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This recent article in Slate addresses an old problem in economics: Why hasn’t the computer led to a dramatically new economy?  Why hasn’t it led to a boost in productivity?  A new book on The Great Stagnation suggests that the American economy hasn’t faltered — rather, the American boom in previous years was due to “low-hanging fruit,” and all of that is gone now.  What I’m more interested in is what The Great Stagnation and another recent book The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future suggest about the role of technology in the future economy.

In general, it’s not a pretty picture.  Their idea is that computers replaced physical labor, and now are taking on more cognitive labor.  For example, in the future, you won’t need as many legal clerks, because a law-aware version of Web search will do the job so much better.  These economists argue that our ability to create new jobs won’t grow as quickly as technology’s ability to take…

Computing Education Blog

CS Ed folk are mailing each other about the Washington Post article on CS Education (just in time for SIGCSE this week!).  Eli’s class at Virginia Tech sounds great, and the project is an excellent example of how context can help to highlight the relevance of computing education — what we’ve been saying with Media Computation and IPRE for years.  Jan Cuny’s comment is highlighting the more significant bit.  Sarita Yardi highlighted in her email to Georgia Tech’s CSEd mailing list that the reporters missed Jan’s bigger issue, and I think Sarita is right.

We do know how to engage kids now.  We have NCWIT Best and Promising Practices, and we have contextualized computing education.  The real problem is that, when it comes to high school CS, we’re just not there.  If you choose a high school at random, you are ten times more likely to find one that offers no CS than to find one offering AP CS.  That’s a big reason why the AP numbers are so bad.  It’s not that the current AP CS is such…

Computing Education Blog

Interesting piece by Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman.  Read all the way to the bottom where he points out that just giving workers degrees won’t restore middle class society.  Krugman’s argument makes sense, but he makes the same mistake that most education administrators make.  The real advantage to the individual of computing is not in using computers.  That doesn’t require any particular education, as Krugman points out.

Krugman misses that the economic advantage goes to those who know how to create with computing. Those who can program (which does require education) have (a) an advantage which enables innovation and (b) the ability to marshal the resources of what used to take many human laborers, thus increasing productivity.

Why is this happening? The belief that education is becoming ever more important rests on the plausible-sounding notion that advances in technology increase job opportunities for those who work with information — loosely speaking, that…

Computing Education Blog

I have a sure-fire way of improving computing education.  Everyone reading this, post this to your blogs and Facebook status and every other way that you make public, digital statement these days:

I promise to no longer teach Java to anyone at the undergraduate Freshman level or earlier.

I am teaching Java in my Media Computation Data Structures class this semester, the first time I’ve taught first year students in four years.  I had forgotten how bad Java is for beginning students!

My students are almost all non-CS majors.  This is all their second semester CS course, but for the most part, last semester was the first time any of them had ever programmed.  Their first course was in Python (robots), Python (MediaComp), or MATLAB.  It’s a small enough class that students actually do come to my office hours, and that lets me see the aggravating errors that they are facing.

Here’s a common error — it’s a faulty method declaration.

public void foo();  
{    
    // blah, blah blah
...

Computing Education Blog

This story came across ACM Technews, with the claim that “University of Alberta researchers have found that high school girls become more interested in computer science if video game creation is incorporated into the lesson plans.” That’s a strong and surprising claim, countering what other studies (including ours) have found.

A pre-print of the journal article is available.  The claim is a bit strong.  First, the researchers never asked the kids if they were interested in computer science or game development!  They asked the students to compare how much fun they had short story writing at school, to interactive story writing at the University on a field trip, to interactive story writing at school, and then to compare traditional writing to interactive writing at school.  Kids far preferred interactive story writing at the University to writing a traditional short story –everybody enjoyed the field trip.  However, for the girls, the difference at school was not significant, while…

Computing Education Blog

The New York Times included this brief reference to a paper that appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in the middle of a fascinating piece about discrimination among psychologists.  They could have done a whole article just on this paper. Here’s the claim in brief:  Why aren’t there more women in CS? Because women choose not to be there, not because of discrimination.  The focus in BPC should be on informing female students about the options in CS, then, not trying to correct for bias or discrimination.  However, we can take action like making academy for family-friendly so that more women choose academia, but that’s making the academy better for both men and women — not an issue of bias.

Check out the abstract: “To better understand women’s underrepresentation in math-intensive fields and its causes, we reprise claims of discrimination and their evidentiary bases. Based on a review of the past 20 y of data, we suggest that some of these claims are no…

Computing Education Blog