On City of New York’s “Computer Science for All”

Today I’m taking a look at the City of New York’s recent announcement of its plan to introduce computer science to all public schools in the next 10 years.

I’m always interested in the details of public announcements. Where is the money coming from? Where is it going? and how will it be measured? Here’s what I could find out about this announcement:

• $81 million dollars over ten years to introduce computer science to all public schools in the next 10 years (by 2025?)
• It will be a 50-50 public-private partnership with the first 2.5 years funded by three Foundations (the Solomon Wilson Family Foundation, Robin Hood Foundation and AOL Foundation). This makes the City’s contribution approx $40m or around $4m per annum. This also means the City of New York will essentially need business development managers to find the remaining funds.
• Computer science will not be a graduation requirement. It will be compulsory up until year 8 and then middle and high schools can offer the subject as an elective.

What I couldn’t figure out is how the money will be spent, and by who. There were a few leads – the first is that the City estimates it will need about 5,000 trained teachers. The second is that the National Science Foundation has said it plans to train 10,000 teachers to teach computer science. Although this May 2015 release talks about the NSF training approx 100 New York public school teachers. I’m hoping those 100 were a pilot for an ongoing program.

This announcement is part of a much larger education initiative to support literary and numeracy programs with the measured intention of increasing university participation rates. It also builds off two other initiatives: a computer science teacher training program (2013, mentioned above) and an Advanced Placement program (2014), that would see college level material offered in high schools.

The program is expected to face challenges in training enough teachers, supporting schools and students with infrastructure and also adapting the content and learning styles to accommodate a world where coding is taught in boot camps, micro courses and in project based learning. Critics of the program have said that this money would have been better spent increasing numeracy and literacy rates and that teaching computer science is a passing trend that will be quickly outdated.

My thoughts:

I’d love to see the breakdown of how the money is being spent. Not to critique it, but to gain ideas for what we could be doing locally. Other programs I’ve looked at spend their money on teacher training, so that would make sense. Infrastructure is another bucket that needs funding but is much more expensive as you have both capital and maintenance costs – mixed with your standard deployment costs.

Teacher training is a very real issue. It is something we will face here in Australia. I also believe that it is a known issue therefore can be factored into deployment plans. If there is a serious plan to rollout coding in schools then the teacher professional development side of things should not be underestimated as it plays a serious part in the program’s success.

On the Digital Technologies Curriculum review process

I thought I’d put up a piece on further developments in the ongoing discussion on the role of the Digital Technologies (K-10) curriculum in Australia. This curriculum would deliver on calls for mandatory technology education, coding in particular, from foundation to Year 10. Last October I put up a piece on the then recent review of the Australian curriculum. This review suggested, amongst other things, that technology should be taught as an elective from Year 9 and older (roughly the same as we have now). The tech industry, and tech education advocates, saw this as a worrying sign.

However, things took a positive turn in December, when the Commonwealth Government (Department of Education) announced it would refer the Review’s recommendations to the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA). ACARA is the joint Commonwealth/State Government education group that led the original consultations and designed the Digital Technologies curriculum. ACARA has been asked to report to the Education Council at its first meeting in 2015.

There are still a few more areas to address. Fran Foo’s December article on this matter specifically asked for comment from NSW and WA governments as to whether they would commit to supporting this industry call for mandatory tech education (and the Digital Technologies curriculum). The NSW response was “NSW is committed to its current practice where technologies learning commences in early stage 1 (kindergarten) with the Science and Technology syllabus and continues into years 7 & 8“. A quick glance at the NSW Board of Studies website shows that NSW has just launched an updated Science K-10 (incorporating Science and Technologies K-6) syllabus in 2015. The article then quotes the NSW Board of Studies as saying “Should the Technologies Curriculum be endorsed by education ministers and BOSTES (Board of Studies, Teaching and Education Standards) decide to  adopt it, consultation with stakeholders including the advocates of coding and algorithmic thinking will ensue”.

