Significant drop in CS interest in high schools
AP CS Courses (and Students) on the Decline, CSTA Survey Finds This spring, the 2009 CSTA National Secondary Computer Science Survey collected responses from some 1,100 high school Computer Science teachers. The results: only 65 percent reported that their schools offer introductory or pre-AP Computer Science classes, as compared with 73 percent in 2007 and 78 percent in 2005. Only 27 percent reported that their schools offer AP CS, as compared with 32 percent in 2007 and 40 percent in 2005. And 74 percent offer CS content in courses other than introductory or AP CS, down from 85 percent in 2007. "The continuing drop in students taking AP CS is a serious warning sign about the state of computing in this country, as a student taking AP typically indicates his or her interest in majoring in that field in college or pursuing a career in that area," said Chris Stephenson, executive director of the Computer Science Teachers Association. article (also see PDFcomparing 2005 vs. 2007 vs. 2009 results): http://www.csta.acm.org/Research/sub/CSTAResearch.html -- wesley - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - "Core Python Programming", Prentice Hall, (c)2007,2001 "Python Fundamentals", Prentice Hall, (c)2009 http://corepython.com wesley.j.chun :: wescpy-at-gmail.com python training and technical consulting cyberweb.consulting : silicon valley, ca http://cyberwebconsulting.com
wesley chun wrote:
AP CS Courses (and Students) on the Decline, CSTA Survey Finds
This spring, the 2009 CSTA National Secondary Computer Science Survey collected responses from some 1,100 high school Computer Science teachers. The results: only 65 percent reported that their schools offer introductory or pre-AP Computer Science classes, as compared with 73 percent in 2007 and 78 percent in 2005. Only 27 percent reported that their schools offer AP CS, as compared with 32 percent in 2007 and 40 percent in 2005. And 74 percent offer CS content in courses other than introductory or AP CS, down from 85 percent in 2007.
"The continuing drop in students taking AP CS is a serious warning sign about the state of computing in this country, as a student taking AP typically indicates his or her interest in majoring in that field in college or pursuing a career in that area," said Chris Stephenson, executive director of the Computer Science Teachers Association.
I'm not involved in the education industry so I'm having a slight logic disconnect with this article. The title implies that students are not -choosing- to major in CS but the body talks about fewer schools -offering- the classes. I'm not clear to what degree students influence the offering of classes versus school leadership deciding that. Is this more a perception of viability issue among management or students? Or perhaps a problem with schools not being able to supply teachers that can teach it, and thereby dropping classes? Maybe CS needs a good PR campaign, showing how fun it is, how it directly impacts the qualify of life for society and how empowering it is to understand and be able to take control of the technology around us. It also is one of the cheapest fields in which to get started as everything you need is free - software tools, online books, video classes. You don't need organizational permission to participate like you do with many majors like nuclear physics (my original major) or medicine and it doesn't even require expensive/messy raw materials like electronics, chemistry or biology. Instead you work with the stuff of dreams, in an air-conditioned clean environment! I didn't know about the Computer Science Teachers Association and I see they have a very nice website. Thanks for the tip -- I'll be checking it out as I feel for the democratization of society we definitely need more people working on computers. Computers (being amplifiers of thought mostly for those who program them) are the only tool developed by Mankind that has such immense power to enslave society if left in the hands of a few. Just look at the information sieving and social monitoring facilities springing up around us. -Jeff
On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 3:56 PM, Jeff Rush<jeff@taupro.com> wrote:
wesley chun wrote:
AP CS Courses (and Students) on the Decline, CSTA Survey Finds
This spring, the 2009 CSTA National Secondary Computer Science Survey collected responses from some 1,100 high school Computer Science teachers. The results: only 65 percent reported that their schools offer introductory or pre-AP Computer Science classes, as compared with 73 percent in 2007 and 78 percent in 2005. Only 27 percent reported that their schools offer AP CS, as compared with 32 percent in 2007 and 40 percent in 2005. And 74 percent offer CS content in courses other than introductory or AP CS, down from 85 percent in 2007.
"The continuing drop in students taking AP CS is a serious warning sign about the state of computing in this country, as a student taking AP typically indicates his or her interest in majoring in that field in college or pursuing a career in that area," said Chris Stephenson, executive director of the Computer Science Teachers Association.
I'm not involved in the education industry so I'm having a slight logic disconnect with this article.
Per my recent meeting with some pro teachers at Sherwood High School on August 7, myself and Lindsey representing ISEPP (isepp.org), the politics are thus: in Oregon State, three years of high school mathematics are mandated by law, and this has traditionally meant something called "algebra" upon entering high school, and something called "geometry" the year following, leaving the third year somewhat up for grabs. Enter computer science teachers, already at a huge disadvantage because their subject is "elective" whereas the math teachers have this legal mandate to enforce three years of their discipline, or the degree might be denied. Solution: make a digital math offering that fulfills the State's 3rd year requirement, competing with Stats and/or Trig or whatever students take after Algebra, Geometry.
The title implies that students are not -choosing- to major in CS but the body talks about fewer schools -offering- the classes. I'm not clear to what degree students influence the offering of classes versus school leadership deciding that. Is this more a perception of viability issue among management or students? Or perhaps a problem with schools not being able to supply teachers that can teach it, and thereby dropping classes?
My view is a kind of hyper-specialization run amok somewhat paralyzed the system from making real change, to where a sort of para- and/or quasi- legal infrastructure, including home schooling and militant parent led alternative schools within the public system (charters or, in Portland, schools within schools), was needed to goad the balance into adopting similar changes. It's basically the usual bell curve of early adopters, then the bulge, then the laggards. The traditional "bandwagon" effect. The upshot is we're looking at a gradual displacement of the calculator generation textbooks with the newer Litvins style textbooks, whether PDF or dead tree or Amazon reader, is for another thread (already completed?).
Maybe CS needs a good PR campaign, showing how fun it is, how it directly impacts the qualify of life for society and how empowering it is to understand and be able to take control of the technology around us. It also is one of the cheapest fields in which to get started as everything you need is free - software tools, online books, video classes. You don't need organizational permission to participate like you do with many majors like nuclear physics (my original major) or medicine and it doesn't even require expensive/messy raw materials like electronics, chemistry or biology. Instead you work with the stuff of dreams, in an air-conditioned clean environment!
This is all good, and whatever the CS folks come up with, we can rip off and use to recruit for our digital math pilots, be these single courses or gateways. The reason I say gateways is kids increasingly enter high school already knowing quite a bit of the algebra/geometry stuff, e.g. our geek Hogwarts Winterhaven placed freshman directly into math-intensive chemistry, with moles 'n shit, and the kids did OK, just out of middle school. So that leaves room for green field development i.e. we don't hafta wait 'til some "third year" to start with the digital mathematics (aka discrete, concrete, post-analogy, computer-based, or whatever community standard).
