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Comment by bob_loblaw | Hacker News Reader

A better approach is that taken by the Bootstrap World curriculum (http://www.bootstrapworld.org/). They align their curriculum around algebra. That way you don't have to find time to make a CS class in an already busy schedule. Bootstrap trains Math teachers to use the curriculum. Again, the school doesn't have to hire a CS teacher. The program is entirely online, so the district IT departments don't have to approve/install any software. They are also moving into physics and data science to expand student exposure to programming.

Bottom line, putting pressure on schools to find time and money for a discrete CS offering is challenging. I tend to think of programming as a tool; don't teach programming for the sake of programming, but as a tool to enhance other subjects.

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> Bootstrap trains Math teachers to use the curriculum. Again, the school doesn't have to hire a CS teacher.

My school decided to have random (STEM, mostly math) teachers teach computer science classes. It did not go well–not because the teachers were bad at teaching, per se, but because they had not had enough training. It turns out that you can't really learn to teach Java over the summer.

Bootstrap does not promise that these math teachers are now proficient coders, but they do walk the teachers through the entire curriculum from start to finish. The teachers act as the students so they get a feeling of what is being asked of the kids. This curriculum is like 25 hours long. Most math teachers use one day a week to work on coding. So I wouldn't call this program CS in the classic sense. Rather it is a brief introduction to coding and how it relates to algebra.

That's ok as long as it's understood that these teachers aren't teaching a standard computer science class. But I'm not particularly optimistic that school administrators will understand the difference.

It has been my experience that school officials will offer some coding if that is what parents want. Coding, programming, and CS are used so interchangeably that often meaning is lost. So the bare minimum of coding classes will be presented as this massive shift toward STEM/CS, and parents will go along with it.

Again, that's ok as long as schools don't try to reuse these teachers to teach actual computer science courses later "because they already know some coding".

My high school had the shop teacher (who was actually a very sharp guy) teach programming. It was actually billed as programming, not CS. We learned C++ (maybe not the best choice, but this was ~1999), and he basically learned whatever he was teaching a few weeks ahead of us. Most of the students were highly motivated, so most learned a lot even if the teacher couldn't give us all the answers.

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