Making Computer Science Fun Again

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Has anyone considered the possibility that its
just not fun anymore?
Don Knuth, October 11, 2006
Making Computer Science Fun Again
Informatics Education Europe II Thessaloniki,
Greece November 29, 2007
Eric Roberts Professor of Computer Science,
Stanford University Past Chair of the ACM
Education Board
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The Crisis in Computing Education

• As everyone has now been aware for some time,
  computing enrollments in the United States and
  most of Europe have plummeted since 2001.

• This drop is of significant economic concern
  because those same countries are training far
  fewer people than they need to fill the available
  positions. In the United States, there are now
  many more jobs in the IT sector than there were
  at the height of the dot-com boom, with all
  projections pointing toward continued growth.

• This decline has been even more rapid among women
  and minority students, reducing diversity as the
  pool shrinks.

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Reframing the Issue

• All too often, those of us who teach computing
  have looked at the declining interest in the
  discipline as an enrollment crisis.

• This characterization is self-defeating and makes
  it harder to attract allies to our cause.
• In a typical university, every department wants
  to increase its enrollment, and we become merely
  another player in a parochial game of resources.
• The real concern is that we have a pipeline
  crisis in that we are producing far too few
  graduates to fill the growing number of positions
  that require computing skills. Judging by
  demand, we were producing too few graduates even
  at the top of the boom.
• Failure to respond to the pipeline crisis will
  place significant constraints on the computing
  industry and compromise national competitiveness.

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A Graphic Indication of the Shortage
Graphic created by Greg Lavender at the
University of Texas.
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BS Degrees in Computer Science
SOURCES
Susan T. Hill, Science and Engineering Degrees
1966-96. Report number NSF 99-330.
National Center for Education Statistics, Digest
of Education Statistics, March 2002.
The last five years represent an interpolation
based on the CRA Taulbee data.
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The Conventional Wisdom

• Just as pretty much everyone now recognizes the
  existence of an enrollment crisis, most everyone
  has a favorite totalizing explanation. The
  leading theories include
• Fears about job security after the dot-com bust
  and offshoring
• Negative images of those who work and study in
  the field
• A broken curriculum that does not appeal to
  todays students

• While there is truth behind each of these
  theories, none of them can serve as a
  comprehensive explanation of the student behavior
  we see today. Even when taken together, these
  theories overlook several important factors that
  are at least as important as underlying causes
  for enrollment decline.

• The factors that lead to declining enrollments
  are complex and highly interconnected. Solving
  the problems depends on developing a better
  understanding of those factors and how they
  interact.

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Outline

• I will start by examining the three most
  prevalent theories

• I will then consider three additional
  possibilities

• I will conclude by offering some ideas about how
  we might address these problems.

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Myths of a Jobs Crisis Persist
There is no shortage of evidence that people
believe the myths about the lack of jobs and the
danger of outsourcing.
Why would any smart American undergrad go into IT
when companies like IBM and HP are talking of
stepping up their off-shoring efforts in the
coming years? They want cheap labor, no matter
the real cost.
I have been very successful in IT, but I
certainly wouldnt recommend it today to anyone
except people who are geeks. . . .
I think the latest figures from the U.S.
Department of Labor are not correct.
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But Data Show Job Prospects are Excellent

• Although there was a slight dip in IT-sector
  employment after 2000, recent data show that this
  decline ended quickly and that there are now more
  computing jobs than at any time in history.
• Projections from the Bureau of Labor Statistics
  indicate strong growth over the next decade

• Money magazine identified software engineer as
  the 1 job, anticipating employment growth of 46
  over the next decade.

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A Thought Experiment about Offshoring

• Suppose that you are Microsoft and that you can
  hire a software developer from Stanford whose
  loaded costs will be 200,000 per year. Over in
  Bangalore, however, you can hire a software
  developer for 75,000 per year. Both are equally
  talented and will create 1,000,000 annually in
  value. What do you do?

• Although the developer in Bangalore has a higher
  return, the optimal strategy is to hire them
  both. After all, why throw away 800,000 a year?
• Any elementary economics textbook will explain
  that one hires as long as the marginal value of
  the new employee is greater than the marginal
  cost. The essential point is that companies seek
  to maximize return, and not simply to minimize
  cost.

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Unravelling the Paradox

• The enormous gulf between perception and reality
  about the strength of the job market in computing
  is surprising.

• Myths tend to persist for a long time only when
  it is in the interest of powerful constituencies
  to maintain the mythology. In this case, every
  easily identifiable constituency would like to
  dispel the misconception
• Companies want to hire more workers in the area.
• Governments want to enhance economic
  competitiveness.
• University computing departments want to attract
  more students.
• Students themselves would presumably like to find
  greater job security.

