Recent Efforts to Broaden Formal Computer Science Education at the K-12 Level

This chapter discusses efforts to improve and enhance the teaching of computer science at the K-12 level. It begins with an account of the CS10K vision of having 10,000 trained teachers in 10,000 schools teaching substantive courses in computer science. The chapter then turns to how various projects and organizations have engaged the components of the CS10K goal: building a new curriculum (the Exploring Computer Science and Computer Science Principles projects), creating a community of practice so that these teachers can carry out their educational work in a professional way (the Computer Science Teachers Association and the online CS10K Community), and carrying out policy work to persuade decision-making bodies in all 50 states and thousands of local communities to support computer science as a core element of high school education (the ACM Education Policy Committee, the Computing in the Core Coalition, and the Computer Science Teachers Association). The chapter ends with an account of the recently established organization, Code.org, which is engaging in multiple activities to create formal computing education at the K-12 level

1. 1.

   One other important player in this story of formal K-12 education is the National Center for Women & IT (NCWIT). Through its K-12 Alliance it is providing materials for high school counselors about computing, and through its Aspirations program it is building a network of high school and college girls interested in computing, using a model of local industry support and recognition that is being replicated across the country. The NCWIT activities are described in some detail in the second of this pair of books.

2. 2.

   “The first AP Computer Science Exam was offered in 1984. The exam tested student knowledge of PASCAL programming. The development of the AP exam was a significant collaborative effort between high school teachers and university computer science faculty. The process of developing the exam began in 1981. The minutes of the first meeting provide a glimpse of issues that continue to arise in developing national assessments like the AP exam. The committee considered building a program that allowed multiple languages and in which students wrote programs that would be run on test data to help determine a grade. The latter is still infeasible today, e.g., student code for the AP CS Principles exam is submitted as a pdf. However, the CS Principles course [described later in this chapter] does allow for multiple and different languages to be used in the course. The development of the AP exam during the 1980s had a significant influence on high school computing. The committee that developed the exam received letters from Bill Gates and John Kemeny advocating for BASIC to be used rather than Pascal. Ultimately the language changed in the 1990s from Pascal to C++ and then in the 2000s to Java. The exam began as one course, split to the A and AB exam in the 1980s, and the AB exam was abandoned in the 2000s.” (CSTA 2015)

3. 3.

   Of course, this effort would not succeed without strong support from the CISE leadership, particularly Peter Freeman in the Broadening Participation in Computing era and Jeannette Wing in the Computing Education for the 21st Century era. This point was emphasized by Cameron Wilson . (Personal communication to the author, 20 October 2015)

4. 4.

   Cuny noted that she was not alone in advocating for this change. She pointed to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, which in a 2010 report entitled Prepare and Inspire: K-12 Education in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) for America’s Future called for upgrading high school computer science courses from technological literacy classes to ones that provided “a deeper understanding of the essential concepts.” (PCAST 2010)

5. 5.

   This chapter has emphasized the vision of CS10K – a vision that Cuny has tirelessly promoted through talks in front of many different groups. However, as Cuny points out (Personal communication to the author November 1, 2015), CS10K is more than a vision; it is also a broad funding program:

   CS10K funded the development of ECS [Exploring Computer Science] and CS Principles, but beyond those awards we made at least 20 more that went much further than just curriculum. ECS is a curriculum but it is tightly integrated with its professional development [(PD)]. In addition, to the development of its PD, NSF has paid for the development of assessments that are just coming on line and for scaling the course nationwide. Funding substantial efforts in Chicago, Washington D.C., U tah, San Jose, MA, and WI among others. We have also funded Teach For America’s program to bring ECS to its schools and increased funding to several of NSF’s Math and Science partnerships in order to bring ECS into their offerings. Many hundreds of ECS teachers have been trained.

6. 6.

   For examples of NSF-funded course development (in some cases also including professional development for teachers) in particular local regions or institutions, see, for example, Flatland et al. 2015; Cuny et al. 2014; Dorn et al. 2015; desJardines and Martin 2013; and Gray et al. 2015. NSF has also funded more specialized topics. See, for example, Stefik and Ladner (2015) on providing computer science education to students with disabilities; Morelli et al. (2015) on mobile computing; and Schofield et al. (2014) on middle-school education.

7. 7.

   Margolis discusses the connection between her work at Carnegie Mellon and her work in the Los Angeles schools in Margolis (2013).

8. 8.

