$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

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: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.

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: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.