My thoughts:

I guess we wait and see. I can absolutely see how a review could decide that the Digital Technologies would be a challenge to implement – by default it features content (coding) that is not particularly strong in Australia. This is all the more reason that it should be taught. The curriculum review focused on whether the content of the Digital Technologies curriculum was achievable from an educators point of view – was it written in a style that people could deliver. This one I’ll leave to educators. Another point was whether teachers would be supported to deliver the content – this was/is a concern for those delivering the technology subject in the UK, so it will be interesting to see how that plays out. Finally I can see why State Government education groups would be cautious about radical overhauls of education systems. Education is vital and not something that is easy to switch up – so naturally they would want to follow due process.

On the plus side, at least the conversation is continuing.

On Camp/Interactive (C/I) (Bronx, USA)

C/I (Camp/Interactive) is a Bronx based tech education program focused on supporting high-school students from underserved backgrounds. Its mission is “inspire and equip underserved students with the skills in computing, leadership, and professionalism needed to thrive in the Internet economy and beyond“. Starting in 2001 as a four week summer program (two weeks outdoor leadership training, two weeks intensive technology training) the program expanded in 2006 with a Bronx based learning centre and later added internships.

The program has three main components (from C/I website):

• Code/Interactive: students attend computer science education sessions at least twice a week at their schools with a C/I Teacher to work on self-directed computer science education modules in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Participating schools gain a robust curriculum, technology, teaching materials, access to other program elements (summits, camps and internships). [C/I’s website shows it is working with roughly 12 schools in the Bronx area.]
• Camp/Interactive: Young Entrepreneur Summits give C/I’s top students an opportunity to develop their technology skills in a unique environment. Each Y.E.S. program hosts panels of minority tech entrepreneurs to share their expertise with C/I students, equipping them with the tech and leadership skills needed to be successful in today’s fastest growing industry.
• Careers/Interactive: Successful students from C/I’s year-long programs apply for paid summer internships at top tech companies. Interns utilise their coding, prototyping, and leadership skills to gain hands-on work experience and training for a future career. Past internship hosts include GroupMe, RetailMeNot, GILT, AirBnB, Business Insider, The New York Times, FourSquare, General Assembly, CK-12, and Gust.

C/I lists its results as:

• Increase in college attendance rates: C/I students are five times as likely as their peers to go to college
• Break the poverty cycle: C/I provides graduates with skills that can double their household income
• Opportunities to join the workforce: 60% of C/I interns are offered full time employment

My thoughts:

There are many things I like about what I’m reading. The first is thoughtful links between the program elements. Offering in-school resources, coupled with more intensive camps/office visits for keen students and ending with the opportunity of a paid internship. I like that the program uses its own year long education program as a filter for companies looking to support interns – only students that complete the years worth of extra curricular study are offered internship positions. This both recognises/ensures the quality of the teaching, but also addresses employer side concerns about the quality/motivation of the students they are taking in. I imagine that if employers were also participating as mentors and hosting office visits then they would also have a chance to meet the students before taking them onboard as interns.

I also like that the program has an official signup process for schools. In Australia we face a challenge that often programs are introduced by a single motivated teacher, and are reliant on that one teachers’ passion and time to keep the program running. Ideally these programs would be taken in by the school and supported at the highest level – then actively promoted to teachers and parents alike as something the school is doing to improve its educational capacity. This is particularly important in the computer science realm where content moves fast, students learn fast and finding skilled educators can be tricky.

Finally, I like the program structure. It has clear opportunities to engage as volunteers, participants and financial sponsors. It appears measurable and it looks possible to track outcomes due to the high engagement with the students involved.

On EU Code Week

So… October 11-17 was EU Code Week. The week that European educators focused on raising the profile of computer science initiatives across the EU. EurActiv has published a series of special reports focusing on coding, education and the economy. They are collated in this nifty PDF – worth the read.