   Goode (2015) no tes that among the original BPC projects only two, Into the Loop and Georgia Computes, concerned precollege education, but that NSF became increasingly interested in K-12 education over time:

   I come at this from a K-12 educational research perspective in which I think, “Wow! Much of the tracking and the filtering and the opportunities already shut down before anybody shows up at college, isn’t that too late?” Over the years, I think there’s been more opportunities in … K-12 and certainly perhaps a huge movement towards focusing on equity issues in K-12 and the high school in particular as the BPC projects have evolved; and I think part of that is because of the success of the Georgia Computes and the now Exploring Computer Science project in showing that we really need to think about students and extending opportunities and the fact that interventions can have a very big impact at the K-12 level when done in collaboration with schools and districts that serve all these students.

9. 9.

   There were issues of intersectionality in this study. It could have been about women in computing just as much as about minorities in computing, as Goode (2015) explains:

   Our research design … included lots of conversations and interviews and data and findings about experiences of the girls in each schools, girls of color and white girls; and yet the book that we eventually wrote, which is what … people referred to when they think about these 3 schools in the study, we have to make a decision to really focus on talking about issues of race because so many people in computer science education had talked about gender. We didn’t want to share the space with really focusing on race and having gender be either a distraction or something that allowed people to maybe not go the next step and say, “No. This is really about focusing on this particular aspect of broadening participation in computing.” Having some of those gender themes not make their way into the book was a big research group compromise … we struggled with; and we tried to write about gender in a few other places. With so much … data, it was a little hard to let it go.

10. 10.

    Goode (2015) indicated that the book gave computer science educators from higher education a basic understanding of how K-12 education was different from undergraduate education, while it was a reassurance to high school teachers who wanted to do right by their students:

    I think for K-12 educators, this was almost a relief to expose some of the realities of their context in working in computer science education and working for equity and highlighting how deep and pervasive some of these issues are and any one quick fix is obviously not sufficient for countering our issues with broadening participation in K-12.

11. 11.

    Goode (2015) identified an additional institutional factor:

    [C]omputer science was a singular department often consisting of one teacher, so a lack of resources, a lack of knowledge about where it fit in the curriculum, if any teachers should be given professional development, who should fund it, where should they go? These conversations just weren’t taking place because each teacher was isolated as the only computing teacher at [his or her] school.

12. 12.

    Goode and Margolis (2004) argue, based upon their ethnographic research in the Los Angeles schools, that there is “lack of clarity around the nature of computer science as an academic, scientific field.” They contrast a definition on the Stanford University website of computer science as an interdisciplinary problem-solving field with a basic vocational model of computer science that is prevalent at high schools with large minority populations.

13. 13.

    Goode (2015) amplified on this finding:

    We often heard from administrators that many of their students weren’t interested or didn’t have the ability to learn computer science, and yet in talking with students, we heard students say, “Well, I wanted to take this course, but my counselor told me to go to forestry.” Or “Well, I would take the course, but they’re really about keyboarding here at school, so I want to learn how to web design. I’ll ask my uncle.”

    Students have those interests and capacity obviously to learn these skills, but the administrators and counselors had belief systems about what the students were able to do, and it did not include creativity or collaboration or many of the other computational practices that we find to be important in [a] more rigorous curriculum.

14. 14.

    For commentaries on Margolis’s book, see Parsons (2010) and Fay (2010).

15. 15.

    Some of the other principals who have been involved with Margolis in the Into the Loop Alliance or in the development of Exploring Computer Science include two former high school teachers, Joanna Goode (who was a doctoral student in education at UCLA and is now professor of education at the University of Oregon ) and Gail Chapman (who is currently the director of national outreach for Exploring Computer Science and previously worked for the College Board and the Computer Science Teachers Association). Deborah Estrin , a professor of computer science at UCLA, was also actively involved.

16. 16.

    The use of the value-laden term “democratize computer science” can be found, for example, in Ryoo et al (2013) but is also used by Margolis and her other colleagues.

    As Goode (2015) n oted:

    In taking with the teachers and the counselors and the students, what we identified was that it wasn’t high potential that was being referred to. It was preparatory privilege in which these were the kids who talked about being at computer camp for a summer in middle school or having a robotics kit given to them or perhaps taking apart an old computer with an adult figure at some point; and these are all activities … applied mostly to the middle class students in that community [and] were not opportu nities afforded to other students. Those other students in contrast were thus labeled [as] … not having the capacity or ability or interest to pursue computing. We found teachers and counselors could be singular gatekeepers of deciding with their perhaps unquestioned belief systems who should be allowed to enroll in the course and who should not be allowed to enroll in the course based on all of the privileges, opportunities, and belief systems mixed up together.

17. 17.