I didn't know about the Computer Science Teachers Association and I see they have a very nice website. Thanks for the tip -- I'll be checking it out as I feel for the democratization of society we definitely need more people working on computers. Computers (being amplifiers of thought mostly for those who program them) are the only tool developed by Mankind that has such immense power to enslave society if left in the hands of a few. Just look at the information sieving and social monitoring facilities springing up around us.
Well said. We either control them, or we let our misleading fantasies about them, born of ignorance, control us. Here's some more of that CS / math hybrid I'm talking about: http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=1979894&tstart=0 Kirby
-Jeff _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 4:44 PM, kirby urner<kirby.urner@gmail.com> wrote: << SNIP >>
The reason I say gateways is kids increasingly enter high school already knowing quite a bit of the algebra/geometry stuff, e.g. our geek Hogwarts Winterhaven placed freshman directly into math-intensive chemistry, with moles 'n shit, and the kids did OK, just out of middle school. So that leaves room for green field development i.e. we don't hafta wait 'til some "third year" to start with the digital mathematics (aka discrete, concrete, post-analogy, computer-based, or whatever community standard).
Oopsie, I said "post-analogy" which makes little sense. This notion of a "digital math" comes from an older software lobby here in Oregon. Full disclosure: was chief outsourced database programmer for Associated Oregon Industries for some years (AOI.og). So if there's a "digital math" there must be an "analog math" that we're gradually overcoming, like broadcast TV is being overcome by HDTV. That "analog math" is what today we might call the precalculus/ calculus track -- very appropriately given how the latter is invested in "perfect smoothness" whereas the hallmark of the digital approach is to quantize everything, make stuff discrete. It's basically Euclid versus Democritus, if you want some philosophy department shorthand. So yeah, DM and AM for short, and DM is gradually displacing AM, not by neglecting calculus, but by making continuing series and sequences come out of Python generators ala Litvins, other P4E literature (inherits from CP4E). Kirby
I don't know the details on this issue, but I am aware of several more general problems. One is that nobody knows what CS is or should be. I got into it before there were CS departments, from Foundations of Mathematics, specifically Incompleteness and Undecidability and Non-Standard Arithmetic. Then I gave myself doses of Computational Complexity, algorithms, data structures, proving programs correct/deriving correct programs, concurrent programming, language design and implementation (including OOP), numerical analysis, relational database theory, security, and various other topics. I put considerable effort into understanding different models of computation, as different as FORTRAN, LISP, APL, PostScript, and FORTH. Currently I am looking at Parrot, the all-singing, all-dancing virtual machine for dynamic languages. I look at CS as the study of everything related to programming that computers should do automatically so that programmers don't have to keep reinventing the wheel. Looking at the Course Description for Computer Science A available at http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/ap/sub_compscia.html http://apcentral.collegeboard.com/apc/public/repository/ap-computer-science-... I see that o Use of a specified subset of Java is required. o Both teachers and students must have sufficient background in math o and have some competence in written communication (for documentation). o A minimum of three hours a week of exclusive access to a capacious and fairly fast computer is required for each student, and more is recommended. o After-hours access to the computers is recommended. o The content changes from year to year, so teachers must be prepared to update their skills. Each of these requirements places a significant burden on schools that want to offer such a program. For example, it is necessary to use a textbook on the AP Java subset, not any of the free Java textbooks. This makes AP CS an easy target during a time of cutbacks. Much of the content of the exam is properly software engineering rather than CS. Legal and ethical issues are also included. IMNSHO, there are major conceptual errors in the course design. For example, "...there are three standard sorts that are required for the AP CS A course: the two most common quadratic sorts—Selection sort and Insertion sort—and the more efficient Merge sort. Of course, the latter implies that students know the merge algorithm for sorted lists. "Students in the AP CS A course are not required to know the asymptotic (Big-Oh) analysis of these algorithms, but they should understand that Mergesort is advanta- geous for large data sets and be familiar with the differences between Selection and Insertion sort." Where is Quicksort? I/O is excluded because it is not standardized in Java. Also, looking elsewhere, where is the Web? Where is the Chomsky hierarchy of language types (regular, context-free, context-sensitive, unrestricted) and their recognizers? (finite-state machine, stack machine, bounded Turing machine, Turing machine) Where is BNF? There are other major omissions. I find that the course described is simultaneously overambitious and severely dumbed down. The sample exam questions are frightfully low-level compared with the AP Biology I took in 1962. Most of these problems come out to one-liners in APL or J, including the OOP questions, which J handles in Namespaces. Some of the practical problems are incorrectly stated for the intended problem domain. For example, clear a check and a per-check fee from a bank account, with no provision for handling checks that are too large. (Do we just pay them? Charge an overdraft fee? Bounce them and charge a fee?) I am working on how to teach CS ideas in third grade using tools such as Etoys Smalltalk, UCBLogo, and Turtle Art, all of which are packaged in Sugar for the OLPC XO and other Linuces. Etoys and UCBLogo are available for numerous platforms, and Turtle Art is written in Python, making it easy to port. We already have more than 40 years experience teaching programming in elementary schools with Logo and Smalltalk. On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 4:44 PM, kirby urner<kirby.urner@gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 3:56 PM, Jeff Rush<jeff@taupro.com> wrote:
wesley chun wrote:
AP CS Courses (and Students) on the Decline, CSTA Survey Finds
This spring, the 2009 CSTA National Secondary Computer Science Survey collected responses from some 1,100 high school Computer Science teachers. The results: only 65 percent reported that their schools offer introductory or pre-AP Computer Science classes, as compared with 73 percent in 2007 and 78 percent in 2005. Only 27 percent reported that their schools offer AP CS, as compared with 32 percent in 2007 and 40 percent in 2005. And 74 percent offer CS content in courses other than introductory or AP CS, down from 85 percent in 2007.
"The continuing drop in students taking AP CS is a serious warning sign about the state of computing in this country, as a student taking AP typically indicates his or her interest in majoring in that field in college or pursuing a career in that area," said Chris Stephenson, executive director of the Computer Science Teachers Association.
I'm not involved in the education industry so I'm having a slight logic disconnect with this article.
Per my recent meeting with some pro teachers at Sherwood High School on August 7, myself and Lindsey representing ISEPP (isepp.org), the politics are thus: in Oregon State, three years of high school mathematics are mandated by law, and this has traditionally meant something called "algebra" upon entering high school, and something called "geometry" the year following, leaving the third year somewhat up for grabs.
Enter computer science teachers, already at a huge disadvantage because their subject is "elective" whereas the math teachers have this legal mandate to enforce three years of their discipline, or the degree might be denied.
Solution: make a digital math offering that fulfills the State's 3rd year requirement, competing with Stats and/or Trig or whatever students take after Algebra, Geometry.
The title implies that students are not -choosing- to major in CS but the body talks about fewer schools -offering- the classes. I'm not clear to what degree students influence the offering of classes versus school leadership deciding that. Is this more a perception of viability issue among management or students? Or perhaps a problem with schools not being able to supply teachers that can teach it, and thereby dropping classes?