Again we see similar themes. The opening address links the concepts of digital natives – familiar with technology but under served by current education systems, the pervasiveness of technology across different industry sectors – not just the tech sector, a recognised gap between unemployment and the demands of the growing tech sector and technology as a potential economic solution for growth and job creation. Example: “The EU’s app-developer workforce will grow from one million in 2013 to 2.6 million in 2019. Additional support and marketing staff will take that figure to 4.8 million by 2018.”

The special report touches on the role of public-private partnerships in championing awareness-raising campaigns and spreading best practice. It mentions a “Coding Industry Coalition” (nb. Google hasn’t heard of it outside of EurActiv’s report) of global businesses that has formed in response to this demand. The idea is that European Union policy makers have little to no control over national based education programs. Therefore industry must step in to demonstrate the usefulness of coding in schools.

The report also mentions the “EU Coding Initiative” – the first localised coding platform in Europe. The initiative provides teaching and educational resources, awareness raising initiatives and online tutorials (beginner-expert). The European website was built off the successful Code.org site and features many of the same tutorials and videos. The About section has a little more information:

“The aim of the campaign is to promote coding through a mixture of online and offline, real-life activities, with a view to establishing coding as a key competence within every education system in Europe. The eu.code.org website, developed in conjunction with Code.org, will provide resources in a number of languages, catering to everyone from the youngest coders, to pedagogical resources and lesson plans for teachers, to industry training and certification for professionals. The European Coding Initiative will play a central role in a number of Europe-wide advocacy and awareness-raising campaigns, including Europe Code Week, Computer Science Education Week, the Grand Coalition for Digital Jobs and the European activities of the Hour of Code campaign.”

On the Australian Government’s Review of the Digital Technologies Curriculum

The Australian Government recently announced its review of the Australian Curriculum. Suffice to say the technology community was not impressed. The review suggested that the proposed Technologies curriculum was best suited as an elective for students in years 9 and above. This goes against the very things that made the original draft attractive – that it was compulsory from Foundation to Year 10 and that it separated out the ‘using’ of technology from the ‘making’ of technology.

The review had a number of recommendations:

• The Technologies learning area should be introduced from Year 9 – not Foundation- Year 10 as previously suggested
• The two Technologies strands of Design and Technology (“using tech”) and Digital Technologies (“making things with tech/computational thinking”) should be merged – which is not dissimilar to the current structure and avoids a direct focus on programming/coding
• The terminology of the curriculum needs consistency and terms/achievement levels need clear definition – never a bad idea

Additional recommendations from the subject expert include:

• Integrate design and technologies into other subjects in primary years and then commence the specific subjects in lower secondary classes (year 9)
• IF design and technologies is taught in F-8 then teachers would need serious support and professional development
• That additional training is provided for secondary school teachers to support the curriculum

The reasons given in the review are as follows:

• There is no international consensus on what a technologies curriculum should include. Apart from the US and UK, few other countries are making technology a compulsory subject and the review outlines the confusing way that technology has been integrated into global curriculums (as part of science, a VET subject, a coding subject etc)
• The primary school curriculum is overcrowded and removing Technologies frees up time to teach other subjects – avoiding the ‘inch deep and a mile wide’ scenario
• Concern over the structure of the subject – that the separation of ‘technologies’ (designed to emphasise ‘making’) from the ‘general ICT capability’ (designed to emphasise ‘using’) was confusing
• The need for teacher professional development in order to pull this off – that teachers were not accustomed to the complex language proposed in the Technologies curriculum and would need support

The subject specialist reviewing the curriculum raised a number of concerns:

• There was little involvement from primary teachers in designing the Digital Technologies curriculum
• The name of the ‘digital technologies’ was not suitable and was not recognised by industry
• Language used in the curriculum achievement standards for Years F-8  is beyond many teachers without a specialist background.
• The writing of the curriculum is pitched at too high a level for primary and secondary teachers.
• The reviewer also questioned whether “Technologies”, as a subject, is the natural home for the technology subject matter OR should it be pervasive across all subjects?