    Goode (2015) ampli fies on this point:

    In two years from the beginning of our effort, the number of females enrolling in AP Computer Science tripled. The number of Latinos quadrupled, African-Americans doubled, and so on. Very impressive results, but in talking with students and having interviews with teachers and looking at pass rates, what [we] realized was twofold. First of all, students were not very successful on the exam, which was not too surprising. It was their first course ever in computer science and it was an Advanced Placement course, not the easiest on-ramp. Like teaching the first year math as AP calculus, skipping the preparatory coursework. That was a little disheartening, but even more disheartening was that students and teachers were not having a particularly positive experience. It wasn’t increasing students’ aptitudes or inclinations to pursue further computer science study. In fact, it almost worked against our efforts to broaden participation in computing because it was such a narrow entry to computing; and … we were having a hard time connecting things such as social impact with Java programming because there was little room in the curriculum to make those connections more explicit within the course guidelines.

18. 18.

    Goode (2008) identified strategies based on her own teaching, as well as on existing research, for increasing diversity in K-12 computer science education. These strategies included purposeful small group recruitment (e.g. girls from the swim team who already knew one another and would work together in computer science class), a culturally relevant curriculum, employing teachers who have not only content-area knowledge but also have learned pedagogical strategies for active student engagement, and providing role models from multiple gender and ethnic backgrounds – as well as institutional features such as making sure appropriate courses are available and providing professional development for teachers.

19. 19.

    Goode (2015) notes that while many groups weighed in on topics for her course, she and Chapman did not experience the same politics of course design experienced in the Computer Science Principles course (described in the next section of this chapter). The Computer Science Principles course had a number of stakeholders from the beginning (the NSF, the College Board , various advisory and development committees), and that course was intended to be representative of al l of computer science so many people had strong feelings about what it should include. For Goode and Chapman, with Exploring Computer Science, the design parameters were much looser: a “set of topics that would be both representative and important though not necessarily comprehensive…[and] that would draw in high school kids … an introductory course that was welcoming and not weeding.”

20. 20.

    This author believes that computational thinking (CT) is vague and limited in its success in characterizing the way in which computing scientists think, reliant upon ideas that were developed in other scientific disciplines (especially mathematics), and over sold, and that 15 years from now it will be seen as a fad. Many other smart people in this field have a more positive view of computational thinking. For example, Cameron Wilson (personal communication to author, 20 October 2015) points out that:

    CT is very much alive and active area of work to help define. Irene Lee just folded in CT concepts into the California Science Framework – a document aligned to the Next Generation Science Standards (which also has references to CT) that guides every K-12 science educator in the state of CA. CT practices are also a key part of the CS-Principles framework.

    However, even if computational thinking does come to be seen as a fad over time, it may prove to be a very favorable development nevertheless, not because of its ideas but because of the interest, passion, and budgets it brought to bear on precollege and beginning college computer science education. One cannot help but draw a comparison between computational thinking and the New Math that came before it.

21. 21.

    While Goode and Chapman were influenced by computational thinking, they instead emphasized computational practices. “We wanted to see students doing what computer scientists do. We didn’t believe there was one ideal or proper or correct way to think; and the language of computational thinking seems a little too [restricted] for the types of doing [that we wanted the students to be engaged in].” (Goode 2015)

22. 22.

    The inquiry-based learning techniques taught to the high school teachers in the professional development workshops associated with Exploring Computer Science included: “role playing, jig sawing activities, pair and small-group collaboration, structured tinkering, multiple solutions, utilizing manipulatives, simulations, English language learner modifications, proactive recruitment of females, journal reflections, and interdisciplinary conn ections.” Goode and Margolis (2011). Also see Goode et al. (2012).

23. 23.

    Ryoo et al. (2013) gives examples of st udents customizing their Exploring Computer Science projects to their own personal interests: healthy eating and food deserts, gang violence, teenage pregnancy, and a younger sister’s battle with cancer. Margolis et al. (2014–2015) show how material relevant to the students is woven into the coursework.

24. 24.

    The dissemination of the curriculum continues to grow. For a 2015 view, which will no doubt soon be out of date, see https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BDzs4k6nbZ87KdRZE62gqO_VpBC1yRSRbolWejGtDnU/edit#gid=0.

25. 25.

    For a discussion of the policy strategy and the actors involved in Exploring Computer Science, see Goode (2010).

26. 26.

    Goode and Margolis (2011) provide an e xcellent account of the work of the Computer Science Equity Alliance to develop and implement the Exploring Computer Science initiative. Also see Goode and Margolis (2004); Goode (2010); Goode et al. (2012); Ryoo et al. (2013); Harmon (2013); Goode et al. (2014); Margolis et al. (2014–2015); and the Exploring Computer Science website (www.exploringcs.org).

27. 27.

