Communications of the ACM

guidance for the national curriculum
says, “A high-quality computing educa-
tion equips pupils to use computational
thinking and creativity to understand
and change the world.”
In addition, the BBC in partnership
with Microsoft and other companies
funded the design and distribution of
the BBC micro:bit (https://www.micro-
bit.co.uk/). One million of these pro-
grammable devices were distributed
free earlier this year (March 2016), one
for every 11–12-year-old (Year 7) student
in the U.K., along with their teachers.
Microsoft Research contributed to the
design and testing of the device, and the
MSR Labs Touch Develop team provid-
ed a programming language and plat-
form for the BBC micro:bit, as well as
teaching materials.

Second, code.org is a nonprofit organization, started in 2013, dedicated to the mission of providing access to computer science education to all. Microsoft, along with hundreds of other corporate and organizational partners, helps sponsor the activities of code.org.

Third, internationally there is a groundswell of interest in teaching computer science at the K– 12 level. I know of efforts in Australia, Israel, Singapore, and South Korea. China is likely to make a push soon, too.

Computer Science for All

Most gratifying to me is President Barack Obama’s pledge to provide $4 billion in funding for computer science education in U.S. schools as part of the Computer Science for All Initiative ( http://1.usa.gov/21u4mxK) he announced on Jan. 30. That initiative includes $120 million from the National Science Foundation, which will be used to train as many as 9,000 more high school teachers to teach computer science and integrate computational thinking into their curriculum. This push for all students to learn computer science comes partly from market demand for workers skilled in computing from all sectors, not just information technology. We see this at Microsoft, too; our enterprise customers in all sectors are coming to Microsoft because they need more computing expertise.

Practical challenges and research op-
portunities remain. The main practical
challenge is that we do not have enough
K– 12 teachers trained to teach comput-
er science to K– 12 students. I am opti-
mistic that, over time, we will solve this.
There also are interesting research
questions I would encourage computer
scientists to pursue, working with the
cognitive and learning sciences commu-
nities. First, what computer science con-
cepts should be taught when, and how?

Consider an analogy to mathematics. We teach numbers to 5-year-olds, algebra to 12-year-olds, and calculus to 18-year-olds. We have somehow figured out the progression of concepts to teach in mathematics, where learning one new concept builds on understanding the previous concept, and where the progression reflects the progression of mathematical sophistication of a child as he or she matures.

What is that progression in computer science? For example, when is it best to teach recursion? Children learn to solve the Towers of Hanoi puzzle (for small n), and in history class we teach “divide and conquer” as a strategy for winning battles. But is the general concept better taught in high school? We teach long division to 9-year-olds in 4th grade, but we never utter the word “ algorithm.” And yet the way it is taught, long division is just an algorithm. Is teaching the general concept of an algorithm too soon for a 4th grader? More deeply, are there concepts in computing that are innate and do not need to be formally learned?

Second, we need to understand how best to use computing technology in the classroom. Throwing computers in the classroom is not the most effective way to teach computer science concepts. How can we use technology to enhance the learning and reinforce the understanding of computer science concepts? How can we use technology to measure progress, learning outcomes, and retention over time? How can we use technology to personalize the learning for individual learners, as each of us learns at a different pace and has different cognitive abilities?

We have made tremendous progress in injecting computational thinking into research and education of all fields in the last 10 years. We still have a ways to go, but fortunately, academia, industry and government forces are aligned toward realizing the vision of making computational thinking commonplace.

Dan Stanzione SC16 Expands Focus on HPC Provider Community, Practitioners http://bit.ly/1REKjKl April 6, 2016

If you are in HPC (high-performance computing) or a related field, you know SC16 ( http://sc16.supercomputing.org/) as the leading international conference for high-performance computing, networking, storage, and analysis. For 28 years, SC has served as the conference of record in the supercomputing community for presenting the results of groundbreaking new research, getting the training needed to advance your career, and discovering what is new in the marketplace.

SC16 marks the beginning of a multi-
year emphasis designed to advance the
state of the practice in the HPC commu-
nity by providing a track for profession-
als driving innovation and development
in designing, building, and operating
the world’s largest supercomputers,
along with the system and application
software that make them run effectively.
We call this the “State of the Practice.”
If you are part of the SC community
but have not always felt SC was the right
venue to showcase your contributions to
the HPC body of knowledge, we want to
encourage you to submit to the techni-
cal program on the reinvigorated “State
of the Practice” track.

Check the important dates page ( http://bit.ly/1WaLX9j) for upcoming submission deadlines.

Jeannette M. Wing is corporate vice president at Microsoft Research. Dan Stanzione is Executive Director of the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin and serves as co-chair of the “State of the Practice” track at SC16.