My thoughts:
The above recommendations seem to undermine the purpose of a national Technologies curriculum. The intent of the curriculum update was the ensure that Australian students were gaining contemporary skills that would put both the students and the country in a good position in the next 15-20 years. It is natural that this is a difficult task with few global case studies – that’s what happens if you want to stay at the forefront of education. It is also natural that teachers should have support to implement these changes. I would argue that teachers need support even without these changes as currently 60% of teachers handling Years 7-10 and 48% of Year 11-12 have no formal ICT qualification.

I’m not sure about the idea of integrating Technology across other strands. I imagine this means that during an art class, students would use some form of digital media, or maybe they are asked to create an iBook for a history presentation. I have a feeling this will lead to a situation where teachers (naturally) support concepts they are already familiar with – what teacher, off their own bat, would use robotics as a method of teaching geometry when you can use more established traditional methods?

In saying this – arguably nothing has changed. The national curriculum has been sitting in draft format for almost a year and was reliant on State Government to support to roll out at a local level. The report mentions that one jurisdiction already had a good existing course and had no plans to replace its current content.

The report can be found here: Review of the Australian Curriculum, Final Report (October, 2014) – the Technologies section begins on page 208

On Mark Zuckerberg’s $120 million grant to San Francisco

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, are donating $120 million (over five years) to public schools in the San Francisco Bay Area. The couple’s gift will be spread over the next five years and is the biggest allocation to date of the $1.1 billion in Facebook stock the couple pledged last year to the nonprofit Silicon Valley Community Foundation. The first $5 million of the $120 million will go to school districts in San Francisco, Ravenswood and Redwood City.

Initial grants will go toward:

• providing computers and connectivity in schools
• teacher training
• parent outreach to support them keep track of student learning
• leadership opportunities for students
• transitions for students moving from middle school to high school
• leadership training for principals.

The May 2014 gift comes at a time when critics are still questioning what became of Zuckerberg’s $100 million donation to Newark, New Jersey’s public school system. Four years ago, he announced the donation flanked by then-mayor Cory Booker and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. A recent New Yorker article criticises the donation and the chain of events it set in motion. While well-intentioned, the money has so far failed to fix the city’s ailing school system. The process lacked meaningful community input and much of the money has been spent on high-paid contractors and consultants. Four years later, the money is nearly gone and a lot of people are angry. The story’s most poignant quote is from Vivian Cox Fraser, president of the Urban League of Essex County, who says “Everybody’s getting paid, but Raheem still can’t read.” Zuckerberg admits that he and local leaders could have done a better job engaging the community and soliciting ideas about how to spend the money.

The money will be routed through the Startup:Education fund with the aim of providing computers and internet connectivity to needy schools, offering teacher training, and helping to fund new district and charter schools among other initiatives.

Extract from: Zuckerberg, Wife Gift $120M To CA Schools, The Big Story, May, 2014)

On Salesforce’s $6 million education grant

Salesforce is proud of its philanthropic credentials. The San Francisco based tech company employs a “1-1-1″ model where it sets aside 1 percent of its equity for a foundation (grants), 1 percent of its employees’ time as community service and 1 percent of its product as a donation. A few weeks ago the company announced it was donating $5 million to San Francisco’s public schools (an increase on last year’s $2.7 million donation) and $1 million to Code.org for computer science education. This is the biggest grant the company has ever gifted and represents 25% of the company’s annual grant giving budget (approx $20 million each year).

Here’s how the grant will be applied:

$2 million in 20 principal innovation grants of $100,000 each (no strings attached – generally used for 3D printers, classroom improvements, media studios, software licences etc)

$3 million will pay for infrastructure and training:

• 1,200 iPads
• 800 Google Chromebooks
• Expand to 48 Wi-Fi enabled digital classrooms across 12 middle schools and eight K-8 schools;
• Four full-time district technology instructors to assist the 20 schools
• Training for 100 teachers to go through professional development on computer science

$1 million for Code.org to support school computer science programs

• Computer science elective classes offered as a part of their school schedule
• Code.org’s “Code Studio” classes in middle and K-8 schools
• After school computer science classes hosted at salesforce.com offices in San Francisco

In addition, the Salesforce Foundation has pledged:

• 5,000 volunteer hours from Salesforce.com employees – an increase on the 1,500 hours in the 2013-2014 school year.