    As Cameron Wilson pointed out, it is probably more accurate to call this a ‘course framework’ than a ‘course’. Various individuals and organizations (e.g. Dan Garcia at Berkeley, Ralph Morelli of CSP Mobile , Code.org , and Project Lead the Way ) implement this framework in different ways in order to create actual courses. (Personal communication to the author, 20 October 2015)

    Jan Cuny has also spoken to this point (Personal communication to the author, 1 November 2015):

    CS Principles as defined by the College Board is not a curriculum but a framework, meaning it is a set of claims and evidence statements indicating what students should know and what evidence you would accept that they know it. Many different curricula can be aligned to that framework. NSF has funded the development of many of these curricula, including the Beauty and Joy of Computing, ComPASS, Thriving in our Digital World, Mobile CSP , CSP4All , among others. Each of these projects includes curriculum development but also course materials, and models of professional development. Again hundreds of teachers have been trained in these courses. Online tutorials, MOOCS, and e-books have been developed for teachers training and several MOOCS have been developed for students as well.

28. 28.

    This account may underemphasize the contributions of Amy Briggs. While Astrachan was the principal investigator on the NSF grant for CS Principles, Briggs was the co-principal investigator. Stephenson has said of Briggs that she was “very much responsible for its productivity.” (Private communication, September 24, 2015) Briggs is a professor of computer science at Middlebury College, where she co-directs the Robotics and Vision Research Lab. She is a member of the Liberal Arts Computer Science Consortium, which has been working on computer science curriculum development for liberal arts colleges since 1984. For more information on LACS, see http://lacs.myopensoftware.org.

29. 29.

    The comments in the main body of the text describe why Astrachan would be a person trusted by the College Board. He had also received a Career Award (the highest honor bestowed upon young scholars by NSF) for a study of computer science education and had been one of the first and few recipients of NSF’s short-lived CS education fellows program. Thus, he was also highly regarded by NSF in the computer science education field.

30. 30.

    Despite this praise for Wing’s p ush of computational thinking, Astrachan raised a commonly heard criticism: “I think many of us, me too, had a concern in [that we] didn’t really know what computational thinking was… I wish we had a more universal agreement on what computational thinking is other than metaphors for thinking about what you’re doing. I think that we could have gone beyond the idea that, when you put things in your backpack, you’re doing some kind of bin packing or optimization problem. To me, I do think computationally because I’ve been doing it so long that when I put things in my backpack I probably do that, but perhaps a political scientist and a physicist also have their own way of thinking and metaphors for doing what they’re doing.” (Astrachan 2015)

    Various educators have discussed the possibilities of introducing computational thinking into the K-12 curriculum. Se e, for example, Lee et al. (2014).

31. 31.

    Cuny co mmented that the College Board “did … want some assurance that the course would be given credit or placement at the college level so after the framework was complete, and before the exam was started, there was an “attestation” phase were colleges were asked about credit an placement.” (Personal communication to the author, 1 November 2015)

32. 32.

    An alternative approach was considered. A large group of computer science faculty members were convened by NSF and the College Board in 2008. Cuny explains the purpose of this meeting:

    The stakeholder meeting (meeting of colleges that received large numbers of CS A scores) was not to convince colleges to change their introductory course but to discuss the creation of the new course. Since it didn’t match up with what most colleges were teaching in their first course for majors, that was of concern because of the credit or placement issue. The stakeholders concluded that they did not want to give up the CS A course but that there was a need for a different course that would bring more and more diverse students into CS. (Personal communication to the author, 1 November 2015)

    In the end, work went ahead on the course design before there was buy-in from the colleges to change their introductory course in computer science.

    The College Board polled a large group of universities and asked them whether they would be willing to offer credit/placement for the new AP based on a general outline of the proposed course. Thanks largely to the efforts of University of Washington computer science professor Larry Snyder, the results were the most positive attestation for any new Advanced Placement course in any discipline. (Private communication from Stephenso n to author, 24 September 2015)

    Advanced Placement credit for this course is not yet an option. The course is going through the College Board’s development, approval, and implementation process, and it is expected that an Advanced Placement exam will appear in the Spring of 2017, so the students will begin to take the official courses in the Fall of 2016.

33. 33.

    The NSF funding for both building an adequate knowledge base and building partnerships for the 10,000 teachers was funded first through the Computing Education in the 21st Century (CE21) program, and more recently in the STEM-C Partnerships program, which was renamed the STEM + Computing Partnerships (STEM + C) to make it clearer that computing was an integral part of this program (not “STEM minus computing” as some read the original name). These programs are joint ventures of the computing (CISE) and Education (EHR) Directorates.

34. 34.

    For example, the NSF recently made a grant of more than $5 million to bring Beauty and Joy of Computing into New York City Schools. This grant alone will train more than 100 teachers.

35. 35.

    Other examples include Project Engage , CS4Alabama , and New Mexico Computer Science for All . (Astrachan et al. 2014b)

36. 36.

