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”.

This week, we wrapped up our dis­cus­sion from last week on intro­duc­tory pro­gram­ming lan­guages (Scratch, WeScheme, Boos­t­rap, etc.) and I brought in one of the many ideas that peo­ple in the K-12 com­mu­nity have to get younger kids into the realm of Com­puter Sci­ence: Lego Mind­storms. Above is the pro­gram­ming envi­ron­ment for the Lego Mind­storms robot and is very sim­i­lar to the envi­ron­ment that we see in Scratch, with its drag-and-drop menus. I believe that this makes it eas­ier for peo­ple who are just learn­ing to pro­gram to have some­thing phys­i­cal that can respond to the move­ments that you pro­gram it to do. This pro­gram is one of the orig­i­nal step-by-step pro­grams that the default sys­tem can walk first-time users through and even allow a sam­ple pro­gram to be down­loaded to the NXT(motherboard) so users can see the robot’s reac­tion to the given move­ments first-hand.

Another perk about the Lego Mind­storms approach to intro­duce stu­dents into com­puter sci­ence is that the robot-building and pro­gram­ming are sep­a­rated into dif­fer­ent dif­fi­culty lev­els for the user to choose. This makes it eas­ier for teach­ers to teach this mate­r­ial to stu­dents and to allow the stu­dents to go at their own pace. Those who have more expe­ri­ence with pro­gram­ming and build­ing can go ahead to the higher level chal­lenges while other stu­dents can start at the begin­ning, all at their own pace. In my high school sci­ence class, we used these Lego Mind­storms as a “robot­ics” lab where stu­dents would be split into sev­eral teams and have a 3-week period to cre­ate a robot that pushed empty film can­is­ters into a marked bound­ary. This cre­ated a com­pet­i­tive atmos­phere where each team wanted to do bet­ter than the rest, which allowed cre­ative designs and pro­grams that would grab the most film can­is­ters as pos­si­ble. I believe this same tech­nique could be used through­out all the Seat­tle Pub­lic Schools and that instead of try­ing to imple­ment a brand new course through­out all schools, we should start small and have a “robot­ics” lab in all sci­ence courses to give stu­dents a feel to Com­puter Sci­ence. Once stu­dents are inter­ested in the field, we can then push to get Com­puter Sci­ence teach­ers in every school so that stu­dents can pur­sue their inter­ests and…if they aren’t inter­ested in Com­puter Sci­ence, at least they have some expe­ri­ence with it and know what it is.