Considering the Danish Informatics Curriculum: Comparing National Computer Science Curricula

Michael Caspersen invited me to review a chapter on the Danish Informatics curriculum (see a link here). He asked me to compare it to existing school CS curriculum with which I’m familiar. That was an interesting idea — how does anyone relate curricula across diverse contexts, even between nations? I gave it a shot. I most likely missed, in that there are many curricula that I don’t know or don’t know well enough. I welcome comments on other CS curricula.

The Danish Informatics curriculum is unique for its focus on four competence areas:

• Digital empowerment which describes the ability to review and critique digital artifacts to ask where the strict demands of a computational system may not serve well the messy world in which humans live.
• Digital design and design processes which describes the ways in which designers come to understand the problem domain for which we design digital artifacts.
• Computational thinking and modeling which describes how data and algorithms are used to construct digital solutions and artifacts.
• Technological knowledge and skills which describes the tools (e.g., programming languages) and infrastructures (e.g., computer systems, networking) used to construct digital solutions and artifacts.
  

I am not familiar with any curriculum that encompasses all four competencies. I’m most familiar with elementary and high school curricula in the United States. Each US state has control over its own school system (i.e., there is no national curriculum) though many are influenced by recommendations from the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) (see link here) and the K12 CS Framework (link here).

In the United States, most computing curricula focus on technological knowledge and skills and computational thinking and modeling. The former is important because the economic argument for computing education in schools is the most salient in the United States. The latter most often appears as a focus on learning computing skills without programming, e.g., like in the CS Unplugged activities from Tim Bell at the University of Canterbury (link).

Modeling is surprising rare in most state curricula. Calls for modeling and simulation are common in US mathematics and science education frameworks like the Next Generation Science Standards (link), but these have influenced few state curricula around computing education. Efforts to integrate computing to serve the needs of mathematics and science education are growing, but only a handful of states actively promote computing education to support mandatory education. For example, Indiana has include computing learning objectives in their state’s science education standards, in order to develop more integrated approaches.

I don’t know of any state curricula that include digital empowerment nor digital design and design processes. These are critically important. Caspersen’s arguments for the Danish Informatics curriculum build on quotes from Henry Kissinger and Peter Naur, but could also build on the work of C.P. Snow and Alan Perlis (the first ACM Turing Award laureate). In 1961, Snow and Perlis both argued for mandatory computing (though at the University level). Perlis argued that computing gave us new ways to understand the world. He would have recognized the digital design and design processes competency area. Snow warned that everyone should learn computing in order to understand how computing is influencing our world. He wrote: “A handful of people, having no relation to the will of society, having no communication with the rest of society, will be taking decisions in secret which are going to affect our lives in the deepest sense.” He would recognize the concerns of Kissinger and Naur, and the importance of digital empowerment.

The Danish Informatics curriculum is unique in its breadth and for considering the social aspects of computing artifacts and design. It encompasses important needs for citizens of the 21st Century.

Broadening Participation in Computing is Different in Every State: Michigan as an Example

In December, Rick Adrion, Sarah T. Dunton, Barbara Ericson, Renee Fall, Carol Fletcher, and I published an essay in Communications of the ACM, “U.S. States Must Broaden Participation While Expanding Access to Computer Science Education.” (See link here, and pre-print available at the bottom of this post.). Rick, Renee, Barb, and I were the founders of the ECEP Alliance which helps states and US territories with their computing education policy and practices. Carol is now the PI on ECEP (which feels so great to say — ECEP continues past the founders, with excellent leadership) — the whole leadership team is here. Sarah likely knows more about state-level computing education policy than anyone else in the US. She has worked with individual teams in individual states for years. Our argument is that broadening participation and expanding access are not the same thing. Simply making CS classes available doesn’t get students into those classes. We tell the story of two states (Nevada and Rhode Island) and how CS Ed is growing there.

Barbara and I now live in Michigan. The CSTA, Code.org, and ECEP report 2020 State of Computer Science Education: Illuminating Disparities (see link here) has a sub-report for every US state. Michigan is on page 56. The press release for the 2020 report says that 47% of US high schools now offer CS. Michigan is at 37%. Michigan is the only state (as far as I can tell) that used to have CS teacher certification and pre-service CS but got rid of it (story here).

Also in December, Michigan Department of Education (MDE) released the first “State of Computer Science in Michigan Report” (see link here). The data collection and writing on the report was led by Aman Yadav and Sarah Gretter of Michigan State with Cheryl Wilson of MDE. A quote from page 11: “The trend of declining course offerings continues at the high school level where even fewer high schools offer CS courses. Code.org course offering data suggests that only 23.7% of rural high schools, 28% of town high schools, 29.1% of sub-urban high schools, and 21.7% of city high schools offer CS.” (The numbers on the website are lower than these — Aman and Cheryl kindly sent me an early peek at a revision that they’re posting soon.)