My view is a kind of hyper-specialization run amok somewhat paralyzed the system from making real change, to where a sort of para- and/or quasi- legal infrastructure, including home schooling and militant parent led alternative schools within the public system (charters or, in Portland, schools within schools), was needed to goad the balance into adopting similar changes. It's basically the usual bell curve of early adopters, then the bulge, then the laggards. The traditional "bandwagon" effect.
The upshot is we're looking at a gradual displacement of the calculator generation textbooks with the newer Litvins style textbooks, whether PDF or dead tree or Amazon reader, is for another thread (already completed?).
Maybe CS needs a good PR campaign, showing how fun it is, how it directly impacts the qualify of life for society and how empowering it is to understand and be able to take control of the technology around us. It also is one of the cheapest fields in which to get started as everything you need is free - software tools, online books, video classes. You don't need organizational permission to participate like you do with many majors like nuclear physics (my original major) or medicine and it doesn't even require expensive/messy raw materials like electronics, chemistry or biology. Instead you work with the stuff of dreams, in an air-conditioned clean environment!
This is all good, and whatever the CS folks come up with, we can rip off and use to recruit for our digital math pilots, be these single courses or gateways.
The reason I say gateways is kids increasingly enter high school already knowing quite a bit of the algebra/geometry stuff, e.g. our geek Hogwarts Winterhaven placed freshman directly into math-intensive chemistry, with moles 'n shit, and the kids did OK, just out of middle school. So that leaves room for green field development i.e. we don't hafta wait 'til some "third year" to start with the digital mathematics (aka discrete, concrete, post-analogy, computer-based, or whatever community standard).
I didn't know about the Computer Science Teachers Association and I see they have a very nice website. Thanks for the tip -- I'll be checking it out as I feel for the democratization of society we definitely need more people working on computers. Computers (being amplifiers of thought mostly for those who program them) are the only tool developed by Mankind that has such immense power to enslave society if left in the hands of a few. Just look at the information sieving and social monitoring facilities springing up around us.
Well said. We either control them, or we let our misleading fantasies about them, born of ignorance, control us.
Here's some more of that CS / math hybrid I'm talking about:
http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=1979894&tstart=0
Kirby
-Jeff _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
_______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
-- Edward Mokurai Cherlin Silent Thunder (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) is my name, and Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination. http://earthtreasury.org/
On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 8:54 AM, Edward Cherlin<echerlin@gmail.com> wrote: << SNIP >>
I am working on how to teach CS ideas in third grade using tools such as Etoys Smalltalk, UCBLogo, and Turtle Art, all of which are packaged in Sugar for the OLPC XO and other Linuces. Etoys and UCBLogo are available for numerous platforms, and Turtle Art is written in Python, making it easy to port. We already have more than 40 years experience teaching programming in elementary schools with Logo and Smalltalk.
I'm glad you say "CS ideas" and not "CS" as I think schools are wide open to innovative curriculum writing they're able to somehow shoehorn into the pipelines they've already built. Schools have a math pipeline, have for a long time, so lets just feed our CS content through that and branch to departments later, in college, where CS is its own department. That being said, of course this or that elite academy might have CS as an elective. I'm not for wagging my finger at these folks, as if I don't appreciate a quality Quaker school when I see one (Haverford is into Python). It's just that the politics in Oregon (and so probably other places) are such that it's easier to enroll math teachers in the idea of more merit pay in exchange for skills-building around phasing OO into everyday math, than it is to railroad CS as any kind of "mandatory" subject in high school. Resistance to CS as "required" (like math is, at least three years of it) comes from "programming" being perceived as just one more profession, and therefore getting too big a footprint i.e. not even doctors or lawyers get their own track. "Math", on the other hand (or "maths" as some say) is supposed to cover all numeracy skills, even alpha-numeracy skills, relevant to propagating a culture, i.e. is sufficiently an "umbrella term" to permit such as "digital math" (aka discrete, concrete) wherein "executable math notations" (e.g. Mathematica, Python, J...) get used (i.e. we move beyond calculators and beyond flatland (purely planar geometry) in one fell swoop). So if we're stuffing the math stocking with CS goodies, how do we integrate with what's already there? I've suggested some of the most obvious bridges: (a) the idea of "a function" is common to both, even though New Math (SMSG) spun "function" in contrast to "relation". That's actually a thread about "side effects" if you think about it, i.e. the same inputs should always generate the same outputs unless you've got some randomizer as a global, hitting from the side as it were, but then why not pass that explicitly --- anyway, talk about "wild cards" fits here. (b) the idea of "math objects" with Polyhedra the unifying bridge between "OO talk" (about objects in general, turtles in particular) and "things with color, shape, other attributes" (i.e. objects like furniture, machines, bodies...). When it comes to (a), I have all the usual abstract algebra for anchoring games with sets of elements and operations (groups, rings and fields -- easy to get to when the math is concrete). The only change with OO is the operations are "inside" the numbers, not "imposed from without". When it comes to (b), I follow the approach in 'The Book of Numbers' by Conway and Guy, leverage such tools as On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (e.g. 1, 12, 42, 92...). In giving just and (a) and a (b) here, I'm not presuming we don't have a (c), (d) and so on, plus I could say a lot more about both (a) and (b), but most of that's already published and helping other gnu math teachers hone their game. I've found very limited receptivity to these innovations outside of some Portland-based pilots we're working on, but then it's not my job to boss math teachers. They'll figure out what to do in some naturally selective adaptive process. I've found greater receptivity overseas, and, given my international school background, am looking forward to field testing these innovations in these more cosmopolitan settings. We have a teacher training program going, with Free School offerings for students willing to be involved in these pilots. I've been blogging more of the details. Linus Pauling House is a hub (isepp.org -- the organization I represented at Pycon this year, where I delivered a 3 hour workshop with Holdenweb.com). However, in saying "international school" I'm not presuming I need to hop a jet to help with these pilots. We have a lot of international families working at Intel around here. Many see the logic in what we're trying to do and want to encourage some level of success, if for no other reason than we're helping their bottom line (lots of need for computers) -- but then there *are* other reasons. Kirby
On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 9:27 AM, kirby urner<kirby.urner@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 8:54 AM, Edward Cherlin<echerlin@gmail.com> wrote:
<< SNIP >>
I am working on how to teach CS ideas in third grade using tools such as Etoys Smalltalk, UCBLogo, and Turtle Art, all of which are packaged in Sugar for the OLPC XO and other Linuces. Etoys and UCBLogo are available for numerous platforms, and Turtle Art is written in Python, making it easy to port. We already have more than 40 years experience teaching programming in elementary schools with Logo and Smalltalk.
