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Sep 29
2010
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A Pennsylvania school district requires Computer Science for all ninth graders.Posted by: Dave Moursund Tagged in: Education Reform
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Click here to learn about Dave Moursund's free book on science and technology education for teaches and parents of K-8 children.
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In browsing the Web today, I came across a newspaper article reporting about a sh0ool district requiring all ninth graders to take a computer course. (http://www.philly.com/philly/education/20100927_Springfield_High_looks_at_computers_in-depth.html) The Springfield Township district is the first in Pennsylvania to mandate that students take a computer science course as a graduation requirement.
I read the article to see what it might have to say about students learning computer science.
On the positive side, there was an indication that the teacher was familiar with the report, “A Model Curriculum for K–12 Computer Science.” A 2006 version of this work is available free as a PDF file at http://csta.acm.org/Curriculum/sub/CurrFiles/K-12ModelCurr2ndEd.pdf. This is a “solid” course with “serious” computer science content.
On the negative side, the reporter was not able to capture the essence of such a course. Quoting from the beginning of the article:
In a Monday morning class at Montgomery County's Springfield High School, Tammy Pirmann [the teacher] set out to show her students that one plus one doesn't always equal two.
Pirmann was introducing the ninth graders in her "Computer Science 9" course to the binary number system, made up of just zeroes and ones—the coding system used by computers.
As Pirmann wrote decimal-system numbers on a whiteboard, her students shuffled around 3-by-5 cards with dots on them, converting them into binary. (Two in binary is "10.")
This quote reminded me of what people were doing in secondary school Computer Literacy courses 25 or so years ago, and it shows little insight into mathematics and computer science.
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Links to Related IAE Documents
Alan Kay, a computer in education pioneer. IAE Newsletter - Issue 9, January, 2009.
Computational Thinking versus Computer and Information Science.
Douglas Engelbart, a computer in education pioneer and inventor of the mouse. IAE Newsletter - Issue 10, January, 2009.
Garbage in, garbage out—for computer and human brains.Robotics and Education.
Videos: http://iae-pedia.org/No_Cost_Educational_Videos
Volunteer led robotics projects and robotics contests in precollege education.
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Well over half the students took the literacy class. It consisted mostly of word processing, with a little bit about spreadsheets and databases, as well as some basic computer concepts and vocabulary. Students who had completed Algebra were intended to take BASIC, but this enrollment decreased over time.
After about 3 years, there was increasing conflict between us and the Business Department, who saw word processing as their province. The year after I left, the district allowed the Business word processing class to count for the Computer Science requirement. Soon after that, Computer Science enrollment collapsed and the department closed.