Low US finish in the ACM competition
The University of Illinois tied for 17th in the ACM's International Collegiate Programming Challenge, the lowest finish by the school in the 29-year history of the competition. The
top spots are loaded down with schools from Eastern Europe and Asia
- in fact, only four US universities placed among the top 40 finishers.
As your read the first link, you can see this is being reported as
further evidence of a worsening situation for US technical education.
We've been watching recently as
overal funding for research is dropping, and enrollment in US computer science programs are declining across the board (
here,
here, and
here).
Our small team that runs this blog can't speak to any grand strategy on
behalf of Microsoft to helping solve this challenge. However our entire
charter is focused on working with the future developers and their
teachers, from high school to grad school, so this is near and dear to
what we care about.
So my question to our readers is: What can - and should - Microsoft do
to help? How can we get students, from high school on up, more excited
about careers in software development? Or even in just getting excited
about the IDEA of development - playing with the tools, building web
sites? How can we help?
