The first picture shows Governor Walker at the podium addressing the audience at Solomo Technology, a social media company and heavy user of computer science, where the signing was held. Behind him is Liz Eversoll, the Founder and CEO of Solomo Technology. The second photo has him signing the bill into law.

The final picture includes Lori Hunt and me with the Governor holding the Governor’s Proclamation for CS Education week in Wisconsin. Lori and I are founding members of the CSTA WI-Dairyland Chapter.

I’ve attached the Wisconsin 2013 CS Education Week Proclamation. With help about 5 years ago (from Stephanie Hoeppner in Ohio and Bob Hillestad in Wisconsin) , I was able to get the first Governor’s proclamation.  Since then I’ve been able to get the current governor to create this proclamation each year for us. In our case the person I contact is the Proclamation Director in the Governor’s Office, Constituent Services. I’m sure each state has a similar person. Perhaps next year we’ll see many more of these proclamations.

A short but worthy read.

http://www.itworld.com/big-data/384215/female-software-engineers-may-be-even-scarcer-thought

http://computinged.wordpress.com/2013/10/28/a-theory-predicting-when-computing-education-will-reach-us-high-schools/

In the second section entitled “Why is there so little computing education in US High Schools”  he talks about Engineering Education Research as an example to support his hypothesis on reasons for the lack of Computer Science Education Researchers (CER).

At the end of that paragraph, he states

“Engineering has a significant presence in K-12 education today.”

While this is true, has the increase in engineering education research in the last twenty years led to the increase in the presence of engineering in K-12 education? Indeed most of us in K-12 hardly ever deal with educational researchers for any reason.

I think the reason is that groups like Project Lead the Way (PLTW) offer an “off the shelf” high quality program, vetted by engineers.  The attractiveness of this is that the school and students get access to a number of well-written up-to-date courses and they also get access to intensive professional development for teachers who want to teach a particular PLTW course.  Teachers must not only take but also pass the two-week intensive summer course before being allowed to teach a particular course.  There is regular monitoring of schools in terms of offering a minimal 3-course sequence of engineering courses and evaluating how well these courses are being taught.

In computer science we have really never had such a program available.  The AP is not such a program.  If a school wants to teach a computer science course, they have to find a teacher who is willing to put together a course syllabus, and then teach that course.  (For AP, the course must be audited for fidelity).  There really isn’t any professional development required to teach any kind of computer science course in most states.

So if a principal wants to expand his/her school’s  academic elective offerings and is shown the PLTW complete program versus creating a computer science program from the many resources out there, which one is that principal going to pick?

Even though there is a substantial cost for PLTW, in most cases this is paid for out of Carl Perkins funds, so in most cases, the principal will take the easy route and take complete program.  This happens again and again at schools in the Milwaukee area, some of which had pretty exciting computer science programs until most were cut for a variety of reasons.  PLTW fits well into CTE.  Computer science has most often chosen to avoid CTE, so the Perkins money goes with PLTW.

We have a start:  the Exploring Computer Science with it’s great, free curriculum and excellent PD.  However even this doesn’t go far enough – the curriculum doesn’t require that teachers get the PD, so there is no way to know if schools teaching Exploring CS are teaching it with fidelity.  This is exactly opposite the PLTW model where teachers are required to follow the curriculum.

Some years ago I mentioned the PLTW model to “higher powers” dealing with CS education and was ignored.  Now that PLTW is piloting their complete curriculum for the APCS Principles course with their required PD and their regular evaluation, perhaps more will take notice of this model.

I’m sure PLTW is already considering additional computer science courses at the high school level and computer science experiences at the middle school level.  All will have high quality curriculum, PD and monitoring as part of their model.  This may not be the total answer (it is expensive), but certainly moves toward a high quality computer science experience for high school students that we all crave.

(For the record, I am not associated with either PLTW or Exploring Computer Science).

