Fumbling Toward Competency

I am a math teacher.  At least, I was until a year and a half ago when, for a variety of reasons, I volunteered to teach computer science.  Since then, I have written many thousands of lines of code, mostly in Java, taken a few courses on Coursera, and racked up respectable scores on Project Euler and wcipeg.  Which is to say I’ve gotten comfortable with a subject I hadn’t really paid much attention to since 1999.

Now that I understand more than (most) of my students, and thinking about the subject, I’m finding myself excited to the point of evangelism about getting more students learning code (as the saying goes “there’s no zealot like a convert”).  Right now, only about 40% of our students are taking at least one computer science course before they graduate from high school, and only around a quarter of those are girls.  I’m interested in how I can increase both of those numbers.

I used to take great pleasure in saying to my radio “That’s not a transit plan, Mayor Ford, it’s a transit idea.”  With that in mind, here’s a few “Action Ideas” of my own

• use a drag-and-drop language to introduce the basic concepts before moving on to a text-based language.  That way, we can separate the ideas from the semicolons.
• work with colleagues in other departments to get some programming elements into the classroom in our middle school years.  That could be an art project, web design, or creating a video game.
• place less emphasis (but not no emphasis) on programming that is heavily calculation-based.

I know these are not really that innovative, so I am looking forward to talking to my fellow Cohorteers on Friday to hear what has worked for you, and what you are planning in the coming months. See you then!