MDE’s numbers are a lot lower than the 37% in the Code.org/CSTA/ECEP report. What’s going on here? My best guess is that CS is rare enough in Michigan that not everybody who fills out a survey knows what the national CS education movement means by “computer science.” We had this a lot in the early days of “Georgia Computes,” too. A principal would say that they teach CS, when they might mean Microsoft Office or Web design (with no HTML, CSS, or JavaScript).

In any case, Michigan is clearly below national averages on providing CS education to its citizens and creating sustainable CS education policy. How do we help Michigan progress in providing computing education to its citizens?

I don’t know. Aman, Barb, and I have had conversations about the potential for growing CS Ed in Michigan. We don’t have the same leverage points in Michigan that we have had in other ECEP states. Michigan is a local control state. Individual local education agencies (LEA’s — sometimes a school district, sometimes a county-wide collection of districts) can make up their own rules on important issues like CS teacher certification. In Georgia and South Carolina, the state government has a lot of control in education, so there was a point of leverage. California is also a local control state, but the California University systems are important to all high schools, so that’s a point of influence. Massachusetts is again a local control state, but the Tech industry is very important to the Boston area, and that’s important to the state. Tech isn’t important in the same way in Michigan. If you read the MDE report, there’s a lot of ambivalence about CS in the state. Administrators aren’t that excited about teaching CS. They don’t see CS education as important for their students. Michigan is a big state, where agriculture and tourism are two of the most significant industries. Manufacturing is a big deal, but manufacturing workers don’t necessarily need to know much about computing. CS isn’t an obvious benefit to much of Michigan.

Aman’s strategy is to grow CS education in the state slowly, to develop pockets of value for CS and success in teaching CS. We have to plant seeds and grow to a critical mass, which seems like the right approach to me. He has projects where he is helping develop teachers and relevant curriculum for CS education in specific counties. He works closely with the MDE. Sarah is involved with Apple’s Developer Academy to open in Detroit (see story here). Michigan does have a powerful and large teacher’s group supporting educational technology, MACUL (Michigan Association for Computer Users in Learning, see website), which could be a significant player in growing CS education in the state.

The important point here is that, in the United States, growing CS education is a state-by-state challenge. Each state has its own story and issues.

Pre-print of CACM BPC article

Defining CS Ed out of existence: Have we made CS too hard to learn and teach?

It was this quote in a tweet from Miles Berry that really made me sit up and take notice of the latest news about the Computing at School initiative:

“If computing increasingly means CS, it looks likely that hundreds of thousands of students, particularly girls and poorer students, will be disenfranchised from a digital education over the next few years.”

He was quoting an article from the New Statesman which can be found here. It describes the history of the rise of the CS curriculum in England. The key paragraph for me is:

The new curriculum was failing. While a tougher course had been introduced, few students were taking it and even fewer teachers could teach it. In many cases, even those who could felt uncomfortable doing so.

The government read the reports and has decided to respond. There’s now an enormous investment in England in trying to train new teachers. The question is whether that’s the right investment.

Meanwhile, in Scotland, the headline of this May 2019 article is “Teachers and students in decline: the computing ‘crisis’ in Scotland’s schools.”

Experts are urging the Scottish Government to take radical steps to boost computing science education to prevent the subject from being squeezed out of schools.

The teaching of computing in schools is in “crisis”, practitioners have told The Ferret, with classes shrinking and teachers in short supply. The latest official data shows that the number of children studying the subject declined last year, while the number of teachers has fallen over the last decade.

Despite a national focus on delivering science and technology education and economic development, schools are finding it increasingly difficult to teach computing science to young people, critics say.

Let’s explicitly consider the questions raised in these two articles. Have we defined CS education in such a way that it’s too hard to teach? That it’s not interesting to learn? Maybe that it’s too hard to learn?

I’ve been writing in the last few months about the surprisingly low uptake of CS education in the United States (for example, in this CACM Blog post). No more than 5% of high school students in any US state are getting any CS classes, from the data available. There is value in setting high standards for CS education (as Alan Kay has been arguing), but that’s an argument for the end goal. Where do we start with CS education? How quickly can and will students learn CS education? What does it mean for something to be too hard to teach or too hard to learn?

Overall, US is following a similar strategy as in England and Scotland for computing in K-12: standalone CS classes, heavy emphasis on in-service teacher development, and counting the number of students in CS classes and the number of teachers leading those classes. There is integrated CS in the US, but as far as I know, no state is tracking those numbers. Public policy tends to focus on things that can be measured. Most of the argument against integration says that too little CS is covered in integrated forms. 95% of US students getting no CS at all is even less coverage than CS in integrated forms.

Let’s consider two hypotheses:

Hypothesis #1: We know how to teach computer science in such a way that all students can learn what they need to be technically-literate citizens, or even to develop the prerequisite knowledge they need to be software professionals. We have not yet achieved this goal because we do not have enough teachers to implement the curriculum. Larger investments in teacher development (perhaps including stipends or better pay to CS teachers) would allow us to scale CS Ed to reach everyone.