Sources:

• Salesforce Pours $6M Into SF Schools, Computer Science Education, TechCrunch, September 2014
• Press Release, Salesforce, Sept 2014
• Salesforce.com’s Benioff gives S.F. schools new $5 million gift, SF Gate, Sept 2014

 

On Code.org’s Code Studio

Today Code.org announced its new Code Studio. This open source platform is designed to support students as young as kindergarten to pick up computer science concepts. It is still a visual programming language (similar to Scratch) but is HTML5 based (so runs in most browsers) and has puzzle based lesson plans for K-12. The lessons teach the usual loops, conditionals, and functions as well as branching into new topics such as how the internet works and digital citizenship. Other neat features are tools that let you build apps and new tutorial videos by tech celebrities.

For me, the most interesting part of this is the new teacher interface. This allows teachers to monitor where their students are in the lesson progression. An interesting idea that pushes Code.org further into the area of curriculum support/lesson plan development.

To help the rollout – Code.org is running training across 60 cities in the US – aiming to prepare up to 10,000 teachers to use the resource. [Source: Announcing Code Studio (Code.org blog, Sept 2014)]

My thoughts:

Nice! While there are a number of STEM related education organisations out there – Code.org is the one that consistently aims for scalable outreach. The organisation keeps coming up with new ways to keep its purpose relevant and on trend. In this case – if those planning the curriculum are moving too slow, then Code Studio is a solution for schools that are in a position to do more than the basics.

Its around this point that the organisation could start considering how it localises its product suite. While computer science concepts may not differ around the world – curriculums and teaching requirements do. In Australia they almost differ from state to state. It would be gold if someone could start mapping these Code.org classes against the local syllabus. Almost a localised wiki of lesson plans that complement the Code.org platform – or at least explain it in localised terms.

Training computer science teachers (UK)

In April 2013 the British Government announced it would provide £2 million to create 16,000 computer teachers (ed: £125 per teacher?). The BCS (The Chartered Institute for IT) – formerly the British Computer Society – is charged with delivering the program. In real terms this program looks like £1 million a year over two years to train 400 ‘master teachers’ in computer science, most likely through the BCS Academy of Computing.  Each of these teachers is then expected to train up to 40 schools (hence 16,000 teachers).

The program builds on the BCS/Computing at School’s existing Network of Excellence, an initiative to connect university educators with school teachers and support ongoing teacher professional development.  As of September 2012 approximately 570 schools had registered for the program – by May 2014 is was about 1000.

Thoughts:

Sounds great. The UK Government computer teacher funding initiatives are a response to their changes to the national curriculum. Makes sense that if you are going to change the curriculum you’d need a concerted effort to retrain teachers. My questions would be around the declining numbers of teachers pursuing computer science as a discipline – can the UK find 400 master teachers? This article (Reboot ICT teacher training to halt the computing brain drain, David Grover, May 2014) painted a fairly grim picture of the projected computer science teacher pipeline here in Australia.

ACDICT comments on the low numbers of qualified ICT teachers

The Australian Council of Deans of ICT (ACDICT) has again emphasised a quality gap in the teaching of ICT at schools. Last week the Council commented on the Australian Council for Educaiton and Research’s statistics which say that up to 48% of ICT teachers handling years 11-12 are not formally qualified in their subject (this figure rises to 58% for years 7-8). ACDICT believes the low number of qualied teachers is causing a decline in student interest in ICT subjects.

This article quotes Yvette Adams (2013, ICT Woman of the Year) as saying a key challenge is that the curricula struggles to keep pace with the changing technology. Yvette goes on to say that increased industry involvement in the classroom (guest lecturers and/or reviewing curricula) is a solution.

Article: Why Technology Education Is Not Cutting It (CIO, June 2014)