“This paper points to problems in the theoretical underpinnings of dominant US Education and workforce definitions of STEM, while presenting a broader conceptual framework for practitioners to understand STEM in terms of innovation.  Today, exigent labor market requirements are for STEM-based skills across many jobs not typically classified as STEM.”

http://www.ventureramp.com/downloads/careerandadultedev.pdf

The shortage in our minds is really in certain segments of the population. To be sure there is an undeniable and very real shortage in the number of females studying and in engineering and computer science careers. There is also an even more extreme shortage in the number of males and females of color in both of these fields. These are certainly shortages that need to be rectified for a number of reasons.

Just today in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel there was a featured story of an all-girls high school engineering class being offered in Kewaskum, WI, about .40 miles north-northwest of Milwaukee, WI. An early paragraph in the article really “says it all” about the shortage in this case of females in engineering.

Women comprise more than 20% of engineering school graduates but only 11% of practicing engineers, according to the National Science Foundation. Only about 30% of the 14 million Americans who work in manufacturing are women, a study from the National Women’s Law Center noted.

This article which interviews the teachers and creators of this class as well as engineers and collegiate engineering faculty is definitely worth taking a look at. These shortages are very real.
<http://www.jsonline.com/business/kewaskum-high-school-launches-all-female-engineering-class-b99101148z1-224720152.html>

Note: This blog post is very US-centric, though Charette does have links to similar types of reports from various countries at the beginning of the article. I invite readers from outside the US to either comment or offer to write a guest blog looking at their country’s situation.

Needless to say the title piqued my interest. One issue that Mr. Charette discusses is how STEM jobs are defined and therefore what various statistics really mean. Definitions of STEM jobs range from 7.6m (US Dept of Commerce) to 12.4m (NSF)

While most of his article revolves around the group of sectors that make up STEM he does in a couple of cases refer specifically to computer science and information technology. For example

“Even in the computer and IT industry, the sector that employs the most STEM workers and is expected to grow the most over the next 5 to 10 years, not everyone who wants a job can find one. A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a liberal-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C., found that more than a third of recent computer science graduates aren’t working in their chosen major; of that group, almost a third say the reason is that there are no jobs available.”

Given the projections we’re all aware of (that there are about 150,000 CS/IT new and replacement positions opening each year on average from 2010-2020), and that we’re graduating only about half that number, why is there such a discrepancy?
I decided to take a look at the EPI study “Guest Workers in the high-skill US Labor Market” published April 24, 2013 to see what I could learn. <http://www.epi.org/publication/bp359-guestworkers-high-skill-labor-market-analysis/>

“What is surprising is that there are still 50 percent more graduates (in computer science and engineering) than the number who enter occupations related to their professional degrees.

“IT workers, who make up 59 percent of the entire STEM workforce, are predominantly drawn from fields outside of computer science and mathematics, if they have a college degree at all. Among the IT workforce, 36 percent do not have a four-year college degree; of those who do, only 38 percent have a computer science or math degree, and more than a third (36 percent) do not have a science or technology degree of any kind. Overall, less than a quarter (24 percent) of the IT workforce has at least a bachelor’s degree in computer science or math. Of the total IT workforce, two-thirds to three-quarters do not have a technology degree of any type (only 11 percent have an associate degree in any field).4

“…it is clear that the IT workforce actually draws from a pool of graduates with a broad range of degrees.”

Interesting and confusing stuff to say the least. The EPI article does an extensive analysis of Guest Workers as its title suggests and finds that (apparently) there are conservatively 165,000 guest workers each year allowed into CS/IT positions which combined with domestic CS/IT grads far surpasses the average yearly projection for new and replacement CS/IT positions.

Wow – I’m really confused now – maybe somebody will help me out??? Maybe I’m just missing something obvious.

Getting back to Mr. Charette, he finally concludes with what he believes is the real STEM “shortage”.

“Rather than spending our scarce resources on ending a mythical STEM shortage, we should figure out how to make all children literate in the sciences, technology, and the arts to give them the best foundation to pursue a career and then transition to new ones. And instead of continuing our current global obsession with STEM shortages, industry and government should focus on creating more STEM jobs that are enduring and satisfying as well.”