Hypothesis #2: We have defined computer science education in a way that is too hard to teach (so too few teachers are unwilling to teach it), and that is too hard to learn (which includes not being motivating enough to recruit students or engage student interest in order to achieve learning).

Given the evidence we have in the US, England, and Scotland, which hypothesis is better supported? You may have a Hypothesis #3 or #4 which is also well-supported by the evidence — I am very interested in hearing it.

In general, we tend to take the “insider view” of CS Ed, as Kahneman warned about (see excerpt here). If you step outside CS Ed, are we making progress along a trajectory that leads to CS education for all? And how long is that trajectory? If you were an Education faculty member and learned that CS had less than 5% of US high school students enrolled, wouldn’t it be reasonable to consider it a fad and likely to pass?

As I wrote in my blog post about what I got wrong in the last decade, I no longer think that CS for All is a matter of access. We have to figure out how to improve participation. I’m in support of Hypothesis #2. We need to re-think what and how we teach CS education. Because of my work these days, I suspect that we made a mistake at the design level. I was involved in the early days of the AP CS Principles (AP CSP) process. Most of the AP CSP curricula I’m aware of were developed by and tested with some of the best CS teachers in the US. That design and development process doesn’t promise a curriculum that many teachers can teach and that most students will learn from.

I just got back from a three day visit in Norway, where they are about to roll-out an integration of CS activities (explicitly programming) into mathematics, science, music, and arts & crafts classes. (See workshop about this topic here.). Maybe that would result in more students learning some computer science. Did US, England, and Scotland make a mistake by emphasizing standalone CS classes over integration?

An Analysis of Supports and Barriers to Offering Computer Science in Georgia Public High Schools: Miranda Parker’s Defense

Miranda Parker defends her dissertation this Thursday.  It’s a really fascinating story, trying to answer the question: Why does a high school in Georgia decide (or not) to offer computer science?  She did a big regression analysis, and then four detailed case studies.  Readers of this blog will know Miranda from her guest blog post on the Google-Gallup polls, her SCS1 replication of the multi-lingual and validated measure of CS1 knowledge, her study of teacher-student differences in using ebooks, and her work exploring the role of spatial reasoning to relate SES and CS performance (work that was part of her dissertation study). I’m looking forward to flying down to Atlanta and being there to cheer her on to the finish.

Title: An Analysis of Supports and Barriers to Offering Computer Science in Georgia Public High Schools

Miranda Parker
Human-Centered Computing Ph.D. Candidate
School of Interactive Computing
College of Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology

Date: Thursday, October 10, 2019

Time: 10AM to 12PM EST

Location: 85 5th Street NE, Technology Square Research Building (TSRB), 2nd floor, Room 223

Committee:

Dr. Mark Guzdial (Advisor), School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology
Dr. Betsy DiSalvo, School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology
Dr. Rebecca E. Grinter, School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology
Dr. Willie Pearson, Jr., School of History and Sociology, Georgia Institute of Technology
Dr. Leigh Ann DeLyser, CSforAll Consortium

Abstract:

There is a growing international movement to provide every child access to high-quality computing education. Despite the widespread effort, most children in the US do not take any computing classes in primary or secondary schools. There are many factors that principals and districts must consider when determining whether to offer CS courses. The process through which school officials make these decisions, and the supports and barriers they face in the process, is not well understood. Once we understand these supports and barriers, we can better design and implement policy to provide CS for all.

In my thesis, I study public high schools in the state of Georgia and the supports and barriers that affect offerings of CS courses. I quantitatively model school- and county-level factors and the impact these factors have on CS enrollment and offerings. The best regression models include prior CS enrollment or offerings, implying that CS is likely sustainable once a class is offered. However, large unexplained variances persist in the regression models.

To help explain this variance, I selected four high schools and interviewed principals, counselors, and teachers about what helps, or hurts, their decisions to offer a CS course. I build case studies around each school to explore the structural and people-oriented themes the participants discussed. Difficulty in hiring and retaining qualified teachers in CS was one major theme. I frame the case studies using diffusion of innovations providing additional insights into what attributes support a school deciding to offer a CS course.

The qualitative themes gathered from the case studies and the quantitative factors used in the regression models inform a theory of supports and barriers to CS course offerings in high schools in Georgia. This understanding can influence future educational policy decisions around CS education and provide a foundation for future work on schools and CS access.

Why high school teachers might avoid teaching CS: The role of industry

Fascinating blog post from Laura Larke that helps to answer the question: Why isn’t high school computing growing in England?  The Roehampton Report (pre-release of the 2019 data available here) has tracked the state of computing education in England, which the authors describe as a “steep decline.” Laura starts her blog post with the provocative question “How does industry’s participation in the creation of education policy impact upon what happens in the classroom?” She describes teachers who aim to protect their students’ interests — giving them what they really need, and making judgments about where to allocate scarce classroom time.