    The CS Principles Project also regularly presented its progress to the twice-a-year meetings of the ACM Education Board and at the Computer Science Teachers Association conference. Astrachan explained that neither the IEEE Computer Society nor the IEEE engineering education conference, Frontiers in Education, have played a large role in the development of Computer Science Principles. Astrachan speculates that this is because the Computer Science Principles is not closely aligned with the engineering focus of the IEEE. However, there have been “learning scientists and social scientists… on… [the College Board’s ] advisory board trying to ensure that the project is grounded well in what’s going on in the cognitive and learning worlds.” (Astrachan 2015) Astrachan believes that the organizations Code.org and Project Lead the Way will be important as the project moves into the launch phase. Mark Guzial and his colleagues at Georgia Tech are working on an e-textbook for teachers to use in connection with the course; and there is undoubtedly going to be some action among textbook publishers to adjust their offerings either by altering existing introductory texts or writing new ones to meet the market for the new curriculum. As of this writing, 36 high school teachers are working as instructors in the College Board pilot project to check that the curriculum works in the classroom. The formal pilot sites are listed at http://www.csprinciples.org/home/pilot-sites. Hundreds of teachers are piloting CS Principles through NSF support. The numbers keep growing, so it is hard to have up to date statistics. As of November 2015, 2000 schools in the United States are teaching either Exploring Computer Science or CS Principles. ( Cuny, personal communication to the author, 1 November 2015)

37. 37.

    Astrachan (2015) remarked: “…it really was this consensus-building, iterative process that maybe we were lucky in terms of having people in the room that were willing to listen. That was unusual in the computer science community where you often have a room full of people some of whom are [pause] – they are zealots in their belief and not willing to listen to other points of view.”

38. 38.

    The seven principles are summarized at https://www.cs10kcommunity.org/computer-science-principles. The course framework can be found at https://advancesinap.collegeboard.org/stem/computer-science-principles. Sample lesson plans that develop some of these seven big ideas can be found at http://www.csprinciples.org/home/resources/lessons.

39. 39.

    There were questions raised in an ACM Executive Committee meeting in 2004 about whether the name Computer Science Teachers Association was too narrow; that perhaps it should instead be the Computing Teachers Association. Stephenson, who had been on the K-12 Task Force and led the effort to build CSTA, argued persuasively, based on her detailed knowledge of middle school and high school computer science teaching, how it would be more effective to emphasize computer science in the name. (White 2015)

40. 40.

    Tucker is a professor of computer science at Bowdoin College .

41. 41.

    Stephenson (2015, revised slightly in a private communication of 24 September 2015) also mentions in particular Fran Trees , a consultant to the College Board on the Advanced Placement Computer Science exam, and Eric Roberts , a professor of computer science at Stanford. Stephenson also notes that:

    Support for CSTA initially was not universal. There was a lot of concern when CSTA was launched, many parties with very good points. There was concern about whether ACM should be working in the K-12 space from some of the ACM leadership. There was concern about whether it should be a computer science organization or should also embrace educational technology and be more of a general organization, a computing teachers organization. There were concerns with the name of it – that it should even be called the Computer Science Teachers Association. There was concern at the postsecondary level that this was a pundit upstart organization mucking about in computer science education and it should be left to the university people who are the experts on computer science education. At one point or another all of these concerns raised their head.

    ACM was very clear that CSTA was important. Several people within ACM, both staff and voluntary leadership, advocated for and helped CSTA from the beginning. There were early concerns and disagreements over the need for CSTA but they faded away as it became clear that CSTA wanted to be a partner with the university faculty and other organizations working in this space. It was important to have a practitioner-facing organization to represent the teacher needs to ACM and to the world at large. It wasn’t an immediate love fest, but CSTA’s the volunteer leadership and staff valued and nurtured these relationships. There isn’t anyone I can think of today that would wish that the organization would just go away.

42. 42.

    Stephenson (2015) n otes about these standards that there was a conscious effort to engage the whole community, and that drafts of the standards were “vetted by many, many organizations.”

43. 43.

    Schnabel (2015) remembers about ACM’s entry into K-12 education policy: “I don’t have any recollection that there was any tension, any feeling, as sometimes happens when you start a new organization, of ‘well, we’re already doing [work] in that space.’ In fact, it was kind of the opposite.”

44. 44.

    On the Education Policy Committee, see Schnabel (2011) and Rodger et al. (2011). In response to an inquiry from this author, Schnabel (2015) quotes an email from ACM CEO John White to ACM President Stuart Feldman indicating that White was interested in Schnabel to lead the policy committee because of his former success with the founding of NCWIT and the ATLAS Institute, his experience in “working inside the Beltway”, his commitment to broadening participation in computer science, and his recognition of the importance of K-12 education and the introductory computing course to the health of the computing workforce. Reflecting on these comments, Schnabel noted that he had done a lot of work in educating policymakers on Capitol Hill while working together with the Chancellor of the University of Colorado, and had skills as a process manager rather than as an expert in the K-12 educational space.