If you’re interested, you may want to surf to the article on the IEEE website and read through the comments posted on his article – most interesting…

I added a slide showing the use of the resource on NCWIT.org entitled “Computing Education and Future Jobs: National, State & Congressional Data”. I had highlighted the congressional district in which were were meeting and grabbed a screen dump.  This graphic clearly showed that the current pipeline of computing students in this Congressional district would only cover 27% of the projected computing jobs in this area.

They were astonished.  Many have requested more information on this site. Here is the NCWIT site:< http://www.ncwit.org/edjobsmap>
I think you’ll find that in nearly all congressional districts across the US, there is a shortfall, just as the national stats that Mr. Wilson’s slides depict. By the way, here’s a link to Cameron Wilson’s very informative slide set: http://www.acm.org/public-policy/2012_CS_Slides_Aug.pptx

Enjoy the rest of your summer.

“In our houses, cars, and factories, we’re surrounded by tiny, intelligent devices that capture data about how we live and what we do. Now they are beginning to talk to one another. Soon we’ll be able to choreograph them to respond to our needs, solve our problems, even save our lives.”

ISTE 2013 (The International Society for Technology in Education) had about 17,000 attendees probably 80% K-12, the rest post-secondary.  While most of this conference deals with using computing technology in K-12 classrooms, there were about 80 sessions which were of interest to the SIGCT  special interest group.  Specifically for Computer Science there were 13 activities that involved computer science (including several BYOD sessions, for example) and 8 more activities related to teaching IT.  While the number of CS sessions are much greater at other conferences like CSTA, attendees get involved in other SIGs which might be of interest to computer science and information technology folks such as the SIGs for Teacher Education, Technology Coordinators, Administrators, Games and Simulations and others.

There is interest in computer science within ISTE.  I don’t know about other computer science sessions, but a BYOD on Scratch was full with about 120 attendees and about 40 additional who waited in line to get in (unfortunately few of those did).

I’m heavily involved in the SIGCT and as part of our activities our SIG held a Forum and a Playground both of which featured CyberSecurity which is a very hot topic in San Antonio.  With the second highest concentration of certified information security professionals nationally, the city has been working since 2002 to build educator-industry partnerships and get more students educated in computer science, IT and CyberSecurity.  The 24th Air Force (the AF component of Cyber Command) just located their headquarters in San Antonio in part because of the strong talent pipelines in the region.

San Antonio has 54 schools which are involved in a national competition called Cyber Patriot http://uscyberpatriot.org where kids use both IT as well as computer science skills.  We also learned that Computational Thinking plays a big part in not only that competition but in schools which have made CyberSecurity a priority in their curriculum.  Several high schools and colleges with CyberSecurity programs exhibited and involved participants at the SIGCT Playground including the UT San Antonio Center for Infrastructure Assurance and Security (CIAS), Alamo Colleges’ ITSA (Information Technology and Security Academy) as well as student and faculty representatives from St. Philips College and Southwest, Holmes and Jay High Schools in San Antonio.

It turns out that CyberSecurity and computer forensics both involve a lot of computer science, particularly significant problem solving and programming, along with significant IT components.  I am aware that there are several collegiate programs in Computer Forensics and CyberSecurity, but I didn’t know how extensive this was at least in the San Antonio area (http://cybercityusa.org/home) and indeed much of Texas.  This is certainly an area that both high schools and colleges consider for their programs.  I know that recently the NSA has made appearances at CSTA, NCWIT and Grace Hopper conferences looking to get involved with computer science advocacy, because areas such as CyberSecurity are of great interest to our armed forces, our government, and should be  to us.

More information is on the CS Ed Week site: http://www.csedweek.org/m/kt1g4rn2/html
including a press release and an overview of the legislation.

If you haven’t already subscribed to the CS Ed Week page (if you received information about this piece of legislation, then you are subscribed), you should do so by scrolling down the page noted above and click on Subscribe.  As you’ll see you’re subscribing to Computing In The Core.  CSEdWeek is an activity of the Computing in the Core coalition.

Please support this legislation and encourage others to do likewise.