I'm glad you say "CS ideas" and not "CS"
Yes, it's all about Powerful Ideas, not about topics, the way curricula are currently written. I have a page on Kindergarten Calculus somewhere...Aha! http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Kindergarten_Calculus <SNIP SNAP SNORUM>
Kirby
-- Edward Mokurai Cherlin Silent Thunder (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) is my name, and Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination. http://earthtreasury.org/
On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 10:16 AM, Edward Cherlin<echerlin@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 9:27 AM, kirby urner<kirby.urner@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 8:54 AM, Edward Cherlin<echerlin@gmail.com> wrote:
<< SNIP >>
I am working on how to teach CS ideas in third grade using tools such as Etoys Smalltalk, UCBLogo, and Turtle Art, all of which are packaged in Sugar for the OLPC XO and other Linuces. Etoys and UCBLogo are available for numerous platforms, and Turtle Art is written in Python, making it easy to port. We already have more than 40 years experience teaching programming in elementary schools with Logo and Smalltalk.
I'm glad you say "CS ideas" and not "CS"
Yes, it's all about Powerful Ideas, not about topics, the way curricula are currently written. I have a page on Kindergarten Calculus somewhere...Aha!
Sounds like we're in agreement then. OLPC remains a theme in this household as well, also liking the Starling for older kids (e.g. high school -- more my focus than the Alan Kay target demographic (we get to Python *after* all that Squeak and Scratch stuff). http://www.system76.com/product_info.php?cPath=28&products_id=92 (advised Trevor to get one) I see you're into Gattegno. I got a crash course in his stuff thx to Dr. Ian Benson, lots of pix in my Photostream of our visiting that Bucky museum in Chicago (where I seemed to know my way around). Marvin Minsky is being discussed indirectly (more into someone named Hawkins, invented the Treo?) on the Wittgenstein list I frequent. I'm not a big fan of AI projects, given the sorry track record, tend to steer clear of pie in the sky there, but OLPC has done real work on the ground (isn't really AI, is more just MIT thinking ahead a little). Kirby PS: I get some fan mail about my calculus too, taught it for a couple years at the AP Calc level, got my students placed into Yale and like that. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: David Winsemius <dwinsemius@comcast.net> Date: Sun, Aug 23, 2009 at 4:16 PM Subject: Catenary arc length: thank you To: kirby@4dsolutions.net Dear Kirby; I want to drop you a note of thanks for putting up this page: http://www.4dsolutions.net/ocn/catenary.html My son is an art student and is building a kiln and plans to have the cross-section as a catenary. One of the questions which his supervisor is asking him to solve it estimating the number of bricks. Your illustration of arc length calculations was very helpful. I took your formulae and implemented a numerical arc length integration of the inverted catenary function using R, a somewhat Scheme-like language for statistical computing. -- David Winsemius, MD Heritage Laboratories West Hartford, CT
<SNIP SNAP SNORUM>
Kirby
<< EDIT >>
-- Edward Mokurai Cherlin Silent Thunder (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) is my name, and Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination. http://earthtreasury.org/
Kirby Urner ндсжег воss
I don't think members of the K-12 CS education community were entirely comfortable with the way the article you quote interpreted the research or even the research itself. For example, the survey is of self-identified CS teachers rather than of schools. Mark Guzdial had a good post on the subject with a response by Alan Kay: http://computinged.wordpress.com/2009/08/10/questioning-the-report-that-high... I'll be starting a CS program in a Seattle school in a couple of weeks. I continue to be amazed at how little programming/computer science/technology is available to students in the district. After all, we have Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc at our doorstep. But administrators don't understand what programming is, knowledgeable teachers are hard to retain, curriculum is pretty spotty and students are scared of being labeled as nerds. And then as Kirby mentions, there are a million and a half bureaucratic hurdle to go through. Restrictive graduation requirements is a good example, teacher certification is another. If anyone is interested in taking a look and maybe providing feedback, two of my courses -- Exploring Computer Science and Creative Computing -- will use Python quite a bit. Right now http://garfieldcs.com/ only has marketing materials but I'll be posting assignments, etc as the school year starts. A number of us K-12 computer science instructors have been trying to put together a social network (http://csteachers.ning.com/) that hopefully will one day be taken over by CSTA. The idea is to get teachers talking about policy issues affecting them, share curriculum resources and just be aware of who is out there interested in K-12 CS/programming education. There's already a vibrant AP CS mailing-list-based community but there isn't such a thing for those of us teaching Python or other languages/tools/courses. It would be wonderful to get some Python experts involved and starting some conversation. Please join us! Best, Hélène. On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 3:56 PM, Jeff Rush<jeff@taupro.com> wrote:
wesley chun wrote:
AP CS Courses (and Students) on the Decline, CSTA Survey Finds
This spring, the 2009 CSTA National Secondary Computer Science Survey collected responses from some 1,100 high school Computer Science teachers. The results: only 65 percent reported that their schools offer introductory or pre-AP Computer Science classes, as compared with 73 percent in 2007 and 78 percent in 2005. Only 27 percent reported that their schools offer AP CS, as compared with 32 percent in 2007 and 40 percent in 2005. And 74 percent offer CS content in courses other than introductory or AP CS, down from 85 percent in 2007.
"The continuing drop in students taking AP CS is a serious warning sign about the state of computing in this country, as a student taking AP typically indicates his or her interest in majoring in that field in college or pursuing a career in that area," said Chris Stephenson, executive director of the Computer Science Teachers Association.
I'm not involved in the education industry so I'm having a slight logic disconnect with this article.
The title implies that students are not -choosing- to major in CS but the body talks about fewer schools -offering- the classes. I'm not clear to what degree students influence the offering of classes versus school leadership deciding that. Is this more a perception of viability issue among management or students? Or perhaps a problem with schools not being able to supply teachers that can teach it, and thereby dropping classes?
Maybe CS needs a good PR campaign, showing how fun it is, how it directly impacts the qualify of life for society and how empowering it is to understand and be able to take control of the technology around us. It also is one of the cheapest fields in which to get started as everything you need is free - software tools, online books, video classes. You don't need organizational permission to participate like you do with many majors like nuclear physics (my original major) or medicine and it doesn't even require expensive/messy raw materials like electronics, chemistry or biology. Instead you work with the stuff of dreams, in an air-conditioned clean environment!
I didn't know about the Computer Science Teachers Association and I see they have a very nice website. Thanks for the tip -- I'll be checking it out as I feel for the democratization of society we definitely need more people working on computers. Computers (being amplifiers of thought mostly for those who program them) are the only tool developed by Mankind that has such immense power to enslave society if left in the hands of a few. Just look at the information sieving and social monitoring facilities springing up around us.
-Jeff _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 6:12 PM, Helene Martin<lognaturel@gmail.com> wrote:
I don't think members of the K-12 CS education community were entirely comfortable with the way the article you quote interpreted the research or even the research itself. For example, the survey is of self-identified CS teachers rather than of schools. Mark Guzdial had a good post on the subject with a response by Alan Kay: http://computinged.wordpress.com/2009/08/10/questioning-the-report-that-high...
