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fascinating mazes suitable for exploration by researchers and hackers, but dispatch the average student in horror after just a few interactions.

The ideal language and the IDE for imaginative programming are still to be designed. If we develop them, educational stakeholders will see how programming provides students with an interactive, engaging medium for studying and exploring mathematics. Thus, it may just turn computing into an indispensable subject for all students, right up there with the other three Rs.

Crossroads

Our community is at a crossroads when it comes to tackling our educational needs. We can continue to search for more saviors and hope that somehow, somewhere computing will receive the respect it deserves. Or we can try to help ourselves and others by turning a piece of the core school curriculum into something that students find appealing and even exciting. Our proposal is just one way of moving in this direction. We don’t know whether it will succeed at large scales; and we can’t know yet what else our community will discover once we start the search. What we do know is that the savior-driven ways have had their chance for many years, and they have failed.

Acknowledgments

We thank Robby Findler and Matthew Flatt for their partnership over these dozen years. Kathi Fisler helped hone our thoughts in this essay. Emmanuel Schanzer turned our ideas into the Bootstrap middle school curriculum, and his efforts have greatly influenced our thinking.

 

References

1. College Board. AP: Exam Grades: Summary Reports: 2007; http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/ ap/exgrd_sum/ 2007.html.

2. College Board. Important Announcement about AP Computer Science AB: Important Change for the 2009–2010 Academic Year; http://apcentral. collegeboard.com/apc/public/courses/teachers_ corner/ 195948.html.

3. USACM. AP Computer Science is NOT Going

Away; http://usacm.acm.org/usacm/weblog/index. php?p=593.

Matthias Felleisen ( matthias@ccs.neu.edu) is Trustee Professor in the College of Computer Science at Northeastern University in Boston, MA.

Shriram Krishnamurthi ( sk@cs.brown.edu) is an associate professor of computer science at Brown University in Providence, RI.

Copyright held by author.