I was lucky to take a computer science class during my senior year of high school. I was also lucky enough to have an amazing teacher and found the subject matter to be interesting and engaging to me. I had always thought about majoring in some combination of neuroscience and psychology before that class and I’m not sure that I would have found the subject without the AP class being offered in high school. I love that Obama wants to push towards creating a computer science course in every school, but I definitely understand that there are many obstacles. Many of the articles outlined several including finding teachers, fitting the class into the curriculum, and deciding what exactly the classes would cover. In my opinion the biggest obstacle would be finding teachers that could do the job effectively. Computer science is not something that everyone loves and those who do can find high paying salaries and job perks that schools (especially public schools) will never be able to beat. Anyone who wants to choose teaching over one of those jobs would have to be after the lifestyle and daily rewards that come along with teaching, not the salary. I also agree with the Beauty and Joy article. Computer science is different from many subjects in the way that it is learned and the way that problems exist and are solved. It is crucial to have the right kind of teacher to keep everyone from immediately giving up on the subject. Most of my engineering friends in other majors dread Matlab assignments because they find coding to be far more frustrating than rewarding. I believe that it requires a certain kind of teacher to make the process enjoyable enough to see the positives of coding.
Another obstacle is deciding what the subject matter of the computer science class is. As someone who had never been quite as good at the theoretical classes in computer science my first instinct is to say **** theory, when reading the article about what should be included in computer education. However, coding is not just learning when you need a semicolon, it is a new way of thinking and problem solving. And if I am being honest with myself, many of the problems and ideas that I learned about in all of my theory classes have helped create the thinking pattern that makes coding fun at least some of the time instead of the frustrating mess that it could be. It does not seem right to teach coding without even touching on theory. Really it doesn’t even seem entirely possible.
Again I have to agree whole heartedly with the article that argues for the power of computational thinking rather than just deep end coding. My high school class did focus on actual code, but also incorporated important concepts and ideas that would help me later on. It is definitely true that just by learning to code you do pick up on some of the conceptual theory without actually knowing the words for it, but you do not become the same kind of well rounded programmer.
isabellehillberg 