45. 45.

    Another influencing factor for the creation of the policy committee was the decision in 2005 by the NCAA that high school computer science courses would not count toward the minimum requirement of college-preparatory courses taken in high school to be eligible to participate in NCAA intercollegiate athletics. The NCAA website included that words “Computer science does not count.” (White 2015)

46. 46.

    Perhaps it was because of this focus on the precollege level that the Education Policy Committee had little to do with ACM’s other well-established educational activities, which were mostly focused on undergraduate education during its first decade of operation. Recently, the policy committee has begun to think about a major study that maps particular types of computer science education at the university level to particular computing jobs. (Schnabel 2015)

47. 47.

    Stephenson (2015) tell s of her involvement with policy relating to Computer Science Education Week:

    …my work with Cameron Wilson began around the launch of Computer Science Education Week. I had given a presentation at a CCSC conference and a professor named Joel Adams attended my presentation about why it was critical to advocate for computer science education. Joel then contacted his representative in Michigan, who was Congressman Vern Ehlers [R-MI], and said we really need to do something about computer science education, here’s all the facts and figures that have to do with our State.

    It happened that Cameron knew Representative Ehlers very well [Ehlers was the ranking member of the Subcommittee on Research and Science Education], had worked with him, and Cameron and I then began on the pathway to have Computer Science Education Week initiated with Mr. Ehler’s support. That was really our first time working together in the policy stage and it was exciting. I felt that we accomplished something that made a difference, and I began my tutelage about policy under Cameron. As we began working more and more in the policy space, meeting lots of legislators, meeting with legislative staff, it became apparent that this really was a good time to work more directly on K-12 policy among the many, many policy initiatives that ACM launched.

48. 48.

    For more on Computer Science Education Week, see the official website at www.csedweek.org.

49. 49.

    Schnabel (2015) credits Mark Stehlik and Leigh Ann Sudol of Carnegie Mellon for much of the initial writing, with Stephenson and Wilson also writing sections; and with editing by White and Schnabel . Stephenson (2015) calls the report “the brainchild of Cameron Wilson ” and argues that this report really launched the focus at the State level and really catalyzed much of the focus around computer science education and its availability in schools.”

50. 50.

    The documentary record makes it sound as though this was predominantly the result of ACM’s efforts. ACM did have a leading role. However, this record probably underplays the importance of NCWIT, which was actively engaged in educational policy; CRA, which had two of its board members, Daniel Reed and Alfred Spector , serving as the high-level contacts at Microsoft and Google, respectively; and perhaps also ABI, which has strong industry contacts useful in raising funds and getting the word out.

51. 51.

    Another strategy of Computing in the Core was to work for passage of a national Computer Science Education Act. This act would provide planning and implementation grants to states to improve their computer science education; a commission to monitor state progress on computer science education and get states to collaborate on teacher certification; enhance computer science teacher preparation programs at colleges and universities; and rigorously evaluate progress and report back results to the federal government. The Computer Science Education has not made it through the political process to become law. However, there is language in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act reauthorization that is before Congress in 2015 in support of computer science education, and this reauthorization has at least some chance of passage in Congress and likely signature by President Obama. (Wilson 2015b)

    The Coalition’s biggest supporters in Congress included Representatives Jared Polis (D-CO) and Susan Brooks (R-IN) and Senators Marc Rubio (R-FL) and Bob Casey (D-PA).

52. 52.

    Wilson (2015b, e dited in a personal communication to the author, 20 October 2015) explains in greater detail the division between federal, state, and local responsibilities in educational policy:

    Most education policy decisions happen at the state, sometimes local, level. States are really the ones that define and control it. You can think of education policy as a layer cake, where there’s a federal layer to it that provides some framework, guidance, and rules; and policy that flows down to the state. The states make a lot of decisions about what happens in terms of the curriculum, and the rules around things like teacher certification – [those] are influenced by the federal government but mostly [they are] directly controlled in the decision-making at the state level. Sometimes, it happens at the local level. It kind of depends on the state, whether they’re a local-controlled state or not. Different states have different powers.

    Really what we look for [with] our federal agenda is trying to make sure that as federal laws are being drafted, computer science is actually mentioned in the legislation as, for example, computer science professional development is one of the activities that state or local entities can fund.

    You also try [at the federal level] to support programs like NSF that are doing research into the field or doing capacity building within the community around CS education.

53. 53.

    Wilson (2015b, edited by Wilson in a personal communication to the author, 20 October 2015) also recalled another weakness of the Coalition:

    [T]he biggest gap for Computing in the Core was [the lack of a] program, and any time you’re advocating for something, and advocating for change, it’s always incredibly helpful to have programs that back up computer science education. Luckily, NSF was working closely with the College Board and with a lot of people in the community to spur research into both middle and high school courses around computer science education.

