Can We Fix Computer Science Education in America? | Techland | TIME.com
July 19, 2012 at 2:55 am 4 comments
Nice piece in Time on the lack of computing education in the United States. In particular, I like that Jane Margolis takes on the myth that students will just learn it on their own without support. That’s thinking that prevents broadening participation in computing
Not every kid has those advantages.
“There is this assumption that if you have this innate talent and you’re drawn to it, you’ll learn it on your own and you don’t really need it at school,” says Jane Margolis, senior researcher at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies and author of Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race, and Computing. “Kids that have a lot of resources at home, often with parents with a lot of technical know-how and access to software, people look at them and say ‘Oh, they just take to it.’”
In 2010, the San Jose Mercury News reported that the percentage of computer workers in Silicon Valley that were black or Latino stood at 1.5% and 4.7%, respectively. Girls Who Code, an organization that encourages teen girls to pursue opportunities in technology, points out that only 14% of undergraduate computer science degrees are earned by women.
via Can We Fix Computer Science Education in America? | Techland | TIME.com.
Entry filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: BPC, broadening participation in computing, computing for everyone.
Computing Ed Research - Guzdial's Take 
1.
Alfred Thompson | July 26, 2012 at 10:29 pm
I think there are a lot of people who don’t want to face the fact that there is a problem because if they admit that they will be forced to address it. And that is just one more problem people don’t want to address.
2.
The Blue Collar Coder may be Stuck in the Shallow End « Computing Education Blog | October 10, 2012 at 9:22 am
[…] creating opportunities in schools for those students who don’t see a path to computing, who don’t live in a place with examples and role models available to guide them into the economic …. Put another way, our industry can grow in a very meaningful way by giving lots of young people at […]
3.
Requiring Computing Education: An Impractical Path to Computing Literacy | Computing Education Blog | April 9, 2013 at 1:21 am
[…] achieve Universal Computing Literacy. We need to make computing education available everywhere for broadening participation in computing. To get computing into every school, Barb argues that we have to make it required for […]
4.
Neil Fraser on CS in Vietnam and (unfortunately) in US | Computing Education Blog | April 12, 2013 at 1:29 am
[…] like the ACM-WGBH image of computing, Stuck in the Shallow End, and Betsy DiSalvo’s work with Glitch all say that students value computing and want […]