Eric RobertsProfessor of Computer Science, Stanford University

NACCQNapier, New Zealand

12 July 2009

Restoring thePassion, Beauty, Joy and Awe

Grady Booch at SIGCSE 2007

Fixing Secondary Education Is Essential

Source: Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, 2005

• In my talk yesterday, one of the factors I cited behind the decline in student numbers is that the exposure students get in primary and secondary schools tends to discourage any interest in computing long before they reach university.

• This problem is reflected in the fact that only a tiny fraction of students graduating from secondary schools in the United States express any interest in computing as a field of study.

• Further evidence comes from the decline in students who take the Advanced Placement examination in Computer Science, which is analogous to A-levels in the UK or to the NQF here.

• The AP/CS exam is the only subject that has declined over the last five years and now ranks below Latin in terms of the number of students taking the exam.

Image Is a Huge Problem in SchoolsIn 1998, sixth-graders in selected California schools were asked to draw their image of a computer professional. The drawings are for the most part aligned with traditional stereotypes:

But Change Is Possible • In 1998, Stanford initiated a project—which I directed jointly

with my colleague Professor Brigid Barron at the School of Education—to design a new computer science curriculum for Bermuda’s public secondary schools.

• The Bermuda Project was a public-private partnership linking the Ministry of Education with Bermuda-based companies.

• The initial goals of the Bermuda Project were to:– Support the development of technological literacy– Prepare all students for work or undergraduate study– Develop a cadre of highly skilled students who are globally competitive

• Over the next six years, our Bermuda Project team developed a computing curriculum for Bermuda’s public schools that remains in place today.

About Bermuda • British overseas territory lying

600 miles east of North Carolina.

• Land area just over 20 square miles (less than twice the size of the Stanford campus).

• Total population of only 62,000 (only slightly larger than Napier) with two public high schools: Berkeley and Cedarbridge.

• Local parliament has had a Labour majority since 1998.

• Considerable national wealth, primarily from companies that relocate to Bermuda as a tax haven.

• The CIA World Factbook for 2005 listed Bermuda as having the highest GDP per capita in the world.

Bermuda.edu

Bermuda.edu

The Bermuda.edu movie is not posted because of copyright restrictions.

The Project Appears Successful

• Students were given pre- and post-tests in several classes to assess levels of learning.

• Students completed survey questionnaires to determine their level of satisfaction, their interest in further computing courses, and their eventual career plans.

• We conducted in-depth videotaped interviews with 38 students.

• An independent team from Boston University evaluated the program and found it to be “excellent.”

• The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) evaluated and certified the curriculum in 2003, making it the first ISTE-certified national curriculum in the world.

We undertook several different assessment strategies to determine the success of the project, including the following:

Projections of Future Selves

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

taking morecomputerclasses

Majoring incomputerscience

Becoming aprogrammer

Owning abusiness

Becoming aweb designer

Becoming acomputernetwork

specialist

Becoming acomputerteacher

Proportion of students

one class

two classes

three classes

four classes

five classes

• In 2005, we sent questionnaires to 300 students who took the Introduction to Computing course between 1999 and 2001, who were by then out of high school.

• We received 71 responses (24%).

• Of the respondents, 29 (41%) had IT-related jobs.

And Remember the Student ImagesIn Bermuda, we repeated this experiment after students had taken our courses and got rather different results:

Images of Computing (Bermuda) In Bermuda, we repeated this experiment after students had taken our courses and got rather different results:

Jan Cuny’s “Clean Slate” Project

http://www.cra.org/Activities/summit/Cuny_A_Clean_Slate_Approach_to_High_School_CS.pdf

The End

http://bermuda.stanford.edu

http://cs.stanford.edu/~eroberts/