    When Code.org took over the Coalition’s activities, it included a programmatic element that built on what the NSF and College Board were doing, helped move that work into major urban school districts, and expanded the curricular offerings as well to younger children.

54. 54.

    Stephenson (2015) f ocused on another of ACM’s organizational limitations in carrying out the national reform of K-12 computer science education:

    As the work of the Policy Committee and then the work of Computing in the Core began to accelerate, there were concerns about crossing the line between advocacy and … more direct engagement in influencing policy. ACM, always very cognizant of the rules and regulations with regard to those kinds of legal situations, realized it was necessary to step back in some ways. There was work that needed to be done at the policy level that ACM was not legally mandated to do because of its nonprofit status and because of its legal requirements as an organization. The search really began for an alternative organization that would be able to take on that role without the legal limitations with regard to work at the policy level.

55. 55.

    Computing in the Core and Code.org have also worked with Project Lead the Way , which is a nonprofit that has a highly successful record of implementing new STEM curriculum in public schools and providing professional development to teachers to teach that curriculum. PLTW has actually developed its own Computer Science and Software Engineering course.

56. 56.

    Stephenson (2015) made a similar point to that made by White: “Cameron took with him, with ACM support, all of his knowledge, all of his connections, his deep understanding of the policy space. I think that really jumpstarted Code.org in terms of [its] ability to be very effective in the space.”

57. 57.

    The material in this section on Code.org is based on the following sources: Apone et al. (2015), Armoni and Gal-Ezer (2014), Astrachan et al. (2014a), Briggs et al. (2015), Cassidy (2013), Dvorak (2013), Edmonton Journal (2015), Empson (2013a, b), Gannes (2013a, b), Glaeser (2013), Guynn (2013), Hamilton (2014), Harris (2014), Hustad (2013), Kumar (2014), Layton (2014a, b, c), Lefferts (2013), Mannila et al. (2014), Mlot (2013, 2014), Morrison (2013), Nieva (2013), Nikou and Economides (2014), Olanoff (2013), Partovi (2013, 2014), Richtel (2014), Rodriguez (2013), St. George (2014), Snyder (2013), Suba (2014), Taylor (2013a, b), Towns (2014), Ward-Bailey (2014), Wilson (2013a, b, 2014a, b, 2015a, Wingfield (2013), Yang (2013), and Yi (2014).

58. 58.

    Partovi has experience in the Silicon Valley start-up world, and Code.org is run like a start-up, including the breadth of its operations given the size of its staff, its exhilarating pace, its heavy use of a distributed workforce, and its high reliance on information and communication tools.

59. 59.

    The evolution in this thinking is represented in the comments of Code.org’s education director, Pat Yongpradit (2015):

    Code.org’s mission is not to create more computer programmers, Code.org’s mission is to make sure that every student learns computer science so that they can do whatever that want to do: be a gymnast, be a chocolate designer, be a sandcastle creator, or be a dancer. I mentioned those interests … very intentionally, because those very people show up in some of our videos in our K-5 program material. A chocolate designer, a bee-keeper, a sandcastle creator, all taking about this general problem solving. How do you debug a solution? How do you use computational thinking in all walks of life? That’s really what we’re about. Computer science is part of a fundamental knowledge base like kids learning how to dissect a frog, or hemoglobin, or physics, or earth science. These things are fundamental things that all kids learn, [in] the same way computer science should do that as well.

60. 60.

    An unrelated paper on the purpose of computer education in school seems to be aligned with Partovi’s goal but is expressed more eloquently: “The goal of teaching computing in school is not necessarily to ‘produce’ professionals who can find jobs in industry. Rather, the goals are ‘to plant the seeds,’ to expose the students to the foundations of the discipline, to provide a perspective, and infuse them with interest, curiosity, and enthusiasm. This, hopefully, will establish a pipeline for higher education, so that they can later choose either research o r industry as a profession,” (Armoni and Gal-Ezer 2014). These authors argue that there is good evidence that introducing computing concepts to middle-school students is appropriate because they are of an age where they can learn the concepts and it is the age at which these students are beginning to form their attitudes about science and technology; however, they also argue that further study is needed to understand the implications of teaching computing to younger children than this.

61. 61.

    When asked what outcomes are hoped for from Hour are Code, Yongradit (2015) replied:

    Well, we don’t expect them to become coders. That’s not the goal anyway. Sometimes people misunderstand that, how could an hour turn someone into a coder? Obviously it can’t. We don’t necessarily expect any kind of major learning gains, per se. Really, the primary goal with the Hour of Code is exposure, and the breaking of stereotypes. Folks understanding that they can do computer science no matter who they are, or whatever their age is, that it’s not rocket science. It’s approachable, it’s fun, it’s creative, and hopefully spark some kind of interest that bubbles-up into them taking a class or if their teacher offering a class, or offering more computer science in their school.

