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spent increasing numeracy and literacy rates and that teaching computer science is a passing trend that will be quickly outdated.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 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.