What I found were teachers acting as gatekeepers to their respective classrooms, modifying or rejecting outright a curriculum that clashed with local, professional knowledge (Foucault, 1980) of what was best for their young students. Instead, they were teaching digital skills that they believed to be more relevant (such as e-safety, touch typing, word processing and search skills) than the computer-science-centric content of the national curriculum, as well as prioritising other subjects (such as English and maths, science, art, religious education) that they considered equally important and which competed for limited class time.

Do we see similar issues in US classrooms?  It is certainly the case that the tech industry is painted in the press as driving the effort to provide CS for All.  Adam Michlin shared this remarkable article on Facebook, “(Florida) Gov. DeSantis okay with substituting computer science over traditional math and science classes required for graduation.” Florida is promoting CS as a replacement for physics or pre-calculus in the high school curriculum.

“I took classes that I enjoyed…like physics. Other than trying to keep my kids from falling down the stairs in the Governor’s mansion I don’t know how much I deal with physics daily,” the governor said.

The article highlights the role of the tech industry in supporting this bill.

Several top state lawmakers attended as well as a representative from Code.org, a Seattle-based nonprofit that works to expand computer science in schools. Lobbyists representing Code.org in Tallahassee advocated for HB 7071, which includes computer science initiatives and other efforts. That’s the bill DeSantis is reviewing.

A Microsoft Corporation representative also attended the DeSantis event. Microsoft also had lobbyists in Tallahassee during the session, advocating for computer science and other issues.

The US and England have different cultures. Laura’s findings do not automatically map to the US. I’m particularly curious if US teachers are similarly more dubious about the value of CS curricula if it’s perceived as a tech industry ploy.

 

Barbara Ericson’s AP CS Report for 2018 and her new blog cs4all.home.blog

Barb has written her blog post about the 2018 AP data (see 2017 report here and 2016 report here), and this year, she’s using it to launch her own blog!  Find it at https://cs4all.home.blog/

Every year I gather and report on the data for AP CS from the College Board which is at http://research.collegeboard.org/programs/ap/data/

There was a huge increase in Advanced Placement (AP) Computer Science Principles (CSP) exam takers nationally (from 43,780 in 2017 to 70, 864 in 2018 – a 62% increase). The Computer Science A (CSA) exam also grew (from 56,088 in 2017 to 60,040 in 2018 – a 7% increase).

Source: AP CS Report for 2018

The biggest concerns for institutionalized CS education in the United States: Standards, limited models, and undergraduate enrollment caps

I was interviewed for the SIGCSE Bulletin by my long-time collaborator, Leo Porter (see https://sigcse.org/sigcse/files/bulletin/bulletin.51.1.pdf).  I talk about this blog, how I started teaching in 1980, about Media Computation, and about what inspires me.

One of the questions relates to the recent discussion about standards and frameworks (see post here).

LP: You have worked with education public policymakers in “Georgia Computes!” and Expanding Computing Education Pathways (ECEP) over the last dozen years. What’s your biggest worry as US states start institutionalizing CS education?

I have two. The first is that the efforts to standardize CS education are making the bar too low. When the K-12 CS Ed Framework was being developed, decisions were being made based on how current teachers might respond. “Teachers don’t like binary, so let’s not include that” is one argument I heard. I realize now that that’s exactly the wrong idea. Standards should drive progress and set goals. Defining standards in terms of what’s currently attainable is going to limit what we teach for years. Computing education research is all about making it possible to teach more, more easily and more effectively. I worry about setting standards based on our limited research base, not on what we hope to achieve.

The second is that most of our decisions are being made around the assumption of standalone CS classes and having teachers with a lot of CS education. I just don’t see that happening at scale in the US. Even in the states with lots of CS teachers in lots of schools, a small percentage of students take those classes. This limits who sees computer science. To make CS education accessible for all, we have to be able to explore alternative models, like integrating computing education in other subjects without CS-specific teachers. If we only count success in CS education as having standalone CS classes, we are incentivizing only one model. I worry about building our policy to disadvantage schools that want to explore integrated models, or have to integrate because of the cost of standalone CS classes.

Since this interview, I have a third concern, that may be more immediate than the other two.  This is what I wrote my CACM Blog on this month. The NYTimes just published an article “The Hard Part of Computer Science? Getting Into Class” about the growing CS undergraduate enrollment and about the efforts by departments to manage the load.  Departments used to talk about building capacity, but increasingly, the discussion is about capping or limiting enrollments.  The reason why this is concerning is because we’ve been down this road before — see Eric Roberts’ history of CS capacity challenges. Our efforts to limit enrollment send a message about computer science being only for elites and being unwelcoming to non-CS majors. This is exactly opposed to the message that Code.org, CS for All, and the AP CS Principles exam is trying to send. We’re creating a real tension between higher education and the efforts to grow CS, and it may (as Eric suggests) send enrollments into the next dive.

