Today we had guest speak­ers Mary Davi­son and Andy David­son from the Seat­tle Pub­lic School Dis­trict come in to talk about their expe­ri­ences of get­ting Com­puter Sci­ence into the school cur­ricu­lum. Mary Davi­son is the head of the Seat­tle Pub­lic Schools Cur­rent Tech­no­log­i­cal Education(CTE) cur­ricu­lum and has worked for 4 years now on this pro­gram. Com­puter Sci­ence has been clas­si­fied into the CTE cur­ricu­lum, because it doesn’t fit with any other fields cur­rently. How­ever, as we dis­cussed in class, we could incor­po­rate Com­puter Sci­ence into a vari­ety of other fields such as Math or Sci­ence . The small cur­ricu­lum that started from Ingra­ham and Chief Stealth, has spread to 5 schools including:

• Ingraham(still going strong)
• Garfield(where Helene pre­vi­ously taught)
• Roosevelt(where our other guest speaker, Andy David­son, teaches)
• Nathan Hale(where they have the “robot­ics” lab in sci­ence class using Lego Mind­storms and other CS courses)
• Cleveland(where they recently changed into a Biotech/Engineering school)

The CTE cur­ricu­lum is also used in Eck­stein Mid­dle School and is plan­ning to be added to the Bal­lard High School cur­ricu­lum in the com­ing year.

Our guest speak­ers also touched on many of the dif­fi­cul­ties that occur when try­ing to add a new cur­ricu­lum to a school. The most impor­tant part is the prin­ci­pal, the change to the school cur­ricu­lum will depend on if the prin­ci­pal is will­ing to embrace it or not. Sev­eral rules can be made from higher author­ity, but the prin­ci­pals of each school have the final say on how these rules will be imple­mented and taught to the stu­dents. Vol­un­teers like our­selves can help stu­dents get expo­sure to poten­tial role mod­els but as teacher Andy David­son pointed out: “The only way you can really make an impact on the stu­dents is if you’re there with them every­day, not one hour a week.” This way you can do both parts of teaching:

1. half on inspir­ing learn­ing and get­ting stu­dents to love the mate­r­ial (role model)
2. other half on teach­ing the con­cepts and top­ics that inter­est the students

Goals for Com­puter Sci­ence edu­ca­tion and the Seat­tle Pub­lic Schools in the future are to get the CTE cur­ricu­lum into all their high schools and mid­dle schools and make sure that all stu­dents are “career and col­lege ready”.