An Interesting School Year in Computer Science Education

Mike Zamansky is Looking at the start of school for 2025 on his blog C’est la Z He’s thinking about phone bans and AI in schools. I have been thinking about both of those as well. I spent some time recently with the teacher who is now teaching in my old computer lab. He’s also a former student of mine. We had a great conversation.

We talked a little about the cell phone ban in schools that was passed into law in New Hampshire among other places over the summer. It is not clear how it will be enforced and what sorts of consequences will be in place for violations.  For a while, I taught with AppInventor which meant that phones were an active and essential part of the class. I wonder what these bans will mean for all the many teachers and students using AppInventor and similar tools.

Phones were a distraction but teaching in a computer lab with computers in front of every students means the Internet is still going to be a distraction. Classroom management is hard enough without computers and cell phones.

Artificial Intelligence is going to be even more interesting this year. How much to allow? How to check for its use? What to teach about it? All interesting questions that teachers and schools will struggle with this year.

My son, a school administrator, find AI tools very useful. So do many others both in and out of education. Clearly, students need to be taught about AI. That debate is, I hope, over, What and how to teach it are still largely to be determined.

Students are going to use AI to write code for them. It would be foolish to deny that. They still need to understand the code that AI is writing for them. Talking to my teacher friend I used the example of HTML. I write these blog posts using Open Live Writer which builds the HTML that gets posted. It does a great job but I still find myself jumping into the HTML to do some fine toning. In this post, for example. I went into HTML to edit the text for the link to Mike’s blog. A small example but knowing what to do saved me a small amount of time.

To be honest though, students using AI to write their code is not my most serious concern. Ethical concerns around AI use is my biggest concern. There are all sorts of issues around copyright for example. The use of books and art to train AIs to create without giving credit to original creators is an important discussion topic. Taking credit for AI output is another. I want students to think about these sorts of things. There is a lot more and more issues will be showing up.The old question is not so much what can we do but what should be do.

So, yes, we want to teach students how to prompt AI. We want them to be able to evaluate to AI product as well. There is a real risk of AI having a negative effect on people actually thinking. Teachers need to find ways to encourage students to think about what AI is, how it can be used, and most importantly how it should be used.

This year is going to be an important one in the future of AI in education.