62. 62.

    For a des cription of some of the technologies used in the first Hour of Code, plus contextual information about start-ups providing “digital playgrounds” for kids, see Kumar (2014).

63. 63.

    In celebration of the nonprofit’s first birthday, it released a tutorial that allowed children to build a version of the popular Flappy Bird game.

64. 64.

    Until now, the success of Hour of Code has been measured in terms of the number of students participating in it. There has been little study of the motivations of the students to participate or what they get out of it in terms of knowledge or interest. One study (Nikou and Economides 2014) has been conducted in Greece about student motivation during Hour of Code activities. The high school students these authors studied had high levels of intrinsic motivation (finding the material interesting and enjoyable) and identified regulation (finding the activity valuable), but external regulation (forced compliance with participation) and amotivation were also observed. The findings were similar for the authors’ observations of first-year college students; however, the college students scored slightly lower on intrinsic motivation and slightly higher on amotivation.

65. 65.

    Code.org achieves this wi de range of tasks in different ways. They have almost 100 promotional partners, including Apple, Microsoft, Google , Salesforce.com , Boys and Girls Club of America , Coder Dojo , Black Girls Code , and Girls Who Code . These partners help to get out the public relations message about what computing is and that it is open to everyone. There are partnerships with other organizations that are creating tutorials for children to use during the Hour of Code . There is a parent community that goes into the schools to promote Hour of Code. Code.org partners with the computer science education community, which has been widely funded by NSF, for curriculum development. Code.org sees its role with this community as scaling up small projects funded at universities both by increasing the numbers involved and making the new technologies more robust. Hadi Partovi has used his computer industry knowledge, contacts, and reputation to build a top-notch technical team of software engineers and product managers in-house at Code.org. A network of contractors to Code.org provides professional development to teachers; meanwhile, the people who manage the trainers (and other programs) and who train the trainers are part of Code.org’s staff, which now numbers about 50 people. Code.org works with CSTA on both policy and teacher professional development.

66. 66.

    On tool building at Code.org, Yongpradit (2015) comments:

    Whereas other orgs might use off-the-shelf products, whether industry coding environments like Visual Studio, or Eclipse, or whatever, … they might use academic environments created by colleges and universities or other folks, we actually craft our own tools for our own specific purposes. Not only do have our own coding environment that blends text- and block-based programming, but we also have tutorials built into that system that we can customize ourselves, and lastly we have that all [this technology] within a larger eco-system that represents a basic learning platform.

67. 67.

    Code.org is careful to make its educational materials consonant with other standards and support other computer education efforts. For example, the materials for elementary school children are compatible with the Common Core Standards were developed in 2009 and followed by 44 states and the District of Columbia. At the middle-school level, Code.org is partnering with Bootstrap and Project GUTS (Growing Up Thinking Scientifically) on computing modules to add to established math and science courses. At high schools, Code.org is supporting teachers in offering the Exploring Computer Science and Computer Science Principles courses described earlier in this chapter.

68. 68.

    Hadi Partovi argues that it has not been helpful to computing education to have it closely associated with STEM education in the minds of the lawmakers:

    [President O bama needs to understand the] subtle difference between computer science and STEM. And that subtle difference is, I think, one of the greatest weaknesses of the computer science education effort. Whether in the tech industry or the CS Ed community everybody knows what computer science is. When you go outside, most people have never studied it, and so it is this vague thing they don’t understand and they put it in the STEM bucket…and things get lost in multiple ways. If you then say, ‘things aren’t going well,’ Americans are like, ‘Oh yeah, we’re bad at math and science.’ What’s missing – they don’t even realize – we teach math and science at every school to every student. We try. And now we’re bad at it. Whereas, in CS we don’t even teach it in 90 % of the schools. We’re not even trying. There’s a big difference here.

    And the other thing that gets lost is that 60 % of all STEM jobs are in the computing area, and only 2 % of STEM education is. (H. Partovi in an interview in Snyder 2013)

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    “I’m really proud of our diversity numbers. In our online courses 43 % of students are girls and 37 % are Black or Hispanic, which is phenomenal compared to traditional computer science courses. [Looking at our high school numbers] … high-school is usually where the greatest disparities and diversities are shown, 34 % of the people in our high-school classrooms are girls, and 60 % are African-American or Hispanic. The 60 % is obviously disproportionate to the nation’s population, and that’s mainly because we work in metro areas, or urban areas. In terms of the 34 % girls, that doesn’t sound that great because it’s not 50 %, but it’s certainly a lot better than the 20 % which is often seen in computer science classrooms, like AP computer science classrooms. (Yongpradit 2015)

Authors and Affiliations

1. School of Information, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

   William Aspray

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