[A transcript of the SIGCSE 2010 conference: Table of Contents]
The title of this panel looked awfully interesting, so I headed off to it despite not knowing just what it was about. It didn't occur to me until I saw the set of speakers at the table that it would be about an AP course! As I have written before, I don't deal much with AP, though most of my SIGCSE colleagues do. This session turned out to be a good way to spend ninety minutes, both as a window into some of the conference buzz and as a way to see what may be coming down the road in K-12 computer science in a few years. What's up? A large and influential committee of folks from high schools, universities, and groups such as the ACM and NSF are designing a new course. It is intended as an alternative to the traditional CS1 course, not as a replacement. Rather than starting with programming or mathematics as the foundation, of the the course, the committee is first identifying a set of principles of computing and then designing a course to teach these principles. Panel leader Owen Astrachan said that the are engineering a course, given the national scale of the project and the complexity of creating something that works at lots of schools and for lots of students. Later, I hope to discuss the seven big ideas and the seven essential practices of computational thinking that serve as the foundation for this course, but for now you should read them for yourself. At first blush, they seem like a reasonable effort to delineate what computing means in the world and thus what high school graduates these days should know about the technology that circumscribes their lives. They emphasize creativity, innovation, and connections across disciplines, all of which can be lost when we first teach students a programming language and whip out "Hello, World" and the Towers of Hanoi. Universities have to be involved in the design and promotion of this new course because it is intended for advanced placement, and that mean that it must earn college credit. Why does the AP angle matter? Right now, because it is the only high school CS course that counts at most universities. It turns out that advanced placement into a major matters less to many parents and HS students than the fact that the course carries university credit. Placement is the #1 reason that HS students take AP courses, but university credit is not too far behind. For this reason, any new high school CS course that does not offer college credit will be hard to sell to any K-12 school district. (This is especially true in a context where even the existing AP CS is taught in only 7% of our high schools.) That's not too high a hurdle. At the university level, it is much easier to have an AP course approved for university or even major elective credit than it is to have a course approved for advanced placement in the major. So the panel encouraged university profs in the audience to do what they can at their institutions to prepare the way. Someone on the panel may have mentioned the possibility of having a principles-based CS AP course count as a general education course. At my school we were successful a couple of years ago at having a CS course on simulation and modeling added as one of the courses that satisfies the "quantitative reasoning" requirement in our Liberal Arts Core. I wonder how successful we could be at having a course like the new course under development count for LAC credit. Given the current climate around our core, I doubt we could get a high school AP course to count, because it would not be a part of the shared experience our students have at the university. The most surprising part of this panel was the vibe in the room. Proposals such as this one that tinker with the introductory course in CS usually draw a fair amount of skepticism and outright opposition. This one did not. The crowd seemed quite accepting, even when the panel turned its message into one of advocacy. They encouraged audience members to become advocates for this course and for AP CS more generally at their schools. They asked us not to tear down these efforts, but to join in and help make the course better. Finally, they asked us to join the College Board, the CS Teachers Association, and the ACM in presenting a united front to our universities, high schools, and state governments about the importance and role of computing in the K-12 curriculum. The audience seemed as if it was already on board. In closing, there were two memorable quotes from the panel. First, Jan Cuny, currently a program officer for CISE at the National Science Foundation, addressed concern that all the talk these days about the "STEM disciplines" often leaves computing out of the explicit discussion:There is a C in STEM. Nothing will happen in the S, the T, the E, or the M without the C.I've been telling everyone at my university this for the last several years, and most are open to the broadening of the term when they are confronted with this truth. Second, the front-runner for syllogism of the year is this gem from Owen Astrachan. Someone in the audience asked, "If this new course is not CS1, then is it CS0?" (CS0 is a common moniker for university courses taken by non-majors before they dive into the CS major-focused CS1 course.) Thus spake Owen:
This course comes before CS1.
0 is the only number less than 1.
Therefore, this course is CS0.
This was only half of Owen's answer, but it was
the half that made me laugh.
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