Question about CS education in high schools | Hacker News Reader

Question about CS education in high schools

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I'm trying to find information for a research project on high school technology and computer science education, with special interest in the history of computers and technology in classrooms and what skills or concepts are being taught (there's a huge difference between learning keyboarding and learning to code!).

I'd trying to find resources on that history, but have few ideas about where to start. Anybody have ideas?

I'd also appreciate any anecdotes of your own experiences with secondary comp sci education, in my own experience I was taught how to type in middle school and CS wasn't offered in my high school.

Thanks!

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My school offered a computer class that was effectively just a typing class in both middle school and high school.

We also had available to us a Pascal course, a C++ course, and an AP Comp Sci (at the time it was still C++).

The core curriculum never got into anything too sophisticated (the AP final project was the most ambitious thing most people worked on) but the teacher allowed those who were comfortable to explore other areas on the side. The most valuable part of the class, in my opinion, was the teachers approach. She would use an overhead projector and write out memory allocations and then show step by step how different allocations were changing as you went through a program. This step by step approach was extremely helpful when trying to internalize the nature of variables, how sort algorithms worked, etc.

I could possibly get you in touch with my old HS teacher, my email is in my profile.

Here is a rule sheet for a northern California schools' programming contest from May 1982 - this was back in the day when it was mainly Apple, Commodore PET, and TRS-80 in the schools.

http://www.portcommodore.com/programming_contest_82.pdf

I don't recall any of the winners completed all three challenges in the 2 hours. Maybe two complete and one partial at best.

As a class we went through Hands on BASIC with a PET (see link below for book), I and a few others were tearing through the PET/CBM Personal Computer Guide, magazines and whatever else we could find.

http://www.bombjack.org/commodore/books-kim-pet-vic.htm

My HS (1998 - 2001) offered one half semester computer science course taught by the AP math teacher. It was using Pascal. I believe 1999 was the first time it was offered.

I don't remember much of the course, I believe it just covered keywords, syntax and control structures. Most of the projects could be completed within minutes for some students.

The school also had mandatory club period that met once a month, so they had a web development club. The club was tasked with developing (html only) the school's website.

Checking the website of the school today, seems like it's still just that one course but now in C++.

This was a rural high school in Pennsylvania.

I've been a middle school and high school teacher for 20 years. I've been teaching an intro programming class once a year for the last 5 years, and I've been paying attention to how CS ed is done in general throughout that time.

I'm happy to answer any more specific questions here, and my contact information is in my profile if you prefer email. But you'll probably get some good responses here if you post some more specific questions.

In England: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-curricul...

My HS (2009-2013) had an intro programming class where we programmed little robots in Java, AP Computer Science, Game Programming w/ C++, and App development w/ java.

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