$500K NSF Grant Boosted Girls' CS Participation At Obama Daughters' $37K/Yr HS

theodp writes: On Friday, a paper entitled Creative Computation in High School will be presented at SIGCSE '16. "In this paper," explain the paper's authors, "we describe the success of bringing Creative Computation via Processing into two very different high schools...providing a catalyst for significant increases in total enrollment as well as female participation in high school computer science." One of the two schools that participated in the National Science Foundation-supported project — see NSF awards 1323305 & 1323463 for Creative Computation in the Context of Art and Visual Media — was Sidwell Friends School, which a 2013 SMU news release on the three-year, $500K NSF grant noted was best known as the school attended by President Obama's daughters. Interestingly, in a late-2014 interview, the President lamented that his daughters hadn't taken to coding the way he'd like, adding that "part of what's happening is that we are not helping schools and teachers teach it in an interesting way." Hey, nothing that a $4B 'Computer Science For All' K-12 Program can't fix, right?

Comments

Computer programming is not computer science

[fustakrakich]

Why do they call it that?

Re:Computer programming is not computer science

[dgatwood]

Computer science is the study of software at a broad level, including software design methodologies (practical CS) and problem complexity (theoretical CS). The first is science (a social science, specifically), because you can experiment with different methodologies, see how they perform, and draw conclusions. The second is more of a theoretical science because you're studying the way computers behave and modeling real-world systems in simplified terms and hopefully verifying how those models relate to real-world behavior, though the latter part is often ignored by theoreticians.

Re:Computer programming is not computer science

[Tablizer]

Actually, there is NOT a lot of science in computing studies outside of the guts of hardware. Science is about modelling the physical world, but computers run virtual worlds (OS's, programming environments, database models), and that is where most students will spend their time.

If you are doing "science" on a virtual world, you're really doing math: proving things about a model, NOT about the actual world. Science is about modelling and predicting the real world, while math is about modelling and predicting fake/virtual worlds.

Science could be done on the software engineering side, such as getting the best code (maintainable) and best customer satisfaction with the fewest resources, but this is closer to economics, finance, and psychology: "soft" sciences. They don't call it "economic science" or "psychology science".

Further, such "efficiency" studies are expensive in practice and there's a very limited amount of actual data on them. It's like field-science without a budget to do field science such that it turns into a big argument over pet theories (i.e. fancy sounding guesses).

The subject perhaps should be called "computer engineering" or "computer technology" and/or "software technology" or "computer studies" or the like.

But titles like "computer studies" and "software technology" sounds too fluffy. You can't charge fat tuition on fluffy-sounding subjects. Thus, there's probably a marketing angle to the current usage of "science" in "computer science".

Oh well, perfect and sufficiently-compact labels for subjects are hard to come by. Tradition may trump better titles. If I were king, I'd make them use "computer technology" or "information technology" in their course/subject titles. It's vague enough to not trigger purity fights, and vague enough to cover lots of sub-topics, which a good IT course set would do.

Re:Computer programming is not computer science

[istartedi]

I'm obviously not the guy who said that; but I'll take a stab.

To me, CS is language agnostic. You could teach CS without a specific language or even a computer of any kind. You can teach binary arithmetic, recursion, sorting algorithms, and lambda calculus with pencil and paper. To me, CS is just specialized math.

Programming, as opposed to CS is the more practical working end of things. You need a computer with a language to teach programming.

You can teach programming and impart very little CS knowledge, although I think some is bound to creep in. Programmers are going to know things that pure CS students don't know, such as what a compiler error actually means. Likewise, many programmers have gone through their entire career without lambda or curried functions!

I don't think a course in pure CS or "just programming" would be good. They should, IMHO, be taught together. It's easier to call the course CS even if it's not pure CS. We shouldn't really pass judgement until we see the curriculum, which I doubt anybody commenting here has.

but its not obamas fault.

[nimbius]

It may be convenient and tempting to blame Obama for this, but its actually something he benefits from thats existed for more than a hundred years. Namely, how wealth learns and lives as opposed to the rest of us.

