We Must Still Teach Computer Science in High School

The tl;dr is simply this “We don’t teach physics in high school in order to create more professional physicists.”

I’ve said that for years and it is true. Teaching CS in high school should not be to create more professional computer scientists, programmers, software developers or professional anything. Just as we teach physics to help students to understand the world they live in, we should teach computer science to help students understand the world they live in. Neither the hype or the reality of artificial intelligence mean that students will not be working with computers in the future. If anything, students are more likely to be more involved with computers in the future.

So yes, AI can write code. The determination on how good that code is is really yet to be determined. There are lots of indications that it is not that good right now.

I was reading an article in The Atlantic titled “There’s Never Been a Better Time to Study Computer Science” that says some interesting things. For example, Valerie Barr, a computer scientist at Bard College, is quoted as saying “You cannot make effective use of AI tools if you don’t know something about what you’re asking the tools to do”

Talks with people using AI in software development suggest that understanding software development is important in getting the most out of AI code development. But getting away from people whose job it is to develop software, pretty much everyone is going to be using or interfacing with AI in the future. Understanding what is behind it all has to be helpful in getting the most out of AI.

Now we’re going to see a lot of changes in curriculum both in K-12 and higher education. I think we need less change in K-12. Oh, sure, add some things about using AI and AI prompting. Basic fundamental concepts are still important though. Understanding what is behind AI is still important. That will help people understand the potentials and limits that will still exist. More than that, those principles are important for extending what computing can do. You can’t build a skyscraper without a strong foundation.

Artificial Intelligence and Making Bread

One of the things I have been doing since retiring is baking bread. I love some fresh bread and I want to avoid artificial ingredients in my food. That doesn’t mean I feel the need for a little artificial help in the process. Enter bread machines. Right now I have two machines I am using.

The machine on the right does the whole thing. I put in the ingredients, set a few settings, press start and in a few hours I have a loaf of baked bread. It’s not a particularly smart machine. It’s mostly some steps on a set of timers.

It does a pretty good job but its limited. The bread is a simple boxy shape but it makes for reasonable sandwiches. It doesn’t do sourdough bread and it doesn’t do anything but a standard boxy loaf of bread.

The machine on the left is called the sourdough sidekick and all it does is manage sourdough starter. That leaves a lot of work for the baker, me, to do to bake bread but it gives me a lot of options. This machine is smarter though.

Managing sourdough requires some maintenance work that I have no interest in doing. Some people name their starter and treat it almost like a pet. I have no interest in that. So the sourdough sidekick handles the part of sourdough that I am not interested in doing so I can focus on the parts I am interesting in doing.

SO what is smart about it? Well, I can tell it how much starter I want and when I want it and it will feed and careful the starter I have in order to have it ready for me. It has to balance water, flour, and temperature for me. There is an app that lets me monitor the process.

This does what I want from AI. It handles the boring part and lets me do the hands on and creative parts that I enjoy doing. The first machine gives me bread but does so in a rather boring fashion. If all food was to me was fuel that would be fine. But there is an art to food as well. There is some creativity involved. The hands on aspect of working the dough gives me a certain satisfaction.

What I want from AI is not to replace the things I like to do but to enable me to do things that I like to do. The sidekick has made baking sourdough more doable for me by taking care of the work I don’t have time and interest to do.

I feel like a lot of AI usage is mostly about replacing people when what I want it to do is enable people. I’ve read several people saying things like they don’t want AI to create art or music but rather do the laundry and house keeping so that they have time to create art or music..

I can understand how companies want to replace people and save money. I think that many of us would rather see AI saving time to enable people. Much of what regular people want AI to do requires hardware like my sourdough Sidekick. It seems like the people behind artificial intelligence are only interested in software modulinos though.  Hardware is hard.

We’re seeing more and more pushback against AI. I believe that is largely because of the use cases it is being promoted for. We really need to combine hardware and software to solve problems that make it hard for people to do they things they want to do.