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Sonya Barry's BlogWhat do we do about Computer Science education?Posted by sonyabarry on April 09, 2008 at 02:08 PM | Comments (3)Chris's blog about Cay's blog on Monday about the sad state of Computer Science education was really timely for me. I commented that day, but I have a lot more to say on the topic. I'm an engineer at Sun, but I've also been teaching Computer Science at a middle school for the past four years, and my masters thesis project was an intro to programming curriculum for 8th graders, using Java. (It was for an interdisciplinary degree - Computer Science with emphasis in Education.) So this issue is really something I think about all the time. 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? Most schools still don't have a good computer science lab, and if they do, they aren't going to let a total stranger come in and install their stuff on it. More importantly, a volunteer is not going to want to spend their time installing their stuff on it and troubleshooting while kids are waiting around for the volunteer to teach them something. It's a recipe for disaster. An Asus eee can run Java just fine, and at 40 pounds total, 20 of them could fit in a rolling carry on bag. Is this a steep price for entry? Certainly, but it's not unreasonable and those machines could each be used for several hundred classes. Why a mentor program? Teaching is not easy. My first few months in a classroom were pure unadulterated hell. At that point I had no training. I hadn't spoken to a human being under the age of sixteen since I was in high school myself. I had no idea what my students were capable of. I also had no idea what I was capable of. I stuck it out because I had to - I was doing this part time as I started grad school and I didn't have a whole lot of choices if I wanted to pay my mortgage without flipping burgers professionally while I was in school. I would have been a much better teacher out of the gate if I had been able to sit and watch somebody else teach what I needed to teach, and then somebody to give me feedback in my first few weeks. So this is what I think we ought to do - have an engineer who is interested in teaching pair up with somebody who has been doing it for a while. At first they watch, then they help, and finally they teach and get constructive criticism from their mentor-teacher. With a program like this in place we could be consistent in both quality and tone. Will I get my wish? I have absolutely no idea. At the end of this school year, I won't be renewing my contract to teach next year. I am sad to be leaving, because I love what I do in my classroom and I will miss the kids, but I need to focus on my "real" career for a while. I hope Sun can get something like this off the ground, because it would be great to be able to continue to teach without giving up all of my free time to do it. Next time: Which kids should we be designing curricula and after school programs for, and what should we teach them? Bookmark blog post:  del.icio.us  Digg  DZone  Furl  Reddit
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