Computer Science Looks Beyond Nerds: Yeah, we still need to say it

The comments from students in the article below from Duke are just like the ones I hear from my students when I ask them how our introductory class is going. “Way better than I expected” and “I thought it would be all geeky” and “I can see using this!”  You’d think with all the press about computing education these days that we would wouldn’t still have to explain all of this, but yeah, we do.

“I thought I would be surrounded by tech geeks who sat alone at their computers all day,” Walker said. “But I came to realize that computer science lets you do things that are applicable to all sorts of fields.”

Now she’s using her new computational savvy to expand a nonprofit she founded in high school to raise money for an elephant sanctuary in Thailand.

“You wouldn’t think that running a nonprofit requires a lot of technical skills, but it does,” she said. “You get a problem and you think, ‘I could solve this on paper and it would take me 25 hours, or I can write one line of code and all of a sudden there’s my answer.’ The efficiency of it is super cool.”

via Computer Science Looks Beyond Nerds | Duke Today.