White House champions WPI-Brown U curriculum to teach computer science
Source: Steven H. Foskett Jr.
A computer science curriculum, developed in part by faculty at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Brown University, will support a new White House initiative to bring computer science education to students across the country.
"Bootstrap," a middle and high school curriculum in which students learn key concepts in computer programming and algebra in the process of creating their own video games, was co-founded by Kathi Fisler, a computer science professor at WPI.
As part of the Computer Science for All Initiative announced this weekend by President Barack Obama, Bootstrap will partner with two other computer science education programs, "Exploring Computer Science" and "CS: Principles," to prepare high school teachers to use the curricula.
The president announced his $4 billion plan in his weekly address, noting that computer science has become a basic skill on equal footing with reading, writing, and arithmetic. His plan aims to get U.S. schoolchildren - particularly girls and minorities - computer science skills they will need for jobs in the new economy.
The president said he will ask Congress to provide funding over the next three years so elementary, middle and high schools can provide opportunities to learn computer science for all students. He said about a quarter of U.S. schools offer computer science.
In his address, he also said he will use resources at the National Science Foundation and the Corporation for National and Community Service to train more teachers, and will pull together governors, mayors, business leaders and tech entrepreneurs to join the cause.
According to WPI, Bootstrap and its partners in the new initiative will sponsor CSPdWeek, a professional development workshop in July for 300 teachers from across the country to learn the initiative's curriculum modules. The curriculum teaches students basic programming, event-driven programming, testing, participating in code reviews and more, Shriram Krishnamurthi, a computer science professor at Brown University and one of Bootstrap's principal developers, said in a press release issued by WPI.
Because the Bootstrap method is familiar to math teachers - using a step-by-step approach to solving word problems in the context of programming a simple video game - it's a gentle introduction to computing for the teachers, Ms. Fisler said in the release.
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