High School Computer Science - What's it all about?
Kathleen Weaver relates a couple of frustrating conversations in her blog today. The other people in her building don't have much of an idea about what she does. Isn’t asking a computer science teacher if they program is sort of like asking a math teacher if they can calculate lowest common denominators? On the other hand, it isn’t always the case.
Part of the confusion comes from schools that label any teaching of anything that involves using computers as "computer science."
To those of us who take computer science seriously, at the high school level or otherwise, a course in Office Suite applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and the like) is not a course in computer science. A social studies course may involve looking at tables of numbers, building graphs and predicting population growth (in other words using math) but we don’t move the course from the social studies department to the math department. That is because most people understand the difference between using math and learning math for its own value. Computer science is not so well understood though.
So what do you tell people when they ask what computer science is or what do you do in computer science courses? It’s easy and it is complicated. The easy part is that, for the most part, in high school computer science we teach students how to write computer programs. The hard part is that there is really much more to it than that. Learning how to program, when done correctly, is about problem solving, critical thinking and looking at the world from a slightly different angle. In short computer science, even in high school, has the potential to make a large difference for students. It’s too bad that more of them don’t get the chance to find that out.