How to organize a state (summit): From ECEP and NCWIT

Soon after we started the Expanding Computing Education Pathways (ECEP) Alliance, we were asked: What should a state do first?  If they want to improve CS Education, what are the steps?

We developed a four step model — you can see a three minute video on ECEP that includes the four step model here. It was evidence-based in the sense that, yup, we really saw states doing this.  We had no causal evidence. I’m not sure that that’s possible in any kind of education public policy research.

One of those steps is “Organize.” Gather your allies. Have meetings where you CS Ed people rub elbows with the state public policymakers, like legislators and staffers in the Department of Education (or Department of Public Instruction, or whatever it’s called in your state).

A lot of states have had summits since then (see a list of some here).  Now, working with the fabulous NCWIT team of communicators, graphic designers, and social scientists, ECEP has released a state summit toolkit.  We can’t yet tell you how to organize a state. We can tell you how to organize a state summit.

From finding change agents to building a steering committee of diverse stakeholders, convenings play an important role in broadening participation in computing at the state level. ECEP and NCWIT have developed the State Summit Toolkit to assist leadership teams as they organize meetings, events, and summits focused on advancing K-16 computer science education.

From https://ecepalliance.org/summit-toolkit 

Need for Reviewers for US Department of Education CS Education Grants – Guest Post from Pat Yongpradit

Pat Yongpradit of Code.org asked me to share this with everyone.

The US Department of Education has announced the EIR grant competition for FY 2019. This year EIR incorporates an exclusive priority for computer science with a focus on increasing diversity and equity in access, as compared to last year where the highlight was that CS was merged with STEM as a combined priority. See more detail in our blog.

There are many moving parts to the federal grant review and award process, including a merit-based review process. In order to adequately score grants featuring computer science, the US Department of Education must have enough reviewers with K-12 computer science education experience. There is more information on the merit-review process and the Department’s mechanism for selecting reviewers in this blog.

Code.org has been asked to put interested folks in touch with leaders of the EIR grant program. If interested, please send your CV to EIRpeerreview@ed.gov.

Having CS knowledgeable reviewers participating in the federal grant review process is crucial to maximizing the opportunity these grants present the field and our collective goal of expanding access to K-12 computer science.

Best,

Pat

Frameworks and Standards can be limiting and long-lasting: Alan Kay was right

Through the K-12 CS Framework process (December 2016, see the post here), Alan Kay kept saying that we needed real computer science and that the Framework shouldn’t be about consensus (see post here). I disagreed with him. I saw it as a negotiation between academic CS and K-12 CS.

I was wrong.

Now that I can see standards efforts rolling out, and can see what’s actually going into teacher professional development, I realize that Alan was right. Standards are being written to come up to but rarely surpass the Framework. All those ideas like bits and processes that I argued about — they were not in the Framework, so they are not appearing in Standards. The Framework serves to limit what’s taught.

Teachers are experts on what is teachable, but that’s not what a Framework is supposed to be about. A Framework should be about what the field is about, about what’s important to know. Yes, it needs to be a consensus document, but not a consensus about what goes into classrooms. That’s the role of Standards. A Framework should be a consensus about what computing is.

I think what drove a lot of our thinking about the Framework is that it should be achievable.  There was a sense that states and organizations (like CSTA and ISTE) should be able to write standards that (a) meet the Framework’s goals and (b) could be measurably achieved in professional development — “Yup, the teachers understand that.” As I learn about the mathematics and science frameworks, it seems that their goal was to describe the field — they didn’t worry about achievable.  Rather, the goal was that the Framework should be aspirational. “When we get education right for all children, it should look like this.”

Standards are political documents (something Mike Lach taught me and that Joan Ferrini-Mundy told ECEP), based on Frameworks. Because the K-12 CS Framework is expected to reflect the end state goal, Standards are being written a step below those. Frameworks describe the goals, and Standards describe our current plans towards those goals. Since the Framework is not aiming to describe Computer Science, neither do the state Standards that I’m seeing.

I told Alan about this realization a few weeks ago, and then the Georgia Standards came out for review (see page here). They are a case in point. Standards are political documents. It matters who was in the room to define these documents in this way.

Here’s the exemplar standard from the Grade 6-8 band:

Use technology resources to increase self-direction and self-regulation in learning, including for problem solving and collaboration (e.g., using the Internet to access online resources, edit documents collaboratively)

Can technology resources increase self-direction and self-regulation in learning? Maybe — I don’t know of any literature that shows that. But even if it can, why are these in the Computer Science standards?

The K-2 band comparable Standard is even more vague:

Recognize that technology provides the opportunity to enhance relevance, increase confidence, offer authentic choice, and produce positive impacts in learning.

