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Aligning computer science with high school mathematics can help turn it into an essential subject for all students.
In MarCH 2008, the College Board (which administers the Advanced Placement (AP) exam) did the unthinkable by reducing a vibrant technology discipline, computer science, to the same level of unpopularity as a dead language, Latin. It achieved this by canceling an AP exam2 in each area. Although ACM and other organizations provided data on the sustained levels of the other AP computer science exam, these statements mask the relative unpopularity of computer science compared to more traditional mathematical disciplines. Concretely, in 2007, a total of 19,392 students took one of the computer science AP exams, in contrast to 267,160 who took calculus and 96,282 who took statistics. 1
Perhaps this isn’t surprising. The three Rs—reading, ’riting, ’ritmetic— symbolize what matters in U.S. primary and secondary education. Teaching these three essential skills dominates the scholastic agenda in the minds of parents, educators, and legislators. Any new material competes with these core elements; if it isn’t competitive, it is marginalized.
Computer science plays such a marginal role. A large part of the problem is due to how computing is portrayed to schools, parents, the people who allocate the education budgets, and the students. The high school curriculum is mired in teaching fashionable programming languages and currently
popular programming paradigms. There is great churn in how to teach this complex content to people for whom its complexity is likely to be inappropriate. Never mind that the languages and perhaps even paradigms of today will have evaporated by the time the students graduate.
This trend is not limited to high schools; it is repeated in the introductory college curriculum. Indeed, many high schools are merely reflecting the curricular confusion at the college level. Colleges, in turn, have a problem of their own: declining enrollments in computer science.
When enrollments decline, the leaders of the computer science education community routinely look for saviors: graphics, animation, multimedia, robotics, and games have all been cast in this role. Not that integrating such topics into a course on computing is necessarily bad; but such ideas are frosting, not essentials. This search for saviors pervades thinking about introductory college curricula, and much of it percolates to thinking at the secondary school level in the form of AP and pre-AP curricula. Others, wanting to offer alternatives, act embarrassed about programming, which is our field’s single most valuable skill, and seek to marginalize it (for example, see the November 2005 Communications column titled “Recentering Computer Science”). Meanwhile, ACM’s own press releases attempt to downplay the gravity of the situation.
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What our community should really aim for is the development of a curriculum that turns our subject into the fourth R—as in ’rogramming—of our education systems. This can not only address high school curricular concerns but can also become an integral part of general education and distribution requirements in college. One way of achieving this goal is to align computing through programming with one of the three Rs and to make it indispensable. An alignment with mathematics is obvious, promising, and may even help solve some problems in mathematics education.
Mathematics and Programming All students must enroll in mathematics for most of their school years. Many of them already struggle with it. Does hitching programming to mathematics make any sense? Consider high school algebra. Bewildering exercises about flies flitting between trains do nothing to help students understand that algebra can actually be put to work. Algebra textbooks try hard to enliven their content with high-gloss color photographs, which we can immediately recognize as symptoms of failure, not a reprieve from it. In part, school algebra appears fundamentally dull to students because it appears to be all about numbers, which play at best a small role in the media-rich, interactive lives of students. We propose the paradigm of imaginative programming, which weds programming to al-
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