Education | DOI: 10.1145/1859204.1859213
Marina Krakovsky
CSEdWeek Expands
its Reach
The second Computer Science Education Week is showing students,
parents, and educators why computer science is important.
To GradUate FroM the Ad- vanced Math and Science Academy, a charter school for grades 6–12 in Marl- borough, MA, every high-school student must take at least
three years of computer science. However, the public school’s inclusion of
computer science alongside math,
English, and other core subjects is
a remarkable exception in the U.S.,
where only one in five states counts
computer science classes toward any
kind of graduation requirement. In
fact, even as most occupations are
increasingly dependent on computing, the number of computer science
courses in the U.S. has decreased in
the past five years, according to
Running on Empty: The Failure to Teach
K– 12 Computer Science in the Digital
Age, a new report from ACM and the
Computer Science Teachers Association. The report ( http://www.acm.org/
runningonempty/) also notes that
when schools offer a computer science course, it is usually an elective;
moreover, much of what passes for
high-school computer science instruction is actually about information technology (IT) literacy rather
than algorithm design, programming, or computational thinking.
“Computing underpins everything,
yet two-thirds of states have few learn-
ing standards in the fundamentals
of computer science,” says ACM CEO
John White. In addition to its efforts
at state and federal levels, ACM is
leading the second Computer Science
Education Week (CSEdWeek), which
is aimed directly at students, teach-
ers, parents, and counselors this year.
Held Dec. 5–11 and officially recog-
nized by a Congressional resolution,
CSEd Week is spreading the message
that computer science is a crucial part
of a 21st century education—regard-
less of your future career.
Marina Krakovsky is a San Francisco area-based
journalist and co-author of Secrets of the Moneylab: How
Behavioral Economics Can Improve Your Business.