I'll be starting a CS program in a Seattle school in a couple of weeks. I continue to be amazed at how little programming/computer science/technology is available to students in the district. After all, we have Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc at our doorstep. But administrators don't understand what programming is, knowledgeable teachers are hard to retain, curriculum is pretty spotty and students are scared of being labeled as nerds. And then as Kirby mentions, there are a million and a half bureaucratic hurdle to go through. Restrictive graduation requirements is a good example, teacher certification is another.
Thank you Hélène, useful to get reality checks from a close neighbor. Our user group PPUG has kept bringing up Sage (the free Python product) and the Sage community as one to get work with. But our ranks include mostly family guys or up and coming private sector, precious few in the teaching professions. As you say, there's a big cultural disconnect between what goes on in the classroom and what goes on in a Python user group -- and that's wrong, why waste so much time on a wild goose chase (chasing the specter of maths gone by). It's the same scene of being surrounded by high tech, kids full of hope, and schools in the dark ages. Our Hillsboro Police Department (next to Intel) was really tired of getting asked to bust kids chops for software piracy, ripping off music (this was Napster's golden year) and when they found about about FOSS they went apeshit, going "why do we have to play the mean guy enforcer when we could be having fun watching these kids develop cyberspace skills and not end up career criminals?" So HPD opened a Linux Lab right there in West Precinct (hand-me-down Compaqs running Red Hat). Me 'n Jerritt (with linuxfund.org back then) were two of the teachers, contracted through saturdayacademy.org. But guess what: teenagers don't really think of a police station as being congenial to their way of life, so the marketing was a real up hill battle. Also the premise was born or desperation: schools so not doing their jobs that the police needed to step in as digital math teachers, when they're supposed to be running forensics labs. Like how twisted is that? George Heuston, the brains behind this project, along with his chief, was unusually ahead of the pack in his thinking (quite a resume, FBI, NORAD... I don't know the half of it I'm sure).
If anyone is interested in taking a look and maybe providing feedback, two of my courses -- Exploring Computer Science and Creative Computing -- will use Python quite a bit. Right now http://garfieldcs.com/ only has marketing materials but I'll be posting assignments, etc as the school year starts.
Garfield High in Seattle? Where my mom went as a kid? And Jimi Hendrix?
A number of us K-12 computer science instructors have been trying to put together a social network (http://csteachers.ning.com/) that hopefully will one day be taken over by CSTA. The idea is to get teachers talking about policy issues affecting them, share curriculum resources and just be aware of who is out there interested in K-12 CS/programming education. There's already a vibrant AP CS mailing-list-based community but there isn't such a thing for those of us teaching Python or other languages/tools/courses. It would be wonderful to get some Python experts involved and starting some conversation. Please join us!
Best,
Hélène.
Sounds excellent. Your meeting at Sherwood High ended on a note of collaboration between high school math teachers and high school computer science teachers as we think both are holding some of the puzzle pieces. My approach has been to jump ahead to where we already have flatscreen monitors in front of most high school math students, and now want to get into ray tracing, simulations, geometry, and yes, turtle graphics (also VRML aka x3D etc.). This isn't just a superficial tour of various gee whiz applications though, it's serious-enough programming in a computer language, expressing "math objects" (such as Vectors, Polynomials) in Python, much as the Litvins text does. http://www.python.org/community/sigs/current/edu-sig/ links to Sage, which you likely already know about, whereas here's the Litvins text home page (not yet linked): http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Digital-Age-Programming-Python/dp/09727055... There's a PDF version, not sure what else, and a print on demand philosophy that's better than most mass publishing policies in my estimation, although I'm not connected to the publisher in any business capacity, have had no contact with the authors to date. Chris Brooks introduced me to this text. He's with Software Association of Oregon etc., seems well connected in Ruby world (given the latter's tight integration with OpenGL, Arthur Siegel used to wonder if our window had gone by (Vpython was moribund at the time, looking much stronger today -- Dr. Bob Fuller my contact with that group)). Kirby
On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 3:56 PM, Jeff Rush<jeff@taupro.com> wrote:
wesley chun wrote:
AP CS Courses (and Students) on the Decline, CSTA Survey Finds
This spring, the 2009 CSTA National Secondary Computer Science Survey collected responses from some 1,100 high school Computer Science teachers. The results: only 65 percent reported that their schools offer introductory or pre-AP Computer Science classes, as compared with 73 percent in 2007 and 78 percent in 2005. Only 27 percent reported that their schools offer AP CS, as compared with 32 percent in 2007 and 40 percent in 2005. And 74 percent offer CS content in courses other than introductory or AP CS, down from 85 percent in 2007.
"The continuing drop in students taking AP CS is a serious warning sign about the state of computing in this country, as a student taking AP typically indicates his or her interest in majoring in that field in college or pursuing a career in that area," said Chris Stephenson, executive director of the Computer Science Teachers Association.
I'm not involved in the education industry so I'm having a slight logic disconnect with this article.
The title implies that students are not -choosing- to major in CS but the body talks about fewer schools -offering- the classes. I'm not clear to what degree students influence the offering of classes versus school leadership deciding that. Is this more a perception of viability issue among management or students? Or perhaps a problem with schools not being able to supply teachers that can teach it, and thereby dropping classes?
Maybe CS needs a good PR campaign, showing how fun it is, how it directly impacts the qualify of life for society and how empowering it is to understand and be able to take control of the technology around us. It also is one of the cheapest fields in which to get started as everything you need is free - software tools, online books, video classes. You don't need organizational permission to participate like you do with many majors like nuclear physics (my original major) or medicine and it doesn't even require expensive/messy raw materials like electronics, chemistry or biology. Instead you work with the stuff of dreams, in an air-conditioned clean environment!
I didn't know about the Computer Science Teachers Association and I see they have a very nice website. Thanks for the tip -- I'll be checking it out as I feel for the democratization of society we definitely need more people working on computers. Computers (being amplifiers of thought mostly for those who program them) are the only tool developed by Mankind that has such immense power to enslave society if left in the hands of a few. Just look at the information sieving and social monitoring facilities springing up around us.
-Jeff _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
_______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
Our user group PPUG has kept bringing up Sage (the free Python product) and the Sage community as one to get work with. But our ranks include mostly family guys or up and coming private sector, precious few in the teaching professions.
As you say, there's a big cultural disconnect between what goes on in the classroom and what goes on in a Python user group -- and that's wrong, why waste so much time on a wild goose chase (chasing the specter of maths gone by).
Collaboration is always expensive so sometimes it just feels easier to pursue an idea in isolation. I'm definitely guilty of that myself. I'm aware of Sage but I don't think I'll be using it, at least for this first year. It sounds like I'm taking a decidedly less mathematical approach to teaching Python than you and probably a lot of people would prefer. In my mind, the goal initially is to get students -- and not just the AP kids -- curious enough to use programming as a way to express themselves and dare to try things they don't know will work. For a lot of kids, math is not going to be the hook but interface design, data visualizations, automated music generation and other such things might be. I'd like for them to think of Python (or JavaScript or Processing or Java) as another great tool they can use to pursue whatever goals they have. There's a delicate balance to strike between academic content and a good hook, though. It remains to be seen whether I can strike it properly.
