Reaction for: Strategic Directions by Andrew H. Schulak

I think the concepts discussed in this paper are very important not only to the realm of computer science, but to all realms of human knowledge and existence.

However, before I go into this aspect of the paper I would like to discuss one other aspect that was brought up by the paper. That is of secondary education in computer science.

As the paper mentions there is no current base curriculum for secondary schools. Most schools do provide education in this subject matter all follow different methodologies. The only connecting piece is the AP Test, which admitted by the paper, isn't very good because not all of the people in the computer science field have had input into it's direction.

The author(s) point out that all other fields have well established curricula for secondary school which allows some standardization in the undergraduate level. Computer science, does not. As a result the field of computer science for education is a little scrambled. The necessity of such reports as the last paper are indicative of this problem: It is difficult to standardize computer science education across the boards.

In order to help rectify this problem the author(s) propose a repository for computer science education, amongst other things, which would help to centralize many educational tools used for computer science.

The centralization of these tools is an important concept because, as we have learned with software engineering, why reinvent the wheel every time when we can learn from the successes and failures of other people? In this style assignments, documentation, lecture notes, aside from other things, could be shared globally via the internet. This would allow people from all over to learn in many new ways, some which have been proven to work better then others.

I think this is a very noble idea, though I readily recognize the difficulty in engineering and maintaining it. If pulled off it could be a very positive artifact which could help education in computer science tremendously.


Reactions


MY NAME: Matthew Amdur

MY COMMENTS: I highly agree that providing secondary schools with more resources for teaching CS would be tremendously helpful. Many of the actual people teaching CS in high schools are not CS graduates, but rather they teach themselves the material. If they had better resources, where they could see how college level CS professors taught different subjects, they would be able to learn more, and would be more able to convey what they learned to the students.


Danah:

I agree that it would be tremendously helpful to devise a method to teaching computer science at the secondary level. I also believe that it is essential to devise a manner in which the information could get across to all students, regardless of economic standards. I fear that putting computer science into high schools tends to target the affluent schools. This only deepens the learning problem.


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