Coding the Curriculum: How High Schools Are Reprogramming Their Classes
October 17, 2013 at 1:56 am 4 comments
I’d love to see more detail on what they’re doing. It’s what Seymour Papert wanted for Logo, now happening not far from MIT and the original Logo experiments. I love what they say later in the piece about the goal being computing for creativity and calculation, not to become a professional software developer.
It’s a new, albeit eccentric experiment. The school isn’t launching mandatory programming courses into the schedule, exactly, but is instead having its teachers introduce coding (ideally, in the most organic ways possible) into their respective subjects. Calculation-heavy courses such as math and science, as well as humanities such as English, Spanish and history — even theater and music — will all be getting a coded upgrade.
True, Beaver may be the first of its kind to experiment with coding in every class, but the idea that more high school students should take STEM-related courses — particularly in programming and coding — isn’t new.
via Coding the Curriculum: How High Schools Are Reprogramming Their Classes.
Entry filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: contextualized computing education, Logo, Seymour Papert.
Computing Education Research Blog 
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Malyn Mawby (@malynmawby) | October 17, 2013 at 2:10 am
And there are fun ways to incorporate code just like in this story – this ‘approach’ could be done in other non-calculation-heavy subjects.
I’m not sure that it should be required nor it to be in every class but I think it could certainly become more mainstream.
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David Wees (@davidwees) | October 17, 2013 at 9:52 am
I tried to set up a two week unit in an English class where students would attempt to create randomly generated poetry. The teacher was very interested in attempting the unit, but we ran out of time to actually implement it, as other skills the kids have ended up being more important to the teacher.
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guy | October 17, 2013 at 11:26 am
I so hope the school is successful with this experiment. Based on everything I’ve seen, read, done over the last 20 years regarding K-12 and computers, embedding simple programming everywhere possible might get us the diversity we would like in CS/IT.
The challenge is going to be figuring out the *simple* programming so that most students come away with a positive exposure. Python is probably ok for the calculus class. Will it work in earlier English classes to generate random prose/poetry? I’m a skeptic based on Python’s syntax and its error messages. Maybe in early English classes, students just author work in HTML. Maybe spreadsheet programming works for some stuff like graphing. Logo, as old as it is, should still be considered for some subjects. The right tool (language/program) at the right time will be key in my opinion.
From the picture of the school in the article, I’m guessing they have quite a capable group of students to experiment on. If they can’t get it right I doubt you can get it right in a public school.
I hope…
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guy | October 17, 2013 at 1:24 pm
The more I thought about this, the more convinced I became that Beaver Country Day School has the opportunity to develop some great Scratch (or Snap!) based/embedded curriculum.