Can I Order Some Hash Browns Please?

This week is Computer Science Education Week ...I have been all over the internet and back and I found an awesome article yesterday.  It seems those people at MIT are addressing some of what I stated in my letter to the editor months ago.  You see whether we realize it or not we live in a technologically illiterate society.  I also got fired up about the so true negative stereotype of the "programmer" but I will save that for another blog.  If you missed the letter, it was in the August 19, Enterprise Newspaper.  


In my letter I talked about the lady trying to order french fries...only it wasn't french fries, it was hash browns and it really happened.  She was clueless about what to do since there was no "person" to check in with and only a touch screen and there was no one around to help her.  I did come to her rescue but it made me wonder about others like her.  I can imagine that someone could be overwhelmed and may just give up and end up leaving without their hash browns because frankly, they do not want to embarrass themselves by having to ask how to use the technology.  Sound familiar...if not you might need to do some research on illiteracy.

There is another side to this though.  The literacy isn't just the use of the "tool" because someone has to be able to know how to maintain it.  The internet is a perfect example of this.  Many people use the internet but few people know or understand what the internet really is.  Using something isn't the same as understanding something.  For example, if you were studying to be an architect and you go to Rome, you would not become a good architect by just by looking at and walking in/out the buildings.  You need to absorb their history, the materials, their structures and what the designers were thinking.  It is only by teaching technical literacy that our children will be able to build the foundations for future technologies. 

Conveying that the "T" in STEM education should be for literacy in Technology isn't so easy.  I had a STEM teacher tell me once when I asked about technology in the classroom that the students will have computers.  I wanted to ask "So are they going to take them apart and rebuild them?".  I knew that was not the case but really I had to bite my tongue to not ask.  It was puzzling to me though because the year before the school had canceled their only elective technology class.  I am sure it is funding, space or something but it still bothers me as to how a middle school who just gets a STEM program at their school decides to cancel an elective computer class.  But I was unfamiliar with the class so it is possible that they were just using the computers and not teaching literacy.  In that case, you might as well just use the computers in the library. 

Ok, so back on track...the article.  At MIT, they have developed a program called Scratch that is aimed at teaching programming to secondary education students.  Funded by the National Science Foundation, it is a environment similar to some of the communities that children can find out on the web (with parent approval) for sharing and playing games.  The major difference here is that while playing and creating, the kids are learning programming skills.  I checked it out a bit with my 11 year old and it looks to be pretty cool.  Conceptually it is similar to the Alice program and Storytelling Alice at Carnegie Mellon University but geared towards the younger set.  It definitely will open some new doors for making Computer Science cool for kids.

Computer Science Education Week http://www.csedweek.org/
Computer Science Teachers Association http://csta.acm.org/
MIT Scratch Project http://scratch.mit.edu/
Carnegie Mellon University's Alice Project http://www.alice.org/
National Science Foundation http://www.nsf.gov/
Referenced Article http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=116070&org=NSF&from=news