It's the same scene of being surrounded by high tech, kids full of hope, and schools in the dark ages.
Our Hillsboro Police Department (next to Intel) was really tired of getting asked to bust kids chops for software piracy, ripping off music (this was Napster's golden year) and when they found about about FOSS they went apeshit, going "why do we have to play the mean guy enforcer when we could be having fun watching these kids develop cyberspace skills and not end up career criminals?"
So HPD opened a Linux Lab right there in West Precinct (hand-me-down Compaqs running Red Hat).
Me 'n Jerritt (with linuxfund.org back then) were two of the teachers, contracted through saturdayacademy.org.
But guess what: teenagers don't really think of a police station as being congenial to their way of life, so the marketing was a real up hill battle.
Also the premise was born or desperation: schools so not doing their jobs that the police needed to step in as digital math teachers, when they're supposed to be running forensics labs. Like how twisted is that? George Heuston, the brains behind this project, along with his chief, was unusually ahead of the pack in his thinking (quite a resume, FBI, NORAD... I don't know the half of it I'm sure).
This is a really interesting anecdote. It's really disappointing to think that the police force would be more aware of the need for technology education than schools! I wonder whether I could get a digital forensics expert to talk about his/her work. I bet that would be interesting to kids.
Garfield High in Seattle? Where my mom went as a kid? And Jimi Hendrix?
The one and only!
A number of us K-12 computer science instructors have been trying to put together a social network (http://csteachers.ning.com/) that hopefully will one day be taken over by CSTA. The idea is to get teachers talking about policy issues affecting them, share curriculum resources and just be aware of who is out there interested in K-12 CS/programming education. There's already a vibrant AP CS mailing-list-based community but there isn't such a thing for those of us teaching Python or other languages/tools/courses. It would be wonderful to get some Python experts involved and starting some conversation. Please join us!
Best,
Hélène.
Sounds excellent.
Your meeting at Sherwood High ended on a note of collaboration between high school math teachers and high school computer science teachers as we think both are holding some of the puzzle pieces.
My approach has been to jump ahead to where we already have flatscreen monitors in front of most high school math students, and now want to get into ray tracing, simulations, geometry, and yes, turtle graphics (also VRML aka x3D etc.). This isn't just a superficial tour of various gee whiz applications though, it's serious-enough programming in a computer language, expressing "math objects" (such as Vectors, Polynomials) in Python, much as the Litvins text does.
http://www.python.org/community/sigs/current/edu-sig/ links to Sage, which you likely already know about, whereas here's the Litvins text home page (not yet linked):
http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Digital-Age-Programming-Python/dp/09727055...
There's a PDF version, not sure what else, and a print on demand philosophy that's better than most mass publishing policies in my estimation, although I'm not connected to the publisher in any business capacity, have had no contact with the authors to date. Chris Brooks introduced me to this text. He's with Software Association of Oregon etc., seems well connected in Ruby world (given the latter's tight integration with OpenGL, Arthur Siegel used to wonder if our window had gone by (Vpython was moribund at the time, looking much stronger today -- Dr. Bob Fuller my contact with that group)).
Kirby
On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 3:56 PM, Jeff Rush<jeff@taupro.com> wrote:
wesley chun wrote:
AP CS Courses (and Students) on the Decline, CSTA Survey Finds
This spring, the 2009 CSTA National Secondary Computer Science Survey collected responses from some 1,100 high school Computer Science teachers. The results: only 65 percent reported that their schools offer introductory or pre-AP Computer Science classes, as compared with 73 percent in 2007 and 78 percent in 2005. Only 27 percent reported that their schools offer AP CS, as compared with 32 percent in 2007 and 40 percent in 2005. And 74 percent offer CS content in courses other than introductory or AP CS, down from 85 percent in 2007.
"The continuing drop in students taking AP CS is a serious warning sign about the state of computing in this country, as a student taking AP typically indicates his or her interest in majoring in that field in college or pursuing a career in that area," said Chris Stephenson, executive director of the Computer Science Teachers Association.
I'm not involved in the education industry so I'm having a slight logic disconnect with this article.
The title implies that students are not -choosing- to major in CS but the body talks about fewer schools -offering- the classes. I'm not clear to what degree students influence the offering of classes versus school leadership deciding that. Is this more a perception of viability issue among management or students? Or perhaps a problem with schools not being able to supply teachers that can teach it, and thereby dropping classes?
Maybe CS needs a good PR campaign, showing how fun it is, how it directly impacts the qualify of life for society and how empowering it is to understand and be able to take control of the technology around us. It also is one of the cheapest fields in which to get started as everything you need is free - software tools, online books, video classes. You don't need organizational permission to participate like you do with many majors like nuclear physics (my original major) or medicine and it doesn't even require expensive/messy raw materials like electronics, chemistry or biology. Instead you work with the stuff of dreams, in an air-conditioned clean environment!
I didn't know about the Computer Science Teachers Association and I see they have a very nice website. Thanks for the tip -- I'll be checking it out as I feel for the democratization of society we definitely need more people working on computers. Computers (being amplifiers of thought mostly for those who program them) are the only tool developed by Mankind that has such immense power to enslave society if left in the hands of a few. Just look at the information sieving and social monitoring facilities springing up around us.
-Jeff _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
_______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 10:11 PM, Helene Martin<lognaturel@gmail.com> wrote:
Our user group PPUG has kept bringing up Sage (the free Python product) and the Sage community as one to get work with. But our ranks include mostly family guys or up and coming private sector, precious few in the teaching professions.
As you say, there's a big cultural disconnect between what goes on in the classroom and what goes on in a Python user group -- and that's wrong, why waste so much time on a wild goose chase (chasing the specter of maths gone by).
Collaboration is always expensive so sometimes it just feels easier to pursue an idea in isolation. I'm definitely guilty of that myself.
And sometimes that's a good thing, as that's what artists call artistic control e.g. none of the great poems were written by committee (I might be challenged on that, but it sounds right to say). You need that unifying vision. But then I think you need exposure to other artists to keep it fresh and relevant. So probably a mix of collaboration and solo work is the best in many cases. Observing Portland's music scene, I'm seeing much to confirm this.
I'm aware of Sage but I don't think I'll be using it, at least for this first year. It sounds like I'm taking a decidedly less mathematical approach to teaching Python than you and probably a lot of people would prefer. In my mind, the goal initially is to get students -- and not just the AP kids -- curious enough to use programming as a way to express themselves and dare to try things they don't know will work. For a lot of kids, math is not going to be the hook but interface design, data visualizations, automated music generation and other such things might be. I'd like for them to think of Python (or JavaScript or Processing or Java) as another great tool they can use to pursue whatever goals they have.
There's a delicate balance to strike between academic content and a good hook, though. It remains to be seen whether I can strike it properly.
