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By Tom Rogers, Southside High School: Lessons from Avatar on Computer Science Careers

Submitted by: Tom Rogers on Jan 26, 2010 at 5:42 am Tagged with: K-12 education Source: Southside High School

I recently saw Avatar and came away not only bedazzled, but with a glimpse of the future. I'm not talking about the future of space exploration or the future predicted by cheesy Hollywood environmentalism, I'm referring to the fact that major motion pictures have now become major works of computer science. Although Avatar's script was written in 1994 it took about a decade to develop the technology for making the movie. Over a thousand people worked on Avatar often performing sophisticated computer tasks. Even the artists had to be computer savvy. Computer science has now become not just an element of technology but an elemental force behind the fabric of our culture.

Will we one day travel to a habitable moon like Pandora in the Alpha Centuri star system as depicted in Avatar? Who knows? Yale University scientists led by astronomer Debra Fischer are currently making a five-year study of Alpha Centauri using a 1.5-meter telescope to look for evidence of planets. Why? Because a computer simulation created by Greg Laughlin, a 41-year-old theoretical astrophysicist at the University of California indicated there's a good chance of finding an Earth-sized planet there at the right distance from the star to be habitable.

As for our environmental future, we don't have to mine unobtainium on Pandora to fix it. Many of the problems can be solved by transitioning to renewable energy such as wind-generated electrical power and here the United States is potentially the equivalent of OPEC. No other country can match it in potential for recoverable wind energy. Indeed since the year 2000 the U.S. has been adding wind generated electrical capacity at an exponential rate, doubling roughly every three years. Within a decade wind power will rank among the country's major energy sources.

Yet, to take full advantage of its wind resources, the U.S. will also need to build a smart transmission and distribution network to transport the electricity from where the wind is blowing to where the energy is needed. Again, computer science will be a major element. The "smart" in smart grid will come from computer science, created and maintained by numerous computer professionals.

We won't be using DNA technology to create ten foot tall blue guys of the type described in Avatar, but within less than a decade, just about anyone in America will be able to obtain a complete genome of their very own DNA. The potential for customized drugs and preventative medicine are mind boggling. It will be up to the new disciple of bioinformatics, a mixture of genetics and computer science, to analyze and catalog the resulting plethora of new data. In fact, just about every developing technology or entrepreneurial venture, not just genetic and energy related, will have a computer science component. If we want to be key players in the new technologies we've got to stay on top in computer science.

Go to the Occupational Outlook Handbook, add up all the new professional level computer related jobs projected for 2016. Next add up all the projected new life science, physical science, engineering, mathematician, and statistician jobs and you'll find that the projected new computer related jobs outnumber the others by a factor of 3.8. Ask computer science professors in South Carolina if a significant number of their computer science majors have had any previous educational background in computer science or written a single computer program prior to college and they will likely say no.

So, is South Carolina's K-12 education system rising to the task of training our future computer science savvy workforce? Well maybe. The state has taken a very progressive first step by requiring a year of computer science for high school graduation but at present, the requirement is typically met by a keyboarding class and a class focused on common applications from a package such as Microsoft Office. Yes, this is important training, but is ability to use the 125+ year old QWERTY keyboard for data entry along with some common applications enough for equipping a 21st century workforce to meet the computer science challenges it will face? As for advance students, ten times more take AP Calculus than take AP Computer Science. Again, is this going to build a workforce with 21st century skills?

If a teacher needs to solve a computer problem, he or she will most likely ask a student for help. Through a process of self learning students often know more about computers than their teachers. This illustrates two points about K-12 computer science: first, a significant population of students are not being challenged and second, relatively few teachers know how to do so. Both problems need to be addressed.

Ramping up K-12 computer science curriculum to meet 21st century demands, building the cadre of qualified teachers required to enable it, and encouraging students to take these courses needs to be given a high priority if South Carolina is going to build the kind of high quality work force it needs for a vibrant 21st century economy. Hopefully the day will come when no student, whether they become computer science majors or not, will go to college without having written a computer program.