Goldberg, D. S., Grunwald, D., Lewis, C., Feld, J. A., & Hug, S. (2012). ITiCSE '12 Proceedings of the 17th ACM annual conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education: Engaging Computer Science in Traditional Education: The ECSITE Project. New York: ACM.
This article describes ECSITE, a program that helps incorporate computer science in the existing K-12 curriculum. In this program, ECSITE fellows pair with teachers and have weekly meetings to discuss how students can improve their understanding of their coursework through computation. These teachers are teaching anything from art or social studies to mathematics or biology. According to surveys from the students and teachers participating in ECSITE, the students learned about how computer science affects their everyday lives, and many teachers will continue to incorporate computation in their curricula. The authors conclude that their program is sustainable and will continue to proliferate.
Before I came to Purdue to study computer science and mathematics, I never learned about computer programming, algorithms, graph theory, or computer simulation. Luckily, I knew that as someone who enjoys logic, creativity, and problem solving, computer science would probably be a good fit for me. However, I believe that high schools should do a better job of introducing computer science to their students as a valid academic discipline as well as a career path. For me, through learning about computer science, I have become a clearer thinker, a better problem solver, and a more aware citizen of the universe, and I want to extend these benefits to more people in our society. I was drawn to this article because ECSITE, which is funded by the National Science Foundation, attempts to remedy the dearth of computer science education before college.
The ECSITE model seems simple yet effective. The fellows meet with K-12 teachers once a week to help prepare computer science material for their classes, and they also meet with faculty members at a university once a month to discuss what is and isn't going well. When the researchers obtained data about their program to elicit results and draw conclusions, they analyzed surveys of the ECSITE fellows and teachers. These surveys are purely qualitative information that could be subject to bias, and while they are definitely an effective means for learning about the status of ECSITE, I think that the researchers should also consider measuring more quantitative results, such as grades and college majors. This paper was published in an ACM journal, which is a reputable source for computer science information, and the authors cited sixteen sources, most of which were written in the past ten years.
According to surveyed teachers, the ECSITE students not only learned about computer science but also gained interest in computer science as a career path. The teachers themselves learned a lot about computer science and recognize the discipline as a valid academic field for their students. Because of ECSITE's success in the classroom, many ECSITE teachers informally recommend incorporating computation in the curriculum to their fellow teachers. Another advantage of ECSITE is that it incorporates computer science into the curriculum in an interdisciplinary manner, which prepares students to work across different fields, which I think is a key to our culture's success. Also, because ECSITE courses are not strictly computer science courses, students who may not have been interested in computer science found joy in learning about computation by taking a class that they would have already taken.
In my technical writing and presentation course, I need to write a persuasive essay and deliver a persuasive speech. One topic that I am strongly considering is computer science education, particularly in high school. This would be a valuable resource for me because ECSITE is an example of a successful program that integrates computer science into high school classes, which I think more high schools should be doing. In particular, I enjoyed reading about how specific classes learned about computer science as it relates to different fields. For example, AP Biology students solved puzzles and wrote algorithms to analyze DNA sequences. My opinion is that learning about computer science can aid high school students in becoming better problem solvers and in understanding subjects they are already interested in, such as math, physics, literature, and art.
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