We Need to Fix Secondary School Computer Science

Abstract

In recent years, the push for secondary school students to “learn to code” has increased significantly. Currently, about half of secondary schools in the United States have computer science education available to students in some form. Unfortunately, many of these schools choose a curriculum bogged down in the nuances of programming language syntax, leaving students bored, confused, unable to apply their learning to useful problems outside the classroom, and therefore disheartened about further pursuing a more conceptual computer science education in college. As a current undergraduate who has helped teach secondary school computer science, I witnessed firsthand the problems with current approaches. I, therefore, propose a shift in the focus of computing education research away from teaching “coding” effectively to elucidating a more abstract but nevertheless more pragmatic characterization of computer science as an academic field, rather than programming as a trade.