I have no idea if computers can “increase confidence,” but given what we know about self-efficacy and motivation, I don’t think that’s a common outcome. Why is this in the Computer Science Standards?

There are lots of uses of the word “information.” None of them define information. The closest is here (again, grades 6-8), which lists a bunch of big ideas (“logic, sets, and functions”) but the verb is only that students should be able to “discuss” them:

Evaluate the storage and representation of data; Analyze how data is collected with both computational and non-computational tools and processes

1. Discuss binary numbers, logic, sets, and functions and their application to computer science
2. Explain that searches may be enhanced by using Boolean logic (e.g., using “not”, “or”, “and”)

What’s missing in the Framework is also missing in the Georgia standards.

• The word “bit” doesn’t appear anywhere in these standards — if there is no information, then it makes sense that students don’t need bits.
• The word “process” does, but mostly in the phrase “design process.” Then it shows up in the Grade 6-8 band, but in highly technical forms: “process isolation” and “boot process.”
• There are no names: No Turing, no Hopper. There is no history, so no grounding in where computer science came from and what the big and deep ideas are.

There are strange phrases like “binary language,” which I don’t understand.

This is from Georgia, where there is a strong video game development lobby. Thus, all students are expected (by Grades 6-8) to:

Develop a plan to create, design, and build a game with digital content for a specific target market.

And

Develop a visual model of a game from the Game Design Document (GDD).

And

Create a functional game, using a game development platform, based on the storyboards, wireframes, and comprehensive layout.

It’s clear that the Georgia Standards are the result of a political process.

The bottom line is that I now wish that we had made sure that the K-12 CS Framework reflected computer scientists’ understanding of Computer Science. It instead reflected K-12 classroom computer science as defined in 2016. They presume languages like Scratch and curricula like AP CS Principles.  That’s reasonable in Standards that describe what goes into the classroom tomorrow, but Frameworks should describe a broader, longer-range thinking. Our

There are no plans that I’m aware of to define a new Framework. The Standards are still just being developed for many states, so they’re going to last for years. This is what Computer Science will be in the United States for the next couple decades, at least.

Analyzing CS in Texas school districts: Maybe enough to take root and grow

My Blog@CACM for this month is about Code.org’s decision to shift gradually the burden of paying for CS professional development to the local regions — see link here.  It’s an important positive step that needs to happen to make CS sustainable with the other STEM disciplines in K-12 schools.

We’re at an interesting stage in CS education. 40-70% of high schools have CS, but the classes are pretty empty.  I use Indiana and Texas as examples because they’ve made a lot of their data available.  Let’s drill a bit into the Texas data to get a flavor of it, available here.  I’m only going to look at Area 1’s data, because even just that is deep and fascinating.

Brownsville Intermediate School District. 13,941 students. 102 in CS.

Of the 10 high schools in Brownsville ISD, only two high schools have anyone in their CS classes.  Brownsville Early College High School has 102 students in CS Programming (no AP CS Level A, no AP CSP).  That probably means that one teacher has several sections of that course — that’s quite a bit.  The other high school, Porter Early College High School has fewer than five students in AP CS A.  My bet is that there is no CS teacher there, only five students doing an on-line class.  That means for 10 high schools and 13K students, there is really only one high school CS teacher.

Edinburg Consolidated Independent School District, over 10K students, 92 students in CS.

This is a district that could grow CS if there was will.  There are 6 high schools, but two are special cases: One with less than 5 students, and the other in a juvenile detention center.  The other four high schools are huge, with over 2000 students each.  In Economedes, that are only 9 students in AP CS A — maybe just on-line?  Edinburg North and Robert R Vela high school each have two classes: AP CS A and CS1.  With 21 and 14, I’m guessing two sections.  The other has 43 and 6. That might be two sections of AP CS A and another of CS1, or two sections of AP CS A and 6 students in an on-line class.  In any case, this suggests two high school CS teachers (maybe three) in half of the high schools in the district.  Those teachers aren’t teaching only CS, but with increased demand and support from principals, the CS offerings could grow.

It’s fascinating to wander through the Texas data, to see what’s there and what’s not.  I could be wrong about what’s there, e.g., maybe there’s only one teacher in Edinburg and she’s moving from school-to-school.  Given these data, there’s unlikely to be a CS teacher in every high school, who just isn’t teaching any CS. These data are a great snapshot. There is CS in Texas high schools, and maybe there’s enough there to take root and grow.

 

A high-level report on the state of computing education policy in US states: Access vs Participation

Interesting analysis from Code.org on the development of policies in US states that promote computing education — see report here, and linked below.  The map above is fascinating in that it shows how much computing education has become an issue in all but five states.

The graph below is the one I found confusing.

