Introduction
Computer science is a hot major again. It had been in the doldrums after the dot-com bust a decade ago, but with the social media gold rush and the success of "The Social Network," computer science departments are transforming themselves to meet the demand. At Harvard, the size of the introductory computer science class has nearly quadrupled in five years.
The spike has raised hopes of a ripple effect throughout the American education system -- so much so that Mehran Sahami, the associate chairman for computer science at Stanford, can envision "a national call, a Sputnik moment."
What would a "Sputnik moment" entail today? Will the surge of students into computer science last, and could it help raise American educational achievement?
Debate at http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/06/15/computer-sciences-sputnik-moment?ref=opinion
Some taking part of the debate below:
Thinking Beyond the Bubble
Updated June 16, 2011, 02:24 AM
Vivek Wadhwa is a visiting scholar at University of California, Berkeley, senior research associate at Harvard Law School and director of research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @wadhwa.
As we learned from the last technology bubble — the dot-com era — high-flying tech careers can be very seductive. When students started reading about the young millionaires of that era, they flocked to computer science, and enrollments reached record levels. And then the bubble burst, and so did enrollments.
Social media apps are cool, but what do they have to do with saving the world?
We’re in the middle of a new bubble now, with a fresh set of millionaires. There is little doubt that this will burst and enrollments will drop again. And we’ll have another generation of students who joined computer science for the wrong reasons.
If we want a real Sputnik moment, we need to create the same demand — and excitement — we had for engineers and scientists in the ’60s, when it seemed that the nation’s survival was at stake. Parents encouraged their children to become scientists; the president told us it was a national priority; and we made huge investments. Science was sexy, chic and essential.
Social media apps such as the ones these kids want to learn how to develop are cool, but not earth-shattering. Students are flocking to computer science because they dream of being the next Mark Zuckerberg, not of saving the world. This burst of enrollments is the equivalent of a sugar high.
It is not that we don’t have real problems to fix. Our economy is still in a slump; greenhouse gases threaten to turn the earth into a giant steam room; scarce natural resources like food, water and oil have already become international flash points as the developing and developed worlds jockey for position to sustain or improve their standards of living. Drug-resistant bacteria threaten us with doomsday plagues. In other words, if there ever was a time for a Scientific Renaissance, now is it.
By the time these computer science majors graduate, we may be in the middle of yet another tech bubble, so these kids may do O.K. But we will not have made any progress toward fixing the real problems and may have celebrated for nothing.
Encourage More Hackathons
June 15, 2011
Jonathan Zittrain is a professor at Harvard Law School and a professor of computer science at the university's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He is a co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
Educating students or the general public about computer science isn't easy. Teaching theory can be interesting and mind-expanding, but it may be no more applicable in most people's lives and careers than high school algebra or calculus. Teaching specific programming languages for more concrete purposes can risk having students lose sight of the bigger picture, confining them to rote work without much prospect for intellectual growth.
The creators of many game-changing inventions were not computer science majors.
That bigger picture is what makes mastery of today's technology so special: unlike many other fields of endeavor, anyone with an idea can try it out and garner an audience around it without having to ink a business plan or raise prohibitive amounts of money. Thanks to PCs that run any software they're given, and an Internet that allows anyone to set up shop and start communicating with the world without having to do the equivalent of buying a television broadcast tower and license, we've seen amazing and disruptive ventures from humble beginnings.
Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web by writing the code for a browser and a Web server and seeing if the world wanted to take it up. No business model, venture capital rounds, or patents were involved. Ward Cunningham invented something called a wiki, where people could collectively edit a document. Jimmy Wales used it to create Wikipedia, a project that was considered foolish at first but has completely reshaped the way people document and share information about the world.
Even the Internet and PC came from unexpected origins. The inventors of the Internet protocol were experimenting; they didn't know what would be done with the network. The Internet didn't and doesn't have a "main menu," but rather, it is raw connectivity waiting for its users to do something with it -- to connect with one another.
The inventors of the first consumer PC -- Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs -- unveiled an Apple II in 1977 that had a blinking cursor instead of bundled software; other technologists were de facto invited to design applications and then share or sell them to one another. (Two years later, to Apple's surprise, the personal computer became a business when Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston invented VisiCalc, the first digital spreadsheet, and companies around the world suddenly craved PCs.)
What's notable about most of these and other game-changing inventions is that their creators mostly weren't computer science majors. They were self-taught or learned their craft through apprenticeship to other coders.
Computer science curricula that lack the spirit of exploration and experimentation -- that stick too closely to the textbooks, whether ones of theory or practice -- won't speed the overall pace of innovation. That's why all-night hackathons are good ideas: they encourage people to see that the world can be changed, and that a small but determined handful of people can do it.
Our challenge is to keep alive Sputnik's rallying cry in a world where coding is becoming more confined.
Sputnik itself was first tracked not by professionally trained astronomers but by bands of amateurs spread across the nation, heeding a call to build or acquire their own telescopes and to document what they saw. Our challenge is to keep alive Sputnik's rallying cry in a world where coding is becoming more confined. Web servers where new ideas might take root are consolidating under a few corporate hosts. Today's coders are naturally more interested in writing for the Facebook or Apple iOS platforms, where truly disruptive ideas can be banned or diminished by gatekeepers who want to protect their own business models, or are compelled to carry water for other regulatory purposes.
The reason to teach computer science isn't to turn everyone into a coder. It's to share the insight that today, more than ever, the world can be shaped by good and rigorous ideas hatched by "mere" teenagers or other outsiders, and that these ideas transcend technology.
There's a social and legal dimension to this as well. That's why computer science should include a look at the policy implications of the codes we forge. Moreover, computer science education shouldn't be limited to college. Programs like the Sprouts help make the craft available to everyone, empowering people to affect the world rather than merely marveling at shiny gizmos.
A Key to Critical Thinking
Updated June 15, 2011, 09:15 PM
Ed Lazowska holds the Bill and Melinda Gates chair in computer science and engineering at the University of Washington.
Students are starting to realize that advances in computer science are central to achieving many of our national priorities – in energy, education, health care, national and homeland security, scientific discovery and open government.
As more fields become information fields, "computational thinking” is necessary for success in just about any endeavor.
As more fields become information fields, facility with what we call "computational thinking” is necessary for success in just about any endeavor. Once, the principal qualification for a career in linguistics was the ability to speak multiple languages; but along came Noam Chomsky with transformational grammar, and the world changed. Once, biology was taxonomy; then Watson and Crick discovered that the human genome was a digital code that could be read, deciphered, modified and rewritten. Once, sociologists studied the formation, evolution and dissolution of cliques by paying undergraduates to participate in focus groups; today they mine half a billion users’ worth of Facebook data.
Computer science is a superb preparation for just about anything. And within technology industries, there are plentiful jobs. Those who choose to work in the computing field find it characterized by highly interactive teams that are focused on solving real life problems. The Dilbert stereotype is surely dead.
For students who want to change the world, there is no field with greater impact or leverage than computer science. Just take a look at the 2010 report by the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology, which characterized computer science as “arguably unique among all fields of science and engineering in the breadth of its impact.”
Despite all of this good news, we need a national re-commitment to education, innovation, science and engineering. All the facts suggest that we are losing our edge.