While most of us go to public school, eat school lunches and attend public universities when and if possible, the cloistered elite do not. An entire parallel yet grossly superior system of education exists for millionaires and billionaires, and everything from its fundamentals to its lunchtime is radically different. While we are playing gym and learning typing in highschool, the children of wealth learn elocution, policy, and various other traits that help them to accept their future roles as C level management, elite constitutional law attorneys, and even members of world banking organizations. If obamas children are learning programming, its merely as a jovial introduction into the world of directing, managing, or guiding long-term and broad stroke efforts in the field. They will not themselves become a "programmer."

that having been said, the children of the elite will always benefit disproportionately from government grants alongside their already generous foundation and nonprofit donations. they have overwhelming resources to secure and exploit them that public, and many private institutions, do not.

Re:but its not obamas fault.

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

The children of elites tend to have parents who care about scholastics, which is far and away the most accurate predictor of scholastic success, not school quality, dollars per pupil, class size, teacher quality, or other irrelevancies Democrats and Republicans argue about.

Re:but its not obamas fault.

[ShanghaiBill]

The children of elites tend to have parents who care about scholastics, which is far and away the most accurate predictor of scholastic success

No. This is wrong. The most accurate predictors of scholastic success are 1) IQ of the child's biological parents, and 2) Household income. Having "parents that care" makes no measureable difference once you compensate for IQ and income. What the parents do matters far less than who the parents are.

Re:but its not obamas fault.

[ShanghaiBill]

Paris Hilton earns millions annually through TV, product endorsements, and her own brands. She has a net worth of over $100 million. Less than $5M of that came from her inheritance. She manages and invests her money well. I don't think she is as dumb as you think she is.

Re:but its not obamas fault.

[slashping]

Seems their education prepared them just fine.

Or, more likely, their education had little to do with it.

Re:but its not obamas fault.

[slashping]

Less than $5M of that came from her inheritance

Her biggest inheritance was the family name, and she exploited that to get the earnings you talk about. Her only talent is being famous.

Re:but its not obamas fault.

[jedidiah]

They have to keep on repeating the Big Lie. They can't portray themselves as the knight in shining armor if there isn't some grave injustice that needs correcting. They need to repeat the media narrative that upward mobility isn't possible.

Re:but its not obamas fault.

[slashping]

Lots of people have a family name. Turning it into a brand the way she did is seriously impressive. Few here are anywhere near that caliber.

You are right. A family name isn't enough, you also need a sex tape.

Re:but its not obamas fault.

[ShanghaiBill]

You are right. A family name isn't enough, you also need a sex tape.

The sex tape was not something that "just happened". It was "leaked" just three weeks before the premier of her first TV show, just enough time to reach maximum buzz before the show was aired, and it doubled or maybe tripled the number of viewers. She took no legal action to stop it, or limit its distribution. She was able to ride the publicity for a five-season run. She also wrote a New York Times bestseller about her life. She is not an air-head, but she plays one on TV.

Re:but its not obamas fault.

[ShanghaiBill]

Yup, nobody had EVER heard of the brand Hilton (Hotels) before Paris came along...

Hilton Hotels is not a reality TV brand. Conrad Hilton had dozens of great-grandchildren. None of the others are near as famous, or as rich, as Paris. She certainly had a lot of advantages in life. But she has built on those advantages, rather than squandering them like most of her relatives. Holding her up as an example of a "petulant child incapable of simple arithmetic" is nonsense.

interesting

[slashping]

part of what's happening is that we are not helping schools and teachers teach it in an interesting way.

It's a feature, not a bug. Coding isn't interesting unless you have a mind for it. And if you have a mind for it, you don't need a creative teacher and colorful projects to make it interesting for you.

Re:interesting

[thesandtiger]

That's ridiculous. Many, many people come to things later in life that they were initially turned off of by truly horrid teachers.