Yes, I'm all for hooks, proving up front that this stuff is going to kick ass. My classes have tended to be purely elective, outside regular school, on Saturdays, for a fee, and not for academic credit (except that around here, Saturday Academy certificates are valued, a real asset on college admissions forms, plus there's the internship program). So I've had to work extra hard to make my classes exciting. That's meant showing some cartoons and then talking about ray tracing as a way to make frames of film (render farms give us more frames at a time). They watch short movies like 'Warriors of the Web' and 'Code Guardian' as specimens, then turn to a simpler workbench where we use Python with POV-Ray. We also talk about lore quite a bit i.e. what is the history of open source, where did Linux come from, who is Richard Stallman, what is GNU? I've been known to screen excerpts from 'Revolution OS' which starts from the birth of Linux through the first dot com boom, so dated, but still interesting. This more math-centric approach I'm talking up on this list (edu-sig@python.org) is more in the storyboard phase i.e. it's an attempt to break away from the pattern of an elective subject that needs to rely on just word of mouth. We're hoping to shift more of the computer stuff into the math domain because that's where you get the required credits. If our digital math track includes enough calculus (among other things), it could probably completely replace that analog math track though all four years of high school. Once kids have a test of learning math in conjunction with ray tracing, making colorful polyhedra spin in a VRML browser, they don't easily go back to the old formats.
It's the same scene of being surrounded by high tech, kids full of hope, and schools in the dark ages.
Our Hillsboro Police Department (next to Intel) was really tired of getting asked to bust kids chops for software piracy, ripping off music (this was Napster's golden year) and when they found about about FOSS they went apeshit, going "why do we have to play the mean guy enforcer when we could be having fun watching these kids develop cyberspace skills and not end up career criminals?"
So HPD opened a Linux Lab right there in West Precinct (hand-me-down Compaqs running Red Hat).
Me 'n Jerritt (with linuxfund.org back then) were two of the teachers, contracted through saturdayacademy.org.
But guess what: teenagers don't really think of a police station as being congenial to their way of life, so the marketing was a real up hill battle.
Also the premise was born or desperation: schools so not doing their jobs that the police needed to step in as digital math teachers, when they're supposed to be running forensics labs. Like how twisted is that? George Heuston, the brains behind this project, along with his chief, was unusually ahead of the pack in his thinking (quite a resume, FBI, NORAD... I don't know the half of it I'm sure).
This is a really interesting anecdote. It's really disappointing to think that the police force would be more aware of the need for technology education than schools! I wonder whether I could get a digital forensics expert to talk about his/her work. I bet that would be interesting to kids.
We have these Science Pubs around Portland, sponsored by the science museum and the leading brew pub chain. The crime lab police woman was tremendously popular, in part because there are so many forensics shows on TV these days. http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2009/06/big-science.html George Heuston did more digital forensics i.e. analyzed hard drives recovered from crime scenes. I think these would be dynamite speakers as well, in a science pub or even math pub context.
Garfield High in Seattle? Where my mom went as a kid? And Jimi Hendrix?
The one and only!
Cool! Glad to be on your Ning thing, thanks for inviting me! Kirby
I'm a math teacher who uses python for personal purposes, but the cs teacher in my building told me that the higher level cs ab ap was axed for this year - that could contribute to lower enrollment. Apparently ap italian was also on the chopping block until the gov't of italy ponied up....if only there were a wealthy benefactor for cs... On 2009-08-28, kirby urner <kirby.urner@gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 10:11 PM, Helene Martin<lognaturel@gmail.com> wrote:
Our user group PPUG has kept bringing up Sage (the free Python product) and the Sage community as one to get work with. But our ranks include mostly family guys or up and coming private sector, precious few in the teaching professions.
As you say, there's a big cultural disconnect between what goes on in the classroom and what goes on in a Python user group -- and that's wrong, why waste so much time on a wild goose chase (chasing the specter of maths gone by).
Collaboration is always expensive so sometimes it just feels easier to pursue an idea in isolation. I'm definitely guilty of that myself.
And sometimes that's a good thing, as that's what artists call artistic control e.g. none of the great poems were written by committee (I might be challenged on that, but it sounds right to say). You need that unifying vision.
But then I think you need exposure to other artists to keep it fresh and relevant.
So probably a mix of collaboration and solo work is the best in many cases. Observing Portland's music scene, I'm seeing much to confirm this.
I'm aware of Sage but I don't think I'll be using it, at least for this first year. It sounds like I'm taking a decidedly less mathematical approach to teaching Python than you and probably a lot of people would prefer. In my mind, the goal initially is to get students -- and not just the AP kids -- curious enough to use programming as a way to express themselves and dare to try things they don't know will work. For a lot of kids, math is not going to be the hook but interface design, data visualizations, automated music generation and other such things might be. I'd like for them to think of Python (or JavaScript or Processing or Java) as another great tool they can use to pursue whatever goals they have.
There's a delicate balance to strike between academic content and a good hook, though. It remains to be seen whether I can strike it properly.
Yes, I'm all for hooks, proving up front that this stuff is going to kick ass.
My classes have tended to be purely elective, outside regular school, on Saturdays, for a fee, and not for academic credit (except that around here, Saturday Academy certificates are valued, a real asset on college admissions forms, plus there's the internship program).
So I've had to work extra hard to make my classes exciting. That's meant showing some cartoons and then talking about ray tracing as a way to make frames of film (render farms give us more frames at a time). They watch short movies like 'Warriors of the Web' and 'Code Guardian' as specimens, then turn to a simpler workbench where we use Python with POV-Ray.
We also talk about lore quite a bit i.e. what is the history of open source, where did Linux come from, who is Richard Stallman, what is GNU? I've been known to screen excerpts from 'Revolution OS' which starts from the birth of Linux through the first dot com boom, so dated, but still interesting.
This more math-centric approach I'm talking up on this list (edu-sig@python.org) is more in the storyboard phase i.e. it's an attempt to break away from the pattern of an elective subject that needs to rely on just word of mouth.
We're hoping to shift more of the computer stuff into the math domain because that's where you get the required credits.
If our digital math track includes enough calculus (among other things), it could probably completely replace that analog math track though all four years of high school.
Once kids have a test of learning math in conjunction with ray tracing, making colorful polyhedra spin in a VRML browser, they don't easily go back to the old formats.
It's the same scene of being surrounded by high tech, kids full of hope, and schools in the dark ages.
Our Hillsboro Police Department (next to Intel) was really tired of getting asked to bust kids chops for software piracy, ripping off music (this was Napster's golden year) and when they found about about FOSS they went apeshit, going "why do we have to play the mean guy enforcer when we could be having fun watching these kids develop cyberspace skills and not end up career criminals?"
So HPD opened a Linux Lab right there in West Precinct (hand-me-down Compaqs running Red Hat).
Me 'n Jerritt (with linuxfund.org back then) were two of the teachers, contracted through saturdayacademy.org.
But guess what: teenagers don't really think of a police station as being congenial to their way of life, so the marketing was a real up hill battle.
