K-12 Computer Science Education News by Ursula Wolz As a community of educators we should become actively involved in this effort. It is old news that there is a projected shortage of CS/IT workers within the next decade. And although enrollments are increasing in undergraduate CS programs, we cannot sit back and relax. In the past 30 years we have experienced cycles of boom and bust in undergraduate CS/IT enrollments. Many of us experienced firsthand the high amplitude of the entrollment curve caused by the web bubble. The growth rate of many CS/IT programs was often unmanageable.The rapid decline wreacked havoc with both short-term concerns such as faculty load and with long-term strategic planning. Our goal this time around should be to reduce the amplitude and widen the frequency of the boom/bust cycle. The bill introduced by Senators Polis and Casey gives us the resources to do this in collaboration with the K-12 community. We need to understand how to inspire young people with diverse interests and learning styles to pursue computing, either as a career, an avocation or a hobby. The SIGCSE community knows a lot about computer science and information technology education. K-12 educators, administrators and researchers understand the dynamics, pedagogy and politics of American education. This bill has the potential to support a successful effort to integrate computing into K-12 teaching and learning. Get involved, keep informed, and participate in moving this legislation forward. Integrating computer science into the K-12 curriculum is not news, so why put it into the SIGCSE Bulletin? Since the big educational movements in the 1970s and 80s that promoted BASIC and Logo, computing educators have attempted to get the kind of integration into pre-college that other disciplines, like Biology and Chemistry, have. This has been a struggle, and in recent years computing, and programming in particular, are marginalized in K-12 for a variety of reasons including teacher preparedness, politics and what Peter Denning described as the eating the seed corn problem. While grassroots and academic efforts such as CS Unplugged, CS4HS, the Alice and Scratch communities and the Principles of Computing AP movement are becoming old news , the news of the day is that politicians are coming on board. On Sept. 22, two US Senators, Bob Casey (D-PA) and Jared Polis (D-CO) introduced the Computer Science Education Act. 1 It is intended to support state initiatives to provide planning and implementation grants to strengthen computer science within schools. Keep an eye on these senators websites to see how this plays out: http://polis.house.gov/ and http://casey.senate.gov/. http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-112s1614is SIGCSE Bulletin, Vol. 43, No. 4 October 2011
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K-12 Computer Science education news
Wolz, Ursula
Follow ACM SIGCSE Bulletin
, Volume 43 (4)
Association for Computing Machinery – Oct 1, 2011
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