Clash of the Timelines: Lessons Learned from the Front Lines of CS Education

Abstract

Public education in the United States is challenged by the rapidly changing skills and knowledge required by the global workforce. Technology innovation drives the evolution of workforce requirements at a pace that is roughly tied to Moore's law, with significant changes every few months to years. In contrast, significant public K-12 school reform has historically required decades. The conflict between the two evolutionary rates, orders of magnitude apart, creates a crisis for sustaining the US economy requiring urgent, innovative, and sustainable solutions. Insightful, strategic thinkers representing a coalition of national agencies and organizations launched a project designed to infuse innovative computer science curriculum into pre-college public schools through the most expeditious pathway available: creation of a new advanced placement (AP) course. The new AP exam is based on a course taught with many titles at the college level that focuses on learning objectives within computer science (CS) principles. If taught with pedagogy that includes and supports traditionally underrepresented students, the course provides diverse students with foundational understanding of the underlying logic, grammar, communication skills, and problem-solving approaches of computational thinking-- essential skills and knowledge for becoming contributors to the country's economic survival. Pilot high school courses based on college level courses that meet the above learning objectives are being introduced into high schools through a national teacher professional development initiative. The goal of this initiative, the CS 10K project, is to train ten thousand teachers to teach CS Principles in ten thousand secondary schools by the time the new AP exam unrolls in 2016-17. Several NSF projects supporting this initiative are undergoing careful evaluation. This paper describes one of these projects and its teacher, student, and district-level outcomes to date. It also considers ways that the positive outcomes might be scaled and sustained, addressing the larger challenge posed above of creating a sustainable strategy for accelerating the pace of educational adaptation to technology's more rapid global transformation.