It seems that Stuart’s paper con­cern­ing the pow­er­house ques­tions brings up a salient ques­tion that has been cen­tral to our dis­cus­sion over this quar­ter: If there are cer­tain men­tal mod­els that cor­re­late to suc­cess in a com­puter sci­ence pro­gram, how do we uti­lize this data to help develop a work­ing cur­ricu­lum for k – 12 stu­dents so that by the time they reach an AP course or intro­duc­tory col­lege course they will be able to suc­ceed?  I think this, by and large, dri­ves all of the dis­cus­sions that we’ve had con­cern­ing cur­rent efforts to get a toe hold in Wash­ing­ton state schools by carv­ing out a role for Com­puter Sci­ence that will, one day, change into some­thing that would be on par with the other major dis­ci­plines (i.e. Math, Eng­lish, Sci­ence, etc…).

I believe, like many in our group, that it is ben­e­fi­cial for any­one who stud­ies com­puter sci­ence, win, lose, or draw, and by study, I mean any seri­ous effort to under­stand the mate­r­ial and inte­grate it into their cur­rent under­stand­ing of the world.  The abstract think­ing that is required to be suc­cess­ful in a CS course is one that crosses the bound­aries between dis­ci­plines and allows an indi­vid­ual to be able to under­stand and break down a prob­lem into man­age­able bits, in order that progress can be made and even­tu­ally a solu­tion obtained.

Now, it is given that there will be those, who don’t choose to put in the time or sadly even those who can’t put in the time, that will fail the course and find that the sub­ject leaves a bad taste in their mouths.  But there are also those who do put in the work and try to under­stand what is being explained to them, and yet still walk away with­out, in the case of UW’s 14x series, under­stand­ing the fun­da­men­tals of pro­gram­ming and thus, for most, close the doors on com­puter sci­ence as a whole.  I think that these are the indi­vid­u­als that we should be think­ing about when­ever we are plan­ning a cri­te­rion for k-12.  What we ought to be ask­ing our­selves is: how do we help stu­dents to be able to cre­ate the men­tal mod­els that will allow them to be able to grasp in a rea­son­able amount of time an inte­gral idea in CS such as an assign­ment by means of an assertion?

I think that the first step is to estab­lish any stand-alone sub­jects that focus on com­pu­ta­tional think­ing as early as pos­si­ble.  I think that the best way to see the results of train­ing minds to think­ing abstractly and algo­rith­mi­cally will come from begin­ning the process early.  By, not only, uti­liz­ing some of the fun activ­i­ties that we’ve seen through CS Unplugged, but also by mak­ing at clear as pos­si­ble to the indi­vid­u­als that they are think­ing and act­ing like com­put­ers; that they are work­ing like a com­puter sci­en­tist; that they are prac­tic­ing a skill that will ben­e­fit them through­out the course of their lives (note that I don’t think that I could make it as clear as pos­si­ble to a kindergartener).

As they progress through their edu­ca­tion, then they are con­tin­u­ously brought back to com­pu­ta­tional meth­ods and the rea­sons why they are impor­tant and over time, and with clear strate­gies for rein­forc­ing this thought process through­out a child’s edu­ca­tion, I believe that we would see an uptick in the amount of indi­vid­u­als, who when given an expres­sion such as b:=( b = false), they will have had suf­fi­cient expe­ri­ence with con­cepts sim­i­lar to this, that will allow them to under­stand the con­cepts that under­lie it.  I think this should be the focus and I don’t think that imple­ment­ing any meth­ods in cur­rent AP or intro­duc­tory col­lege CS courses will change the cur­rent trends in understanding.

I know this is all a bit “hand-wavy” and it’s easy for me to expound my views when they aren’t backed up by any hard method­olo­gies or imple­men­ta­tions, and that’s cor­rect, it was pretty easy.  But I will say this (like the dodge?), I think that more impor­tant than any cur­ricu­lum that can be set down is the teach­ers that impart the infor­ma­tion to their stu­dents, using meth­ods will be under­stood by as many as their stu­dents as they can man­age.  I don’t know if any­one will argue that there is no value high enough that can be placed upon a teacher who can get stu­dents to grasp com­plex ideas in a man­ner that allows them to under­stand it almost seam­lessly.  I can’t describe how you train some­one to do this, but I know that most of us have had the ben­e­fit of being taught by such a one.  So, when look­ing over the arti­cles that were ref­er­enced in Stuart’s arti­cle and listed on the Educ 401 web­page, I ran into a post on secretgeek.net con­cern­ing the paper “The Camel Has Two Humps” by S. Dehnadi and R. Bor­nat ([4] in Stuart’s sources) that claims to be the response of Alan Kay in regards to this con­tro­ver­sial paper (these are the guys who claimed that they could 100% accu­rately pre­dict who would suc­ceed at and who would fail at com­puter pro­gram­ming, using indi­ca­tor ques­tions sim­i­lar to Stuart’s pow­er­house ques­tions).  I was unable to ver­ify if it truly was Alan Kay, but regard­less it is a very well-thought and enlight­en­ing post and I have linked it here and I think it’s a ben­e­fi­cial read, so check it out! EOM.