Summit on CS education in South Carolina

Duncan Buell and Lonnie Emard have an op-ed piece in today’s The State about the summit we’re co-hosting this weekend as part of our ECEP Alliance efforts in South Carolina.  ECEP is bringing in Cameron Wilson from Code.org, Dale Reed from University of Illinois-Chicago who is a leader in the Exploring CS effort there, and Marie desJardins to talk about her efforts in Maryland (as well as Rick Adrion and me, to talk about efforts in Massachusetts and Georgia). There is still space available, if readers in South Carolina would like to join us — see the invitation here.

This Friday and Saturday, IT-oLogy, together with the University of South Carolina, will host the Computing Education in South Carolina Summit. This event, funded in part with an Expanding Computing Education Pathways grant from the National Science Foundation, will provide outreach to policymakers in government and education about the importance of teaching “real computer science” in South Carolina and the fact that the state is not so far behind national leaders that it could not itself become a national leader.

The prediction is that three out of five job openings in the computer/information sciences, life/physical sciences, engineering and mathematics fields are asking for university degrees in computer science, and starting salaries nationally for computer science graduates are better than $60,000 a year. In spite of these inducements, enrollments in computer science are low, and the nation is producing only one-third of the university graduates in computer science as there are jobs available.

via Columbia, SC: Buell, Emard: Summit can help make SC a leader in ‘real computer science’ education | Letters to the Editor | The State.