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Another Step Taken in the Direction of Quality K-12 Computer Science Education

Submitted by: Tom Rogers on Jan 06, 2011 at 1:43 am Tagged with: Computer Science, Computers, K-12 education Source: Computer Science Teachers Association, SC Chapter

We finally did it: thanks to the efforts of Dr. Duncan Buell at USC and the backing of the Consortium for Enterprise Systems Management, we started a chapter of the Computer Science Teacher’s Association (CSTA) in South Carolina, and for November had the highest number of new members in the nation. It’s yet another step in the direction of South Carolina becoming a leader in K-12 computer science education.

So, why is becoming a leader significant? I could mention computing's growth rate of professional jobs: add up all the projected growth in scientist, statistician, mathematician, and engineering jobs from 2008 to 2016 forecast by the Occupational Outlook Handbook, throw in physicians and surgeons and the anticipated growth in professional level computing jobs exceeds it by 80 % (see http://www.intuitor.com/student/ComputerMathJobDegrees.htm ). However, the real question is what's driving this growth?

For a start, in the 21st century virtually every form of entertainment, communication, and information will be significantly impacted by computers and their associated networks. Smart-phones are a prime example: a single hand-held device that can deliver news reports, GPS information, music, TV shows, movies, e-mail, and telephone communication. The device itself is a computer.

For business and manufacturing the situation is similar. While many expect manufacturing to continue going overseas, some may actually return. A product from Asia can spend weeks in transit--time its working capital isn't making money. Combine computer aided design (CAD), computer aided manufacturing (CAM), and advanced business information systems with regional manufacturing, the product can potentially be sold before it's manufactured with its design modified to meet a customer's exact demands, an attractive price, and a total delivery time measured in days. Certainly Amazon.com has demonstrated that customers are willing to wait a few days to receive their product given a good price and a larger than normal selection.

Traditional manufacturing jobs, however, will not be returning. The manufacturing job of the future will require workers who can interact with and trouble shoot computerized systems in fairly sophisticated ways. Although the workers themselves may not be directly designing software, anyone who has ever struggled with bugs in a software product knows that users are part of the software debugging, evaluation, and feedback system. Workers who know how to use software and how to communicate with software developers will be a plus.

The Therac-25 dramatically illustrates this point. The machine was computer controlled and designed to deliver precise radiation doses to cancer patients. Unfortunately, due to software bugs it delivered excessive doses resulting in a number of serious injuries and fatalities due to radiation burns. The problem went uncorrected for about 18 months in spite of patient injuries and complaints. Apparently, the idea that a computer-controlled machine could make a mistake must have seemed outrageous.

We can only ponder, but perhaps the Therac-25 software issue would have been resolved earlier if its operators had some understanding of software development or had ever designed and debugged a program of their own. Certainly, in the future such mistakes would be less likely to occur if the Therac-25 incident were widely studied.

A single high school computer science class is often the only formal computer training, if any, medical professionals receive, even though they're increasingly dependent on computers. It's important to make sure that this class (required for high school graduation in South Carolina) and the other earlier computing classes leading up to it are high quality. The new CSTA chapter is a step in that direction. It gives like-minded teachers a chance to share ideas and gives university professors, college instructors, and industry representatives a way to feed information back into the K-12 system.

According to Randi Weingarten President of the American Federation of Teachers “...our schools are still organized for the industrial age rather than the knowledge economy (Newsweek Dec 27, 2010).” Any step toward improving K-12 computer science education has to be a step in the direction of correcting this situation.