Who Is Driving Changes to Computer Science Education

There are a lot of Changes happening at code dot org The Slashdot article linked there lists several of them. While the changes include a number of people changes including President Cameron Wilson stepping aside, Chief Academic Officer Pat Yongpradit leaving to join Microsoft, and some staff layoffs the change in direction, to AI, may be the most concerning. From Hour of Code to Hour of AI? Some interesting comments follow that post.

The questions top of my mind are "who is driving the direction of CS education" and "is CS education moving in the right direction?" A lot of people believe that industry is pushing CS education in the direction of being vocational. The new focus on Artificial Intelligence often feels like a vocational direction.

My involvement with computer science education predates code.org and even CSTA so I have seen a lot of changes. In my first teaching days computer science teachers were pretty isolated. There was SIGCSE which accepted K12 teachers though welcomed sometimes felt like aspirational rather than actual. ACM, of which SIGCSE was and is still a part, was doing some support for CS education. Cameron Wilson was a huge part of that and worked policy.

CSTA was developed by some wonderful people in and around ACM. This started the real movement towards expanding K12 CS education. CSTA helped train and organize teachers to push for more more CS education. Code,org came a bit later and brought something new to the effort.

Code.org brought money and industrial production values. From the first set of videos that went viral to some very good curriculum resources as well as connections to industry and political leaders. Getting policymakers to push for CS education stepped up.

We’ve come a long way.

Coming back to my earlier questions. Is industry driving the directions that CS education is moving? A lot of people think they are. Industry has money and it has funded a lot of the work by code.org and CSTA. The modern Golden Rule is that the people with the gold make the rules after all.

Industry has some motivation here. I spent a few years working at Microsoft myself where my job was to promote the use of Microsoft tools for teaching. I didn’t get much in the direction of what to teach. I always felt that teachers should decide what to teach and I just wanted to help teachers find ways to use tools to teach those concepts. Teaching computer science as vocation was always there though. Senior mangers often told me that industry needed more people to know CS because there were jobs that needed to be filled.

CS as vocation has always been a selling point for CS education of course. It’s what helped sell school boards and other elected officials. Among teachers that was usually a secondary motivation. For a lot of teachers, including me over time, CS education became more about understanding how the world works. We don;t teach physics because we want to make more physicist. We teach it so that students understand the world around them.

People who are not working for tech companies often have to use computers and make decisions about computing. From spreadsheets to databases to internet searches. And now AI. People in all walks of life use computers. Understanding computer science can make those people more efficient. Computers are an important part of our world.

It seems like all the big tech companies are betting huge sums of money on AI. There is a lot of pressure to move the direction of CS education into AI. Is the industry push vocational in intent? Is is all about helping these companies to make money? CSTA and code.org are both pushing AI these days. Is this because of industry (gold making the rules?) or would it be happening independently?

That leads to the second question – are we moving in the right direction? I think that question may be different for K12 and for university. Personally, I still think CS education in K12 should be about understanding and not vocational. Someone else can address higher education but K12 should be about preparation for life and not for vocation at least in comprehensive schools.

So is AI the right direction? I think it is indisputable that AI is important to learn. Students should learn prompting and they should learn what AI can and cannot do, They should also learn how to think about what AI should not do. They need to know something about how AI works and that is core computer science.

I think that computer science, in the old analogy, is the dog and AI is the tail. The tail should not wag the dog. Making AI the focus at the expense of basic  computer science would be a huge mistake. We do have to teach the basics that make AI possible. Students need to understand where AI comes from and where it might go. Understanding code is an essential part of that understanding.  There is always going to be more to CS than just AI. We didn’t stop teaching arithmetic when calculators were invented. We should not assume that AI code writers mean we don’t have to stop teaching basic computer science.

CS in K12 should not be just vocational. Is industry driving CS education? I fear they may be. Are we moving in the wrong direction? Maybe. If so, it will be up to educators to provide some course correction. 

Are We Really Teaching Artificial Intelligence

According to Code.ORG

The Hour of Code is now the Hour of AI

The Hour of AI makes teaching AI literacy easy, engaging, and fun. Empower your students to become the next generation of innovators with AI.

Of course the web site has a lot of activities that are still labeled “Hour of Code” but it raises the question: What does it mean to teach artificial intelligence?

