Rebooting computer science, Part 2

Computer science has an image problem. That’s one of the conclusions drawn at the Rebooting Computing Summit, which I attended a couple of weeks ago.

Last week, I wrote about some of the challenges facing computer science. I covered what we discussed in the first day of discussions, which was the overall issue of attracting more young people into the field.

The second day of the event revolved around various loosely directed brainstorming activities (under the unfortunately label of “Appreciative Inquiry,” or AI). The task at hand was to determine a set of concrete actions that the conference attendees – and potentially, larger groups like the ACM or IEEE Computer Society) would undertake to make computer science appear more inviting, relevant, engaging and appealing to young people.

After a lot of work creating potential projects – and then a black-box system of weeding them down and combining them, the list – there were a dozen projects. As you can see, many are focused on education. Here’s my description of them:

• Redefine the public’s image of what computing means
• Create learning communities around computer science
• Create a national curriculum for multi-disciplinary collaboration
• Clearly define computing with a field model and field guide
• Create tools to demonstrate the fun and beauty in computer science
• Promote computing as an essential subject in K-12 education
• Teach computing fundamental in K-8 education
• Hire and train 10,000 new computing teaching teachers by 2018

• Create a repository of open artifacts for use in K-16
• Promote problem-based learning in grades 7-14
• Create socially relevant computer science projects
• Promote initiatives to orient computer science around multicore

To be honest, I’m not sure that the effort was entirely successful. Many of the projects were loose, and in some cases, they were conflicting. There was little effort to define what success would actually look like, and with few exceptions, the set of concrete actions appeared to be aspirational goals instead of real projects.

With that said, it was good that the discussion took place, and I was honored to be part of it – and to work with such an impressive group of people.

The big question is, what happens next? I wish I knew. That, too, was not defined.