A Week For Computer Science Education
Have you seen the announcement about Computer Science Education week yet? Congress has passed a resolution designating the week of December 7 as Computer Science Education Week. This week was selected because it covers the time of Grace Hopper’s birth anniversary. I think that is a wonderfully fitting time period myself.
Cameron Wilson of ACM has a blog post about how Computer Science Education Week came about in the Congress. It’s really great to see that Congress “gets it” at least at some level. Cameron goes on to say:
Because Congress voted on this week doesn't mean much if the community doesn't do something to make the week tangible. ACM plans on partnering with key computing organizations -- Microsoft, Google, Intel, the Computer Science Teachers Association, the National Center for Women and Information Technology, the Computing Research Association as a start -- to develop a website and outreach materials. Third, these resources can be plugged into the schools and to a variety of audiences including policy makers, school administrators, teachers, parents and the community itself to be used in a variety of ways.
As these resources become available you can bet I’ll be writing about them here as soon as I find out about them. But it is not to early (or too late) to start thinking about and scheduling things for the week of December 7th. Let’s get out there and promote the idea of computer science education to students, administrators, school boards and the general public.
This is not a completely new idea though. Brian Scarbeau has been promoting this idea for a number of years. One year he even got his city mayor to make a proclamation (http://sws.lhps.org/Default.aspx?alias=sws.lhps.org/computerscienceed ) A grass roots version of Computer Science Education day (which both Brian and I pushed in our blogs) was started with limited success (largely because of little outside support) several years ago. A number of high schools have taken advantage of this idea to have events in their schools. So this is an idea that has potential for impact with this Federal recognition and materials to support it.
And much thanks to Cameron Wilson and ACM for taking this ball and running with it through Congress!
