Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM
The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org,
features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM
community. In each issue of Communications, we’ll publish
selected posts or excerpts.
doesn’t mean we make it easier to become a doctor!” That made sense to
me, but then I heard others push the
metaphor a bit. Adding more nurses and
more physician assistants does improve
quality of care, and it is less expensive to
have more of these health care providers
than to produce enough doctors.
Only a few U.S. states offer CS teacher initial certification, which requires
a choice to become a CS teacher while
still an undergraduate and take years
of classes. Georgia and California, like
several other states, offer an add-on
certification (“endorsement”) teachers can earn after gaining a certification in something else. An endorsement typically still requires multiple
semester-long courses. Utah has one
of the most innovative CS teacher add-on
certification schemes, with three levels:
an initial level that requires only some
summer professional development,
and two further levels requiring post-secondary courses.
Leigh Ann DeLyser hosted a great ses-
sion about CSNYC and the new CS for
All Consortium. CSNYC is charged with
implementing Mayor Bill de Blasio’s ini-
tiative to make CS education available to
all students in all grades in all New York
City schools by 2025. DeLyser told us CS-
NYC is defining the Mayor’s initiative as
a school-based mandate. Even 10 years
and $81 million isn’t enough to provide
certified, full-time CS teachers in every
school so every student gets a CS course.
Rather, every school must offer to every student in every grade a high-quality
CS learning experience. Maybe that’s a
full course, like the BJC CS Principles
curriculum now in NYC schools. Alternatively, it might be a Bootstrap unit in
an algebra class, or a CT STEM activity
that uses StarLogo to achieve NGSS science learning goals. It’s a reasonable incremental approach towards CS for All.
New Hampshire, one of the newest
ECEP states, is exploring micro-certifi-cations. Rather than getting a certification as a CS teacher, a mathematics or
science teacher might get a micro-cer-tification to demonstrate proficiency in
using a computer science approach in
their teaching. There might be micro-certificates in Bootstrap, CT STEM, or
Project GUTS for middle school science.
We want a future where computer
science is taught by certified teachers
and is as universally available as mathematics and science classes are today
in most U.S. high schools. That’s the vision Briana Morrison and I wrote about
in CACM ( http://bit.ly/2iIFeEc). Along
the way, we need ways of growing CS
education where we develop teachers
who know about and teach computer
science, even if not full-time, certified
CS teachers.
Mark Guzdial
Taking Incremental
Steps Toward CS
for All
http://bit.ly/2gCFpSM
November 28, 2016
At the end of October, the Expanding
Computing Education Pathways (ECEP)
alliance organized a summit with the
White House Office of Science and
Technology Policy (OSTP) on state implementation of the President’s CS for
All initiative. You can see the agenda at
http://bit.ly/2ifPVw Y and a press release
on the two days of meetings at http://bit.
ly/2iMvyek. I learned a lot at those meetings; one insight I gained was that the
CS for All initiative will succeed in increments. U.S. states are developing novel,
incremental approaches to CS for All.
The event’s second day was focused
on teams from the 16 states and Puerto
Rico in the ECEP Alliance. At a session
on teacher certifications, some of the attendees were concerned with what they
saw as lowering standards in order to
get more certified teachers. “We have a
shortage of doctors in rural areas. That
The Slow Evolution
of CS for All,
the Beauty of Programs
Mark Guzdial considers the steps needed to reach the goal of CS for All,
while Robin K. Hill ponders the aesthetics of programming.
DOI: 10.1145/3037383 http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm