hi my name is Ashley Gavin and today I'm going to be talking about Computer Science Education uh but before I start I should probably tell you what computer science is because a lot of you probably heard the term computer science and you're like oh no please don't talk about that that sounds boring that sounds technical um but it's actually not really that bad so I'm just going to tell you what computer science is all about so to me my definition of computer science is that it's a medium for problem solving and self-expression so much the same way an artist when she goes to paint something she thinks about what does she want to paint and then translates that idea how it would come out and paint and paintbrushes uh a computer scientist does the same thing except they use the computer to build that product but let's talk about the cool Parts about computer science if you major in computer science you can go and work for one of these companies now one of the great some of the great things about these companies is you can get free food free laundry free haircuts they're very well paid and everyone thinks that you're a genius you tell your friends that you work there they think oh you must be really really smart another great thing about computer science is when you major in computer science you come out making a lot of money computer science and computer engineering are two out of the three top paying majors in college so if money is important to you that's something that you can get out of it if you're more into what matters in life happiness computer scientists are second in terms of job satisfaction in this country um first is professors so me as a computer science teacher I'm obviously the happiest of everyone um and these guys have a lot to be happy about I think more than that there's job security more than 1 million jobs in computer science are going to go unfilled and just so that you understand what a large number that is there are only going to be about 8 million college graduates over the next few years so by 2020 1.4 million jobs in computer science will open up but we're not going to fill the vast majority of those jobs um also that's the founder of Google Larry Page and his girlfriend uh just way really way too goodlooking for this guy so young men if you're interested in women computer science might be for you another great thing about computer science as a teacher everything that teenagers love is because of computer science video games as a product of computer science Wikipedia so that they can write their papers as a product of computer science the selfie is a product of computer science Kim Kardashian wouldn't have a career without the computer scientists that came up with the selfie yet despite this no one takes it and when I say no one I really mean absolutely no one if we look at all the jobs the new jobs in maths and Sciences that are going to emerge over the next few years 60% of them are going to be in computer science all the other sciences and maths combined physics biology chemistry won't add up to the number of jobs just computer science alone and yet only 2% of all math and science majors are pursuing computer science as a major over four or just under 400,000 students took uh the AP History test last year these are high school students the advanced placement exam less than 40,000 took the computer science exam that's a that's 10% and of that really small number only 15% of those students is embarrassing 15% are women and embarrassing 8% are students of color why why I just spouted the amazingness of computer science maybe some of you will want to go and take your first computer science course but why is no one taking computer science there are lots of reasons a lot of people say that it's the culture and yes the culture is a problem most people when you think of a computer scientist you think of a nerd in a basement coding all by himself you picture The Matrix you picture these guys not necessarily people that you want to hang out with although I'm sure they're very nice this is another shot of a computer science department that won a grant to fund Computer Science Education and they put this on their website and I imagine this is probably their most diverse class like this is the one that they are bragging about culture matters a lot but I actually think that teaching matters more and I think we can do more more quickly by changing the approach of teaching computer science so I'm going to do an informal completely unscientific poll um I'm going to ask you guys two questions and I want you guys to answer them so the first question is what most influenced your choice of field so if you're in college this is your major or what you think you're going to major in if you have a job this is your job uh the field that you work in and I want you to think about of these two which was the most influential on your choice number one you saw it on TV or in the media and you thought it looked cool or number two you tried it and you enjoyed it so who's in Camp number one like one person who's in Camp number two yes imagine that you tried the thing that you are going to do for the rest of your life probably and you enjoyed it now the next question I had a basic Elementary understanding of my field prior to college and I don't mean that you necessarily had a lot of knowledge about it but you kind of knew what you were getting into when you signed up for that introductory course when you got to college how many of you is that true the vast majority of people yeah um I replicated this on Facebook and I I I found the same results in an equally unqualified unscientific way but it makes a lot of sense that we do the things that we love and we familiar with them but as teachers we're not doing this we actually suck at this we suck at teaching computer science and by we I don't mean me I mean the United States I'm actually really qualified and that's why I'm standing up here but we reinforce those cultural stereotypes that I was talking about we alienate students and we keep them uninformed about what computer science actually is so at the primary Middle School level there is no computer science and a lot of people would make the argument why would a three-year-old need to know what computer science is but very young children are familiar with other Sciences they're familiar with Biology they go to the doctor they talk about these things the being a doctor is a field that they can see themselves in but there's no computer science curriculum at the middle school and higho or sorry the middle school and the primary school level so when you reach middle school and you're going through puberty and you're thinking about your future as an adult and you don't know what computer science is that's not something that you're going to picture for yourself in the future at the high school level it's a little bit better but still fairly abysmal only 50% of states offer computer science course as a credit that goes towards your graduation what 16-year-old is taking a course that does not count towards her graduation the kids that I showed you in the first couple slides right not normal high school kids and the problem is that even those that are teaching computer science we're not really sure if they're teaching real computer science and by what I what I mean by that is a lot of schools teach things like Facebook privacy settings Microsoft Word and they CL claim that those are computer science skills they claim that web design is computer science which it actually isn't so only a s subset of these schools are actually teaching real computer science and within those only the top math and science students are allowed to take it and Mo and a lot of them probably don't even know what it is and by the way computer science isn't math computer science were math it would be called math but it's called computer science and it's called that for a reason so just so you know a little bit more about me I majored in computer science s and got honors in computer science a school called binmar College then I went on to work as an engineer at a national security Lab at MIT and right now I teach some college level computer science at Wesleyan uh University you're probably like wow she sounds pretty smart she must be really good at math and science nope no very bad so let's look at my transcript from high school here I failed biology and had to argue my way out of summer school and I got straight C's and D's in other Ma and Sciences My overall GPA was not great um yet I was able to go into computer science and I was really good at it and I didn't even take math later on in life I still have never even taken pre-cal most of you probably have much higher uh math skills than me then we take all those kids we put them in a room and we show them this on their first day of class now let's imagine that you wound up there somehow you're not a top math or science student or even if you are you've never heard of computer science and you're surrounded by the most competitive kids in your school and then the teacher puts this on the projector this little monstrosity here how many of you might feel intimidated yeah because it's terrifying I've been coding for 10 years I still find this terrifying and just so you know a lot of this isn't pertinent information many of these things these students won't learn for a few months my colleagues in computer science some of them still don't know what that word means and it hasn't affected their job performance why are we doing this we need more engineers and yet we're pushing these kids out and trying to make this seem like it's an elite club for only the smartest people in the country computer science is not about numbers or random symbols it's not even really about code it's about problem solving and making really really cool things that's what I mean when I say that it's a medium so I've put together a focus on that Medium in education that I think will work better than the way we're currently teaching computer science so the first part of my philosophy is Project based learning computer science is the only subject where on day one you can walk into class and in 45 minutes you can program a video game no other class can do that so why wouldn't you do that right that's something that everyone is going to enjoy but the great thing about using Project based learning is that again computer science is not about coding it's about problem solving and I'll give you an example of what I mean let's say a student actually wants to build a video game like Mario where you know a little guy runs across the screen and jumps up on platforms and sort of jumps on bad guys the first thing that you have to figure out is the steps that make that possible how do I make this person jump when they reach the top how do I make them come back down what if something bumps into them along the way these are all considerations that you have to think about you don't code them first you think about them first then you think what the what are the worst case scenarios like what's a scenario that I haven't thought about yet how do I test the solution to make sure that it works that's all problemsolving skills that apply far beyond computer science and when you do Project based learning you can do that in your classroom another great thing about project- based learning is that computer science doesn't exist in a vacuum it it you can't do computer science for the sake of doing computer science you have to apply it to another field that's why it was made so when a student says well I don't really think I'm interested in that that doesn't really matter what are you interested in and let's apply computer science to it so I do a lot of Robotics work a lot of generative art a lot of video games music medicine things like this and that really brings in kids that thought they weren't interested in computer science another great thing about computer science is that you can share it with the world so how many of you are like a Humanities or social science major yeah so quite a few of you have you ever written a paper and told a friend about it and your friend was like whoa I want to read that paper and they actually read it like they actually printed it out you handed it to them they read it they gave it back to you one one person you're the first I've ever met the great thing about computer science is if you make an app it's on your phone and all of your friends are going to be playing it by the end of the day they're going to share with their friends they're going to be look at this cool thing that my friend made that gives you Pride that makes you feel empowered and that's sharing love of computer science and maybe those kids are thinking I want to do something like this relevancy is also super important because people think computer science is really really hard and it's not a lot of the things that are in the app store right now you could probably make by the end of your first computer science class so my students they actually built the iPhone game 2048 which was number one in the app store for a little while and they built it in 4 days so by the end of this they're thinking what else can I make what else can I get in the App Store and all this leads up to a feeling of empowerment they feel that they have the skills no matter what the problem is they can go and put those skills towards fixing that problem they use computer science as a way to express their ideas and it's not about numbers and symbols on a screen does this work it's all rainbows and fairies and unicorns Ashley but can I do this in my classroom and will it work yes definitely so we did this at girls who code where I was the founding curriculum director and I did a lot of work on like assignments and teacher training and thing like things like this but my proudest accomplishment was making this philosophy something real cuz I hadn't seen it in many places and what we found was that it worked actually better than the computer science curriculum that already exists out there uh that our that our country uses in the public educational system so what we did was the computer science AP course is supposed to prepare you for college so what we did is we took a bunch of college questions from top universities exams Carnegie melon MIT uh Stanford and we put them all in an exam and our students took it at the end of the year and then we compared their grades to the computer science exam so the AP students did way worse than our girls our girls more than doubled the amount of A's and had like a quarter of the amount of fs and this is a pretty large sample we're talking about 500 kids from all different backgrounds the vast majority had never done computer science before and didn't even identify as a future computer science major in terms of self-efficacy we did a great job 10% came in men wanting to major in computer science and 100% left either majoring in computer science or related field the vast majority 88% majoring in computer science what if all teachers did this what if we weren't the only people doing this how would the world change what would it look like the economic impacts are obvious we'd have less of a jobs crisis pretty much anyone who wanted a job could get one but what about building your own business what if you have another passion that isn't computer science but is related to computer science if you're running your own business you can build your own app you don't have to wait for a technical co-founder you can just go out and do it if you want to build your website you can if you want to do marketing you can you don't have to spend that extra cash and you can get a custom solution my friend works at Urban Outfitters and uh she said to me I want to learn how to code I was like me the Evangelist of computer science I was like how is that relevant to your job she was like well I thought about this and really it's not about the product anymore like we have a lot of products the problem is finding the person who wants to buy it she's a buyer at Urban Outfitters and she said rather than trying to find the product that everyone wants to buy why don't I just find the people that want to buy what I already have so she can use custom computer science and do that in-house and probably get a promotion at her job if you are interested in medicine or curing diseases computer science you you just can't do that without computer science anymore I don't know if you've heard this but cells are like really small um and they're hard to by hand analyze so using computer science you can write scripts to cure diseases and I just taught my friend uh how to code so that she could try and cure CLE cell anemia that's the problem that she's working on so basically I'm curing CLE cell anemia I'm a stand-up comedian and I found that when I told jokes I thought you know oh I did really great or I did did really bad and then I'd he someone else say talk about their jokes and they were like I did fantastic and I thought oh man you really sucked I don't know how you thought that and I realized it's so subjective so I wrote code to analyze audience response and to build sets for me so that my set is the best possible set for a certain amount of time and I I'm really I'm funny I can't prove it but I am and I think this is the way that computer science can change your life and the way that you feel as an individual not just in your job or in school but have you ever woken up and had an idea or you're using a piece of technology and you're like I wish it did this and then what happens it just floats away Gone Forever the everyone invented DVR before they invented DVR then we had to wait a whole bunch of years for a computer scientist to come up with that idea and actually implement it so computer science is about taking ideas and making them realities that's what it's about so these are some quotes from my students and the way that computer science impacted their lives digital Wesleyan was one of the most valuable experiences of my life I learned so much and I feel far more empowered to make a difference than before this was not a Habitat for Humanity trip we didn't spend 10 days in like a cave together bonding this was computer science that made him feel like he could go out into the world and do whatever he wanted to do that is amazing learning to code changed my perception of myself from a Wisher to a doer now I'm empowered to do the things I want and I don't have to wait for anyone else to do them this is a quote from a 16-year-old girl the same girl taking that selfie following Kim Kardashian on Instagram said this after taking a computer science course this is the this isn't just about even if she never does computer science I know she's doing it every day in her life choices she's empowered herself um this one I just put up there because if you're not convinced by the talk it's a testimonial from one of my students so let's go back to the root of computer science this is a picture of the eniac the first computer and what it was used for was during World War II to make different kinds of calculations they didn't build it to make Snapchat they didn't build it to make Twitter they built it to save lives they saw a problem and they needed a solution and so they came with this and just so know little fun fact all the first programmers were all women because all the men were serving in the war um lady aah Loveless uh she's the first ever computer programmer she actually lived during the 1800s early to mid 1800s and she worked with a man named Charles babage who invented the first idea of a computer it never got made um because it was way ahead of its time and they couldn't get the funding but it was called the analytical Engine and lady adah Loveless thought oh my gosh I could make stuff with this she didn't say that I'll give you the exact quote but she was the first programmer because she figured out that she could use this machine to build the things that she imagined in her mind and the quote was the analytical engine on the contrary is not merely adapted for tabulating the results of one particular function and of no other but for developing and tabulating any function whatever in fact the engine may be described as being the material expression of any indefinite function of any degree of generality and complexity any idea you have you can make it doing computer science and that's what this Innovation was about it was about expressing yourself so rather than showing our kids this in the first day of class let's try another approach let's ask them if you could make anything what would you make and that's my approach to teaching computer science thank you [Applause] w