Also the premise was born or desperation: schools so not doing their jobs that the police needed to step in as digital math teachers, when they're supposed to be running forensics labs. Like how twisted is that? George Heuston, the brains behind this project, along with his chief, was unusually ahead of the pack in his thinking (quite a resume, FBI, NORAD... I don't know the half of it I'm sure).
This is a really interesting anecdote. It's really disappointing to think that the police force would be more aware of the need for technology education than schools! I wonder whether I could get a digital forensics expert to talk about his/her work. I bet that would be interesting to kids.
We have these Science Pubs around Portland, sponsored by the science museum and the leading brew pub chain.
The crime lab police woman was tremendously popular, in part because there are so many forensics shows on TV these days.
http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2009/06/big-science.html
George Heuston did more digital forensics i.e. analyzed hard drives recovered from crime scenes. I think these would be dynamite speakers as well, in a science pub or even math pub context.
Garfield High in Seattle? Where my mom went as a kid? And Jimi Hendrix?
The one and only!
Cool!
Glad to be on your Ning thing, thanks for inviting me!
Kirby _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
Lloyd Hugh Allen wrote:
I'm a math teacher who uses python for personal purposes, but the cs teacher in my building told me that the higher level cs ab ap was axed for this year - that could contribute to lower enrollment. Apparently ap italian was also on the chopping block until the gov't of italy ponied up....if only there were a wealthy benefactor for cs...
Now I'm really confused. ;-) So you're talking about the CS 'courses' no the AP tests, right? I know the AP -tests- are offered only when it makes business sense for the testing company but -courses- are under the control of the local schoolboard, I thought. So you're saying the schoolboard decides what courses to offer based on who gives them money, up to and including governments, foreign and domestic, instead of what is (a) best for society/future interests of the students based on knowledge of trends, or (b) student registration demand/historical interest in certain topics? I'd love to get into the head of some of these decision makers - what wierd view do they have of CS? They must imagine it being some luxury topic, some elective nice to have like Italian for advanced students but not something of basic literacy for all students. There is a difference between "this is what every citizen should know about computers/tech to understand the rapidly changing world around them" and "vocational training to become a professional programmer". -Jeff
On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 5:07 PM, Jeff Rush<jeff@taupro.com> wrote:
Lloyd Hugh Allen wrote:
I'm a math teacher who uses python for personal purposes, but the cs teacher in my building told me that the higher level cs ab ap was axed for this year - that could contribute to lower enrollment. Apparently ap italian was also on the chopping block until the gov't of italy ponied up....if only there were a wealthy benefactor for cs...
Now I'm really confused. ;-) So you're talking about the CS 'courses' no the AP tests, right? I know the AP -tests- are offered only when it makes business sense for the testing company but -courses- are under the control of the local schoolboard, I thought.
So you're saying the schoolboard decides what courses to offer based on who gives them money, up to and including governments, foreign and domestic, instead of what is (a) best for society/future interests of the students based on knowledge of trends, or (b) student registration demand/historical interest in certain topics?
I'd love to get into the head of some of these decision makers - what wierd view do they have of CS? They must imagine it being some luxury topic, some elective nice to have like Italian for advanced students but not something of basic literacy for all students.
I think you're about right here Jeff. It takes little think tanks with no investment in the status quo to bring attention to these abuses. In our district, if a school censors YouTube, even for teachers, we encourage writing the ACLU, even Amnesty International. Censoring is like book burning, and if you're tax funded and doing it, you maybe need a knock on the door from the taxpayers' representative (could be a Congressman), some scandalous press. The way kids are hobbled with obsolete textbooks teaching nothing relevant is of course a travesty.
There is a difference between "this is what every citizen should know about computers/tech to understand the rapidly changing world around them" and "vocational training to become a professional programmer".
-Jeff
Yes, big difference. Lots of canary in mineshaft tests vis-a-vis "what every citizen should know..." No mention of SQL in all four years of high school? Dead canary. No mention of RSA in all four years of high school? Dead canary. No use of FOSS on commodity hardware to impart math principles? Dead canary. I think we should give out Dead Canary awards to deserving school boards ("we" being my think tank -- I know Python.org is business class conservative and can't afford to do anything that controversial or fun). Kirby
I just want to offer a little more background on the AP situation. There used to be two AP CS courses: AP CS A was and remains roughly equivalent to a semester-long college intro to programming in Java and AP CS AB was roughly equivalent to a data structures course. The AB course was not offered by many schools and because it was one of the least popular AP tests, the College Board axed it. There was also an equity question -- this was the test with the biggest gender and ethnic bias. I don't think it would be fair to say the course was killed against historical interest because that truly was declining. Also, it was definitely not what most people would need to understand technology. Jeff, you're right that a teacher could technically offer the equivalent to AP CS AB. That being said, without an AP test at the end of the line, school districts have very little way of knowing whether a course is good and I sympathize with this in some sense. It doesn't make a ton of sense to keep offering a course that can't be gauged for quality (because no one knows computer science at the district level) and that only white gamer-types take (generalizing, but sadly largely true). Here are the statistics: http://www.collegeboard.com/html/aprtn/ap_computer_science.html To fill the void left by the AP CS AB course, some colleges have been offering college credit to students of teachers who align their curriculum in some way. Here are some details on UW's program: http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/reges/uwhs/ Teachers across the nation are transforming their AB courses into UW in the high school courses. Axing the AB test might actually be a really good thing. The College Board is working on creating a new AP test aimed at capturing some of the things you're talking about that would be good for society and student future and making it approachable to more students. Jeanette Wing's ideas on computational thinking are a big part of that. Last I heard, the plan was to give teachers choice over language of instruction. Python would be one of those choices so hopefully once that curriculum gets going there'll be a sharp increase of Python in high school. Hélène. On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 5:07 PM, Jeff Rush<jeff@taupro.com> wrote:
Lloyd Hugh Allen wrote:
I'm a math teacher who uses python for personal purposes, but the cs teacher in my building told me that the higher level cs ab ap was axed for this year - that could contribute to lower enrollment. Apparently ap italian was also on the chopping block until the gov't of italy ponied up....if only there were a wealthy benefactor for cs...
Now I'm really confused. ;-) So you're talking about the CS 'courses' no the AP tests, right? I know the AP -tests- are offered only when it makes business sense for the testing company but -courses- are under the control of the local schoolboard, I thought.
So you're saying the schoolboard decides what courses to offer based on who gives them money, up to and including governments, foreign and domestic, instead of what is (a) best for society/future interests of the students based on knowledge of trends, or (b) student registration demand/historical interest in certain topics?
I'd love to get into the head of some of these decision makers - what wierd view do they have of CS? They must imagine it being some luxury topic, some elective nice to have like Italian for advanced students but not something of basic literacy for all students.
There is a difference between "this is what every citizen should know about computers/tech to understand the rapidly changing world around them" and "vocational training to become a professional programmer".
-Jeff _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
participants (6)
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Edward Cherlin -
Helene Martin -
Jeff Rush -
kirby urner -
Lloyd Hugh Allen -
wesley chun