I’ve been corrected: the first bar says that where the school’s population is 0-25% from under-represented minority groups, 41% of those schools teach CS.  Only 27% of mostly-minority schools (75%-100% URM, in the rightmost column) offer CS.  This is a measure of which schools offer computer science.

The graph above doesn’t mean that there are any under-represented minority students in any CS classes in any of those high schools.  My children’s public high school in Georgia was over 50% URM, but the AP CS class was 90% white and Asian kids.  From the data we’ve seen in Georgia (for example, see this blog post), few high schools offer more than one CS class. Even in a 75% URM high school, it’s pretty easy to find 30 white and Asian guys.  Of course, we know that there are increasing numbers of women and under-represented minority students in computer science classes, but that’s a completely different statistic from what schools offer CS.

I suspect that the actual participation of URM students in CS is markedly lower than the proportion in the school.  In other words, in a high school with 25% URM, I’ll bet that the students in the CS classes are less than 25% URM.  Even in a 75% URM high school, I’ll bet that CS participation is less than 75% URM.

Access ≠ participation.

Source: The United States for Computer Science – Code.org – Medium

ECEP has a new home at The University of Texas at Austin: First meeting this week at CSforAll

I can’t tell you how exciting this press release is for me.  Rick Adrion, Renee Fall, Barbara Ericson, and I started the Expanding Computing Education Pathways Alliance (http://ecepalliance.org) in 2012 to provide states with support as they broadened participation in computing education.  Six years later, we had 16 states and Puerto Rico involved — but we were ready to be done.  We all four had worked on previous alliances (CAITE and Georgia Computes) and felt that the movement needed new leaders.  I am so very pleased that Carol Fletcher and her wonderful team decided to carry on ECEP, and NSF has agreed to continue funding ECEP as it expands to TWENTY-THREE states and US territories!

ECEP (now based out of UT-Austin) will have its first meeting this week, at Wayne State University in Detroit (where Barbara and I first met in 1983) as part of the CSforAll summit.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded the UT STEM Center a three-year $2.5 million grant to lead the Expanding Computing Education Pathways (ECEP) Alliance. ECEP is one of eight Broadening Participation in Computing Alliances (BPC) funded by the NSF to increase the number and diversity of students in K-16 pathways. ECEP works with state leadership teams to achieve this goal through education policy reform. First launched in 2012 through an NSF grant to Georgia Tech and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, ECEP has since grown through four phases from two states to sixteen and Puerto Rico. Building on the existing network of ECEP states noted in the map above, the ECEP leadership team is pleased to announce the fifth phase addition of six new states to the Alliance: Hawaii, Minnesota, Mississippi, Ohio, Oregon, and Washington.

Source: National Alliance for Expanding Computing Education Pathways has a new home at The University of Texas at Austin

South Carolina requires CS to fulfill high school requirement, and Keyboarding is no longer CS

Pat Yongpradit of Code.org shared some great news with me.  Well, it’s not really “new” — it happened back in March 2018. But it was something that both of us worked on, and it was great to finally see it happen.

South Carolina was one of the first ECEP (Expanding Computing Education Pathways) Alliance states. They had one of the first statewide summits on computing education (see blog post here). They were one of the first states to require computer science for all high school students.

The problem was that they didn’t actually require computer science. They allowed some 90 classes to count as CS, and only six actually contained CS content (like programming or algorithms). Even a course on “keyboarding” counted as “CS” under the South Carolina system. South Carolina resisted changing this requirement, as Tony Dillon of the state Department of Education argued (see this blog post). I’ve worried that other states that mandate CS would fall into a similar trap (see blog post here on that).

That changed March 28, 2018 with this memo. South Carolina has computer science standards. Keyboarding no longer counts.

It’s an interesting question how this happened.  I know that Pat and others at Code.org have been working a lot in South Carolina.  I know that our South Carolina ECEP collaborators, like Eileen Kraemer, Tiffany Barnes, and Mary Lou Maher, have been working tirelessly on the state. I also know that my involvement from Georgia had limited success.  As one Department of Education official said when I was working in Columbia, “No professor from Georgia Tech is going to tell me about AP CS.”

My suspicion is that this happened because there was significant internal and external pressure.  South Carolina wasn’t going to do much when it was just external pressure. But when it was both, there were changes made.

Pat has promised me that Code.org is going to be helping South Carolina fulfill their plans for new CS requirements.

 

The Story of MACOS: How getting curriculum development wrong cost the nation, and how we should do it better

Man: A Course of Study (MACOS) is one of the most ambitious US curriculum efforts I’ve ever heard about. The goal was to teach anthropology to 10 year olds. The effort was led by world-renowned educational psychologist Jerome Bruner, and included many developers, anthropologists, and educational psychologists (including Howard Gardner). It won awards from the American Education Research Association and from other education professional organization for its innovation and connection to research. At its height, MACOS was in thousands of schools, including whole school districts.

Today, MACOS isn’t taught anywhere. Funding for MACOS was debated in Congress in 1975, and the controversy led eventually to the de-funding of science education nationally.