• After thinking about this issue for some time, I
  believe that the final assumption may be
  incorrect
• Talking about job security does not seem to boost
  the number of majors.
• Students are often most captivated by
  high-risk/high-return employment.
• The prospect of wealth is often a more potent
  motivator than stability.
• Enrollments track the NASDAQ, not the Bureau of
  Labor Statistics.

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The Single Best Enrollment Predictor
A statistical analysis undertaken by my
colleague, Mehran Sahami, found that 88 of the
1993-2003 enrollment variance at Stanford can be
explained by the NASDAQ average of the preceding
year.
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The Image Problem

• There is no question that both computing work
  (and computing students and workers) have a
  negative image. The prototypical image of the
  pocket-protector-wearing, socially inept geek
  is deeply ingrained in our culture.

• The problem with positing image as the reason
  for the current decline is that it fails to
  explain the high enrollments of the boom years.
  The cultural images at these two different times
  were largely the same, leading one to conclude
  that
• Rich geeks are cool.
• Well-paid geeks with high job security are
  boring.

• Studies of current student interests supports
  this theory
• Economics and business majors are generally on
  the rise.
• Hedge-fund management and investment banking are
  top career choices.
• The resurgence of the NASDAQ has caused
  enrollments to rebound.

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Google Buys YouTube for 1.65 Billion
Dot-Com Boom Echoed in Deal to Buy YouTube By
ANDREW ROSS SORKIN Published October 10, 2006
A profitless Web site started by three
20-somethings after a late-night dinner party is
sold for more than a billion dollars, instantly
turning dozens of its employees into paper
millionaires. It sounds like a tale from the late
1990s dot-com bubble, but it happened
yesterday. Google, the online search behemoth,
agreed yesterday to pay 1.65 billion in stock
for the Web site that came out of that
partyYouTube, the video-sharing phenomenon that
is the darling of an Internet resurgence known as
Web 2.0. YouTube had been coveted by virtually
every big media and technology company, as they
seek to tap into a generation of consumers who
are viewing 100 million short videos on the site
every day. Google is expected to try to make
money from YouTube by integrating the site with
its search technology and search-based
advertising program.. But the purchase price
has also invited comparisons to the mind-boggling
valuations that were once given to dozens of
Silicon Valley companies a decade ago. Like
YouTube, those companies were once the Next Big
Thing, but some soon folded.
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The Curriculum Has a Second-Order Effect

• The computing curriculum as traditionally
  implemented has clear deficiencies and could
  certainly bear improvement.

• As an explanation for declining enrollments, the
  curriculum is broken theory has serious
  shortcomings

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The Problem Starts Early
The UCLA HERI study shows that students have
already made their decisions before they reach
university.
Source Higher Education Research Institute at
UCLA, 2005
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Computing Faces Huge Challenges in Schools

• People who have software development skills
  command high salaries and tend not to teach in
  schools.

• In many schools, computing courses are seen as
  vocational rather than academic.
• Students who are heading toward top universities
  are advised to take courses other than computer
  science to bolster their admissions chances.
• Because schools are evaluated on how well their
  students perform in math and science, many
  schools are shifting teachers away from computer
  science toward these disciplines.
• Computing skills in generaland programming in
  particular have become much harder to teach.
• Teachers have very few resources to keep abreast
  of changes in the field.

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CS is Losing Ground

• The Computer Science exam is the only Advanced
  Placement exam that has shown declining student
  numbers in recent years.

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CS Is Tiny Compared with Other Sciences
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Complexity and Instability

• Complexity. The number of programming details
  that students must master has grown much faster
  than the corresponding number of high-level
  concepts.

The number and complexity of topics that entering
students must understand have increased
substantially, just as the problems we ask them
to solve and the tools they must use have become
more sophisticated. An increasing number of
institutions are finding that a two-course
sequence is no longer sufficient to cover the
fundamental concepts of programming.

Computing Curricula 2001

• Instability. The rapid evolution of the field
  creates problems for computing education that are
  qualitatively different from those in most fields.

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The March of Progress
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The Pace of Change

• The pace of changeparticularly in terms of its
  effect on the languages, libraries, and tools on
  which introductory computer science education
  dependshas increased in recent years.

• Individual universities and colleges cant keep
  up.
• In a survey by the Computer Science Teachers
  Association, secondary school teachers cited the
  rapid pace of change as the most significant
  barrier.

