More information is on the CS Ed Week site: http://www.csedweek.org/m/kt1g4rn2/html
including a press release and an overview of the legislation.

If you haven’t already subscribed to the CS Ed Week page (if you received information about this piece of legislation, then you are subscribed), you should do so by scrolling down the page noted above and click on Subscribe.  As you’ll see you’re subscribing to Computing In The Core.  CSEdWeek is an activity of the Computing in the Core coalition.

Please support this legislation and encourage others to do likewise.

Ultimately her teaching experiences have caused her to ask “do the students really have a solid understanding of the mathematics they are using?  And, more importantly, do they understand why they’re using it?”

I think you know where I’m going with this.  Too often in computer science courses (and in fact in other IT courses that are offered in high school and I dare say in post-secondary) are planned so that a certain amount of material is “covered”.  Students get to practice modifying and writing code but often have no clue why they are writing this code.  They get to memorize some syntax but don’t understand what they’re memorizing.  There’s little of no context within which their work in writing code can be placed.  One might call this “context-free content”.  I think the author of the article is saying the same thing, but for mathematics.

Another way to look at this is to relate it to G. Polya’s four-step problem solving approach:

• Understand the problem
• Design a solution
• Solve the problem
• Assess your solution

Too often particularly in my early years of teaching computer science, I would “understand” the problem for them (put it in simplistic terms, over-simplifying), then with them I would “design” a solution (though even these simplistic problems might have had several approaches, we ended up with one).  They’d “solve” the problem (of course the detailed design encouraged almost identical solutions) and I would develop the test cases to see if their program “worked.”

There is little ownership by the students, little opportunity for real insight into any of these steps, little reason to learn and understand the programming techniques  beyond the next test.

I know I had to work hard to get  my students to expand their involvement beyond coding something that either we or I had understood, designed and assessed.  It wasn’t always easy but helping students find a context for their work with more realistic problems and situations always paid off with students being able to apply what they learned later in the course and more importantly in later courses.  Open-ended problems  helps out a lot.

Think about helping students understand the “why” along with the “how” of computer programming, especially when you’re given a course and a text to “cover” with a group of students.

Find a context for the content.

(full URL for the article:  http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/03/27/26crowley.h32.html?tkn=LNSFw%2FMoqekT4IEeYBSFfusZ4rOHVCeJYo%2F0&cmp=ENL-EU-VIEWS1 )

Is engineering sexier?  Is it more interesting?  Is there more money behind engineering?  Is it easier for businesses to support engineering programs in K-12 because kids often produce physical, tangible things as they are developing their engineering chops?

Why when you mention IT do people nod approvingly, but then avoid further discussing this area and including it in STEM?  Do other readers see this?

In fact while on that aforementioned panel, I referred to CS in several slides and afterwards, several university and business folks told me I either shouldn’t talk about CS or I need to combine it with IT, because, they exclaimed, businesses don’t do CS – they do IT and their departments are so named (IT or IS or something similar)…then you discover that most of what those departments do is design, develop and implement software…sounds like CS to me.  But maybe this is for another post.  Maybe I have an incorrect or off-center notion.

Let’s talk!  See you here soon!

Since I retired some years ago, I advise the school and serve on their Advisory Board which is made up of about 20 business people, some post-secondary reps and a few retired staff like me. As some of you know, I’ve kept my “oar in the water” related to CS education. I’ve been involved at the curricular level and as an advocate for increased CS in schools in general both locally and around the nation.  If you want to see some specifics of my involvement, take a look at my LinkedIn page at http://www.linkedin.com/in/joekmoch

Over what I hope will be many blogs and lots of comments, I’m guessing that everything K-12 is on the table.  Advocacy, approaches to beginning courses at the HS level, middle school and elementary computer science (possibly with a guest blogger for elementary), developing a program (i.e., a series of courses at the high school level, perhaps a series of units at the K-8 level), getting support for your program, and probably lots of other things that I’m forgetting at the moment.

I welcome your response to any future blog posts I write. So let the fun begin!