Peter Dow’s 1991 book Schoolhouse Politics: Lessons from the Sputnik Era is a terrific book which should be required reading for everyone involved in computing education in K-12. Dow was the project manager for MACOS, and he’s candid in describing what they got wrong. It’s worthwhile understanding what happened so that we might avoid it in computing education. I just finished reading it, and here are some of the parts that I found particularly insightful.

First, Dow doesn’t dismiss the critics of MACOS. Rather, he recognizes that the tension is between learning objectives. What do we want for our children? What kind of society do we want to build?

I quickly learned that decisions about educational reform are driven far more by political considerations, such as the prevailing public mood, than they are by a systematic effort to improve instruction. Just as Soviet science supremacy had spawned a decade of curriculum reform led by some of our most creative research scientists during the late 1950s and 1960s, so now a new wave of political conservatism and religious fundamentalism in the early 1970s began to call into question the intrusion of university academics into the schools…Exposure to this debate caused me to recast the account to give more attention to educational politics. No discussion of school reform, it seems, can be separated from our vision of the society that the schools serve.

MACOS was based in the best of educational psychology at the time. Students engaged in inquiry with first-hand accounts, e.g., videos of Eskimos. The big mistake the developers made was they gave almost no thought to how it was going to get disseminated. Dow points out that MACOS was academic researchers intruding into K-12, without really understanding K-12. They didn’t plan for teacher professional development, and worse, didn’t build any mechanism for teachers to tell them how the materials should be changed to work in real classrooms. They were openly dismissive of the publishers who might get the materials into the world.

On teachers: There was ambivalence about teachers at ESI. On the one hand the Social Studies Program viewed its work as a panacea for teachers, a liberation from the drudgery of textbook materials and didactic lessons. On the other, professional educators were seen as dull-witted people who conversed in an incomprehensible “middle language” and were responsible for the uninspired state of American education.

On publishers: These two experienced and widely respected publishing executives listened politely while Bruner described our lofty education aspirations with characteristic eloquence, but the discussion soon turned to practical matters such as the procedures of state adoption committees, “tumbling test” requirements, per-pupil expenditures, readability formulas, and other restrictions that govern the basal textbook market. Spaulding and Kaplan tried valiantly to instruct us about the realities of the educational publishing world, but we dismissed their remarks as the musings of men who had been corrupted by commercialism. Did they not understand that our mission was to change education, not submit to the strictures that had made much of instruction so meaningless? Could not men so powerful in the publishing world commit some of their resources to support curriculum innovation? Had they no appreciation of the intellectual poverty of most social studies classrooms? I remember leaving that room depressed by the monumental conservatism of our visitors and more determined than ever to prove that there were ways to reach the schools with good materials. Our arrogance and naivete were not so easily cured.

By 1971, Dow realizes that the controversies around MACOS could easily have been avoided. They had made choices in their materials that highlighted the challenges of Eskimo life graphically, but the gory details weren’t really necessary to the learning objectives. They simply hadn’t thought enough about their users, which included the teachers, administrators, parents, and state education departments.

My favorite scene in the book is with Margaret Mead who tries to help Dow defend MACOS in Congress, but she’s frustrated by their arrogance and naivete.

Mead’s exasperation grew. “What do you tell the children that for?…I have been teaching anthropology for forty years,” she remarked, “and I have never had a controversy like this over what I have written.”

…

But Mead’s anger quickly returned. “No, no, you can’t tell the senators that! Don’t preach to them! You and I may believe that sort of thing, but that’s not what you say to these men. The trouble with you Cambridge intellectuals is that you have no political sense!”

Dow describes over two chapters the controversies around MACOS and the aftermath impacts on science education funding at NSF. But he also points out the problems with MACOS as a curriculum. Some of these are likely problems we’re facing in CS for All efforts.

For example, he talks about why MACOS was removed from Oregon schools, using the work of Lynda Falkenstein. (Read the below with an awareness of the Google-Gallup and EdWeek polls showing that administrators and principals are not supportive of CS in schools.)

She concluded that innovations that lacked the commitment of administrators able to provide long-term support and continuing teacher training beyond the initial implementation phase were bound to faster regardless of their quality. Even more than controversy, she found, the greatest barrier to successful innovation was the lack of continuity of support from the internal structure of the school system itself.

I highly recommend Schoolhouse Politics. It has me thinking about what it really takes to get any education reform to work and to scale. The book is light on evaluation evidence that MACOS worked. For example, I’m concerned that MACOS was so demanding that it may have been too much for underprepared students or teachers. I am totally convinced that it was innovative and brilliant. One of the best curriculum design efforts I’ve ever read about, in terms of building on theory and innovative design. I am also totally convinced that it wasn’t ready to scale — and the cost of that mistake was enormous. We need to avoid making those mistakes again.