When I was in elementary I *HATED* maths and science because the way my teachers taught it was aggressively boring. It was all rote memorization of formulae and processes, and there was zero joy or excitement - they taught it like people who didn't actually know the material and were just reading from a teacher's guide, because that's exactly what they were.

We moved and I went to a better school, and I was STUNNED at how interesting the teachers were able to make subjects I previously hated and dreaded.

Flash forward to now and I've had a long career as both an engineer and a research scientist. Given my successful career, I'd say I definitely have a mind for it, which I might never have come to realize if I'd had to continue staying with shitty teachers who seemed to go out of their way to make it boring.

And I know a LOT of people who have had similar experiences. Dismissing a huge swath of people as somehow unworthy or incapable simply because they don't immediately become fascinated by a subject is absurd. Funny enough though, it's a pretty common attitude by people in tech.

Re:interesting

[thesandtiger]

When I was very young, my older brother would have friends over and they would play D&D. Being the pesky kid sister, I wanted to play with them, and my folks insisted they let me play. So I made a character (a very time consuming process) and triumphantly joined their game and... my character was immediately killed by a dragon swooping down from the sky who then flew off, job done.

So I took a couple of hours to make another character and... killed by a random passing ogre. My brother and his friends were laughing their asses off about it, and figured they had gotten me to stop wanting to play, because it took me like an hour or so to make a character and if they kept dying...

I told my dad what was going on and, rather than tell my brother and his friends to knock that shit off, he said hey, let's see if we can make it so you can make a new character faster than they can kill it off. We spent about 3 weeks building a character creation program on our Apple ][; it just HAPPENED to also teach me the basics of programming.

Next time I gamed with them, they predictably killed my character right away. So I ran off, printed out a new one and came back. They killed her, too. Came back a minute later with another, then came back with a stack of them and at some point they said fuck it and actually let me play.

Give a person a problem they actually CARE about solving and that is amenable to an engineered solution and some support while they're surmounting the learning curve, and they'll probably pick stuff up really well. Necessity first, THEN abstraction.

The rich are going to get theirs

[rsilvergun]

Stop asking yourself how you can stop them from getting it and how we can get it for everybody else. All crap like this story does is get people yelling about govt waste. And all that happens when you try to cut it is your education budget for your kid's school gets cut.

Trends

[phantomfive]

I'm not sure the trend of 'making programming a game' is the best way to go about it....it works fine at the introductory levels, but how do you move beyond drag-and-drop programming blocks and start using text all the time? Are you going learn about NP-complete with pictures? I think at some point, the students need to develop a passion for solving puzzles, otherwise they will not have the desire to keep going.......

In any case, here is the curriculum they used:

1) programming (bouncing ball, kindergarten picture)
2) functions, variables, basic loops, 2D arrays (image processing)
3) fundamentals, control structures (Andy Wharhol, Green Screen)
4) algorithm development (finding the robots ball)
**At this point, the students are given a four-week introduction to Python** 5) OOP: classes, polymorphism, animation (bouncing ball, sea creature)
6) OOP and design (space invaders)
7) Abstraction Strings (data visualization)
8) OOP: interfaces (swimmable object, paint)
9) OOP: inheritance (sea creature inheritance)
10) Recursion (hanoi tower)
11) algorithm development, OOP: encapsulation (robot maze)

Personally I would rather see less emphasis on OOP, and more emphasis on "the proving mindset" (the proving mindset being, when you write code, try to think of everything that can go wrong, every possibility). It's kind of hard to understand when OOP is a good thing without writing bad code first.....

Re:Trends

[Tablizer]

Plus, OOP is not the right solution for some parts of systems. The "OO everywhere" mentality of the last decade is mostly dead. We've learned, yet again, "use the right tool for the job".

The FP (functional) fans are making the same mistake lately, I believe: "FP everywhere". In part because JavaScript (ironically) has a lousy OOP model such that people stick anonymous functions all over the place. (Oh oh, I didn't mean to start a Paradigm War.)

