those students and get them into a better class. And I'm actually in favor of having students with a lot of experience start by skipping a class or two. The sooner students are surrounded by their "peers" in ability/experience, the faster and more reliably they're going to engage.
But to be clear: the issue isn't that people should be actively sorting the students so that only female and non-white students are in the CS1 class. That's a horrible idea, racist, sexist, and all the other "ists" you can come up with. It is likely that the "normal" track will have more non-white and female students in it because that's what the high school demographics say: non-white/non-Asian/female students are less likely to have prior experience. But it's also true that there will be more students from rural schools in the "normal" track, because rural schools are less likely to have computer programming courses.