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The Vilification of Programming

• Those who argue most strongly for the broken
  curriculum theory often blame programming for the
  woes of the discipline, decrying the widely held
  view among students that

computer science programming
This view is indeed too narrow.
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Dangerous Trends
We have met the enemy and he is us.

Walt Kelly

• As an illustration of this trend, consider the
  following post that appeared on SIGCSE-MEMBERS on
  August 14, 2006

I have an idea for a panel that Id like to
organize for SIGCSE07. Im asking for
volunteers (or nominations of others) to serve on
the panel. The panel Id like to organize would
have a title something like Alternative
Models for a Programming-lite Computer Science
Curriculum The theme of the panel would be to
share ideas and thoughts on how we might reduce
(or eliminate) the emphasis on programming within
a computer science curriculum. The basic idea is
to cause discussion centered on the knowledge and
skills students of tomorrow will need in the
global economic workspace and the implications
for the CS curriculum. As more and more aspects
of software development of offshored, what kind
of curriculum would allow a student to be
successful in the IT field?
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Industry Is Not Amused

• Every technical person in the industry with whom
  Ive spoken is horrified by the prospect of
  reducing the emphasis on programming in the
  undergraduate curriculum.

• At the ACM Education Council meeting in
  September, a panel of technical people from
  companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and
  Boeing were united in their concern about the
  scarcity of competent software developers. I
  have summarized their position as the computing
  curriculum is not nearly as broken as it seems
  likely to become.

• Employers in developed countries with high-tech
  sectors are desperate for more people with
  programming talent. In his keynote at ITiCSE
  2007 in Dundee, Scottish entrepreneur Chris van
  der Kuyl said that the lack of programming talent
  was the greatest limiting factor in the industry.

He called it coding.
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Programming Remains Central

• As with many of the popular theories for
  declining enrollments, the call to reduce or
  eliminate programming from computing curricula
  arises from some undeniable assumptions
• There are more jobs in IT that dont require
  programming.
• Programming is not particularly popular with
  students today.
• Offshoring of programming jobs has increased.

• Unfortunately, this analysis ignores the
  following equally valid propositions
• There are more jobs in IT that do require
  programming.
• Programming has historically been what attracts
  students the most.
• Offshoring exists largely because of a shortfall
  of skilled employees.

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Programming Has Become Much Harder

• A very real part of the problem, however, is that
  programming has become significantly more
  difficult than it used to be, both because we use
  it to solve more challenging problems and because
  the tools we use have much more detail complexity.

• In her interviews with pioneers in the computing
  field, SIGCSE Chair Barbara Boucher Owens found
  that every person with whom she spoke got into
  the field because they were captivated by
  programming. That is happening much less often.

• We need to find a way not to reduce or eliminate
  programming from the computing curriculum, but
  instead to restore the sense of passion, beauty,
  joy, and awe that Grady Booch spoke about so
  eloquently in his keynote at SIGCSE last year.

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What We Need To Do

• Recognize that the problems extend well beyond
  the university.

• Press government and industry to improve
  computing education in schools.
• Increase public awareness of the range of
  opportunities.
• Forge alliances with industry to bolster the
  image of work in the profession.
• Expand efforts to increase diversity.
• Develop tools and materials that can be used off
  the shelf.
• Improve distribution channels for best practices.
• Promote interdisciplinary curricular connections.
• Continue experimentation in curricular
  strategies.
• Encourage research into new software paradigms
  that can make programming fun again.

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Positive Initiatives

• The National Science Foundation sponsored four
  regional conferences on Integrated Computing and
  Research (ICER) and has funded several proposals
  under a new Computing Pathways (C-PATH)
  initiative.

• Several ACM Education Board projects are proving
  helpful
• A brochure for high-school students
• The CC2001 series of curriculum reports
• The Computer Science Teachers Association
• A community effort to develop Java tools (the ACM
  Java Task Force)
• There are many interesting ideas in the community
  that are showing promise
• Mark Guzdials media computation course at
  Georgia Tech
• Stuart Regess back to basics strategy at the
  University of Washington
• Jeannette Wings computational thinking
  concepts
• The Alice Project developed at Carnegie-Mellon
• Various robot-based introductions
• Pair-programming strategies at a variety of
  schools

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Some Encouraging Signs
Matt Jacobsen, Senior, UC Berkeley
A common misconception is that many people think
CS means sitting in front of a computer all day
long. This may often be the case for programming,
but CS is a large field. There are many
applications that require CS skills that involve
little or no programming. . . .
From Dan Garcias Faces of CS web site.
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The End