For example, JS's "setTimout" should be part of a "timer" class instead of rely on anonymous functions. That would allow more parameters and options (possibly for future expansion):

// pseudo-code
t = new(timer);
t.milliseconds = 4000;
t.overlap = false; // don't start a new thread if existing not done
t.maxWait = 12000;
function t.onTick { // over-ride (define) event
  doSomethingPeriodically();
}
function t.exceedWait() {
  threadTookTooLongCustomHandling(
        this.errMessage);
}

But a bigger-picture problem is that there is more to IT than coding, and coding jobs may even shrink, as offshoring picks up. I have more to say about this in another message.

Kipling I'm not

[OffTheLip]

"President lamented that his daughters hadn't taken to coding the way he'd like"

It's that way for many things. I never took to writing a great novel either although I took English, writing and literature most of my school years.

Re:whaaa?

[Austerity Empowers]

Apparently the rich plan to grow up to be code monkeys rather than hedge fund managers, CEOs or anonymous board members these days.

"CS not interesting"

[Anonymous Coward]

"part of what's happening is that we are not helping schools and teachers teach it in an interesting way"

It has nothing to do with the teaching technique. You can't force people to become interested in computer science and programming. If you aren't the type of person who is naturally drawn towards this particular type of problem solving, you'll quickly be discouraged by the constant setbacks and frustration that accompany all programming endeavors. Very few people have the natural mathematical talent and abstract thinking abilities necessary to enjoy this work and thus overcome the first 5-10 years of pain and eventually become good.

This is why inequality is rampant

[MikeRT]

They would rather throw money at the daughters of the upper end of the 1% than money at the sons of the bottom 50%. Because equality. Because a girl born to a family that can afford $37k/year/kid for K12 tuition is "oppressed" by the "patriarchy" that includes a poor white kid who lives in Appalachia with a dad on Social Security Disability and a mom works as a waitress at a low end restaurant and a minority boy living in a violent ghetto with no father in his life. No siree, those boys have it easy because their penises give them preferential access, should the heavens open up and give them access to an accredited college at some point in their lives. Fight for equality, fight for the daughters of the privileged!

You can lead a horse to water...

[K. S. Van Horn]

"part of what's happening is that we are not helping schools and teachers teach it in an interesting way."

If someone needs to convince you that CS is interesting, then maybe CS is not for you. I've never known a really good programmer who got into the field because someone coddled and cajoled them into it. On the contrary, they seek out every opportunity they can find to learn more on their own initiative.

So..

[fluffernutter]

Apparently the future CEOs and executives of companies plan to do all the programming themselves? It is just a minor thing to do on the side? Or perhaps the CEOs will only need to know enough to determine which robot to use.

Re:Incorrect.

[Dcnjoe60]

Actually, computer programming is a subset of computer science. You cannot design and build computers without thought to how to design applications for and program them.

But by itself, teaching programming is not computer science any more than drivers ed would be automotive engineering.

Re:whaaa?

[110010001000]

Sidwell isn't even the most expensive private school in DC.

Sidwell Friends School

[westlake]

In keeping with Quaker tenets, Sidwell Friends School seeks a student body that represents varied economic backgrounds. In 2015-2016, 23% of our students will receive approximately $6,700,000 of financial aid support with an average aid award of $25,708, which covers two-thirds of the average tuition cost.

Financial Aid

All students must acquire at least 20 credits before graduating. Students are required to take four years of English, three years of mathematics, three years of history, two years of one foreign language, two years of science, and two years of art. In addition to this, all freshmen must take a full year Freshman Studies course. Sidwell is a member school of School Year Abroad.

Notable alumni

Ann Brashares, author, "The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants"
Margaret Edison, playwright, Pulitzer Prize for Drama
Walter Gilbert, Nobel Prize chemist
Hannah Gray, later President of the University of Chicago
Davis Guggenheim, director, "An Inconvenient Truth"
Campbell McGrath, poet, MacArthur Foundation "Genius" award winner
Bill Nye, "Science Guy"
Robert Watson, computer science and network security, FreeBSD

Sidwell Friends School/A?