New thinking for educational challenges

Back in Monday's editor's blog, I pointed over to Cay's blog about the College Board dropping the Advanced Placement Computer Science AB course and some of the trends behind it. This development has a lot of people talking (take a look at Monday's comments for some interesting thoughts), including a couple of our own bloggers.

java.net intern / Sun engineer / middle school teacher Sonya Barry asks What do we do about Computer Science education? Her Master's thesis project was an intro to Java programming for eighth graders, so she knows this field well. She writes:

In the past few weeks I've met with someone from Sun's Global Citizenship Initiative. He's working on proposals to get a volunteer program set up so Sun's engineers can go out with the company's support and teach a CS curriculum either as part of a class or an after school program. He wanted to get some opinions from me about it, since I'm actually teaching it, and he also came in to my classroom on Monday morning to observe.

So what would I do if I had all the time and money to do this? My suggestions were to come up with some kind of portable classroom and to have a fairly rigorous mentor program for teaching engineers how to teach.

Why a portable classroom? Why mentoring? She's got a good case for each, so go check out the details.

Meanwhile, Juan Carlos Herrera discusses the use of Java in international education, in Project "Hello Buddy/Hola Amigo":

The project "Hello Buddy/Hola Amigo" is a Sun Microsystems' volunteers' initiative to reduce the digital divide. The digital divide is the gap between people that has resources and knowledge to get access to digital and information technology from people who don't. The source of digital divide came from social, economical, and cultural issues. Some technology (specially if come from the open-source world) can help to overcome the digital divide since open-source software does not have cost for using and also can be distributed freely, countries with with broader digital can use for free.

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The project itself is based on Wonderland, a Sun's open-source project to create virtual 3D world. Wonderland gives us the platform to build a live virtual and 3D classroom where children of different countries can meet and share in a virtual space for fun...and learn. At the same time we can take advantage of this tool to teach and educate children, if we have technology that provides a broadband connection, audio, and publishing tools, we can develop and attend classes closer to a real world. Finally the project will have a children driven approach, in fact both English and Spanish speakers will teach each other their native language.