A Framework for K-12 CS Education [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

A Framework for K-12 CS Education [pdf]

k12csdotorg.files.wordpress.com

24 pointswallflower2 comments

Call me pessimistic, but I mostly expect myself, my children, and probably their children, to all be retired/dead before CS makes it into K-12 curriculum. That said, I really like this proposal. No language is named or suggested in the first few pages (and maybe the whole document)...as it should be, just like a proposal to teach reading and writing wouldn't specifically mention English and Hemingway. Rather, the focus is on teaching recognition and decomposition of computational problems, something that could feasibly be done by pen and paper (though it wouldn't be much fun, to be honest).

As someone who teaches programming in the digital humanities/journalism field...it's been hugely disconcerting to me how the word "algorithm" is used as a kind of de facto adjective to certify the correctness of a hypothesis/process, e.g. "I have a revolutionary algorithmic process that can tell when a politician is lying to you!"...In my opinion, it'd be a huge victory to be able to make the word and concept of "algorithm" so commonly understandable in mainstream thought, that the phrase, "You, using a pen and paper, can do anything a computer can" wouldn't have to be a concept stated explicitly in a publication written for business leaders and professionals.

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-paul-ford-what-is-cod...

I have reason to be optimistic. Over the last few weeks I've been attending "TeachMeets" [1], where teachers, in their own free time, meet up and share 7 minute talks about things they're trying in the classroom.

The number of teachers bring coding into the classroom is way higher than I expected. And not just senior school either: this teacher [2] is teaching coding in K-2 classrooms. So kids as young as 5 years old. And she's not the only one.

What is cool is also seeing some of them talk about exactly what you mention: teaching computational concepts without necessarily getting in to coding. Teachers are figuring out ways to do this, in games, activities, and hands-on projects that kids enjoy. Teaching students computational thinking, and then algorithms. Then when they start writing code, it makes a lot more sense.

Seeing teachers doing all this over the last month has left me feeling way more optimistic...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeachMeet [2]: https://twitter.com/GeekyAusTeacher

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