In a conversation, a very smart friend talked about how there was a time when we taught Office applications (Word processing, spreadsheets, and the like) and called those classes computer science classes. That’s not real computer science and the CS education community has fought that characterization for years. With some success!

My friend made the comment that much of what is called teaching AI today is the AI equivalent of teaching the Office application of AI and not the science of AI. For example, is teaching AI teaching how to use an existing AI tool and having students train it to recognize some type of object. Is that the same as teaching how the AI works or what sorts of algorithms are behind the training? Of course not.

Likewise, teaching students how to write good prompts to a LLM is not the same as teaching how a LLM works. In fact, I would argue, its not any different from teaching students to write good instructions to another person.

Now I am not saying that learning how to write a prompt or train a machine learning tool is not valuable. Clearly it is. Arguably it is even necessary. But is that really teaching Artificial Intelligence in the same way that a course like AP CS is teaching computer science? Or is it more like teaching applications without teaching how it works?

I have heard the argument that students are not ready to learn how AI works or that the algorithms are too complicated. I would agree that students may not be ready to create an AI at the level of ChatGPT but that doesn’t mean they cannot handle the concepts behind that sort of software.

The truth is that a lot of what AI, especially machine learning and Large Language Models are doing is not really that new. What is new is that we have lots more data for AI to work with and we have processing speed that is a lot faster than what we used to have. Machine learning is heuristics on steroids. LLMs are data analysis with lots more data and faster CPUs.

We had software learning by asking questions and trying different options 50 years ago. Now we have the software asking itself the questions and finding new paths based on data. We had rule based software for decades but now we have better algorithms to evaluate data against rules. We’ve been studying text looking for hidden meanings throughout history. Now we have more text for algorithms to analyze and the ability to analyze in more ways in less time. We can start with simple data sets and basic concepts that teach the roots of AI. Students can deal with it. They do that sort of thing with human intelligence all the time.

If we are serious about preparing students for the future of AI we really need to get serious about teaching some depth of concepts. Let’s not stick with the Office applications equivalent and lets move on to the real science.

Hour of Code and Corporate Involvement in CS Education

An interesting article was shared on Facebook recently -Is the 'Hour of Code' the New 30-Minute Saturday Morning Cartoon Commercial? Take a look at it. It may make you think.

One statement there is that "corporate-sponsored Hour of Code tutorials for the nation's schoolchildren have blurred the lines between coding lessons and product infomercials." Well, that is something to think about. Blurred or crossed?

Those who know me know that for over nine years I worked for a big tech company supporting computer science educators. So clearly, I think that a lot of "big tech" involvement is a good thing. Is it now manipulating children? Well, that gets interesting.

BTW I am also friendly with people at Code.Org and have done work for them in the past. While I don’t/haven’t agreed with them on everything I think they are good people with good motivations. Just being clear on my biases here.

First off, I think there is a big a difference between Hour of Code and Saturday morning cartoons. Prime among those differences is teacher involvement. Teachers are the gateway to Hour of Code. And in fact, they are the gateway to just about all tech influence in CS education. While there may be some students finding and participating in Hour of Code, most students use Hour of Code in the context of the classroom, computer lab, or library under adult supervision.

My understanding is that many of these product placement modules in Hour of Code are solicited to attract/interest students in learning computer science. Put another way, computer science is the product and Minecraft or Disney characters are the show bringing the audience. In a sense, Computer Science is the advertisement and the corporate tool/characters are the show.

Does doing a Minecraft Hour of Code encourage students to play more Minecraft? Perhaps. Though my ten year old grandson hardly needs more encouragement as it is.

This can be a slippery slope or course. Where is the line between promoting computer science and promoting a commercial product? That’s hardly unique to Hour of Code. My grandson has a Chromebook because that is what his school uses. I doubt that is the only product that children want because they see it or use it at school. I trust teachers to be a good influence on their students. I don’t see they becoming salespeople for the companies helping support Hour of Code. I think they know when to encourage and when to point in other directions.

Companies know that Hour of Code is a gateway towards learning computer science. They see that as a good thing. If that leads to more students interested in their products as well I am sure they are happy about that. But they are still selling computer science first. Blurry lines are not the same as crossed. We should keep an eye on that though.