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quietus writes:

Last week, President Trump signed a memorandum for $200M per year in federal funding to advance K-12 computer science education.

A good initiative, says IEEE, but, for just this once, let's not spend this money on yet again a bunch of 3D-printers, laptops or educational robots.

Ideal CS courses should teach computational thinking: logical thinking, abstraction, algorithmic expression, problem decomposition, stepwise fault isolation, and debugging. Hardware ain't helping there. Good, qualified, teachers do. But how do you get (good) CS graduates in front of the classroom when they can easy make a multitude writing software, or doing network engineering?

Companies like Microsoft already have programs that encourage volunteer employees to spend a couple of hours each week, teaching classes at high schools. An even better idea, IEEE claims, would be if those employees spent several days at the school, teaching students, while also mentoring teachers.

Original Submission

1. "quietus" - https://soylentnews.org/~quietus/
2. "signed" - https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2017/09/26/president-trump-signs-memorandum-stem-education-funding
3. "says IEEE" - https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/at-work/education/what-500-million-could-mean-for-k12-computer-science-education
4. "teaching classes at high schools" - https://www.tealsk12.org/
5. "Original Submission" - https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=22610

printed from SoylentNews, Advancing K-12 Computer Science on 2026-04-13 20:41:43