The following is a guest blog post from Aaron Dubrow, Public Affairs Specialist for the Office of Legislative and Public Affairs (OLPA) at the National Science Foundation (NSF), and Gera Jochum, Communications Specialist for the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate at the NSF. Today, the White House hosted its first Summit on Computer Science for All to celebrate progress and announce new commitments for the initiative. As the lead Federal agency responsible for building the research knowledge base for Computer Science (CS) education, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced more than $25 million in awards since the initiative was launched just seven months ago. These new awards accelerate NSF’s ongoing efforts […]

The White House recently released their list of 100 examples of President Obama’s leadership in science, technology, and innovation. The list includes many computing related commitments such as supported millions of students with ConnectEd, created a new pipeline for well-paying tech jobs, and called for computer science education for all. The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) has contributed to many of these examples. #34 is the National Robotics Initiative (NRI). In June 2011, the Administration established the National Robotics Initiative to spur research and development in a variety of robotics applications, including healthcare, agriculture, manufacturing, space exploration, and national security. The CCC’s 2008 Robotics Roadmap was a key catalyst for the NRI and […]

Contributions to this post were provided by Andrew Ko, University of Washington. Andrew J. Ko is an Associate Professor at the University of Washington Information School and an Adjunct Associate Professor in Computer Science and Engineering. His research focuses on interactions between people and code, spanning the areas of human-computer interaction, software engineering, and more recently computing education. Ko maintains a blog called Bits and Behavior in which he muses “about software and the world’s attempt to understand it.” A recent blog post, however, was a little more personal and talked about his transition from studying developer tools and productivity to “shaping how developers (and developers-in-training) learn and shape their […]

This weekend the president unveiled a historic plan which will revolutionize the way students are taught in schools, by giving them a chance to learn computer science (CS). With the shifting economy, policy makers, business leaders, and educators are finally recognizing that CS is a basic skill necessary for economic opportunity and social mobility. This is a change that our community has recognized for many years. As we noted a few weeks ago with the release of our Computing Education Whitepaper, President Obama said in his final State of the Union Address, that “helping students learn to write computer code” was among his goals for the year ahead. A growing […]

The following is a blog post by Ran Libeskind-Hadas, R. Michael Shanahan Professor and Computer Science Department Chair at Harvey Mudd College, Co-Chair of CRA’s Education subcommittee (CRA-E), and former Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council Member and Debra Richardson, founding Dean of the UC Irvine Bren School of Information and Computer Science and CCC Council Member. Mayor Bill de Blasio announced this week that every public school in New York City- elementary through high school – must offer computer science courses to all students within ten years. It is estimated that fewer than 10% of schools in New York City currently offer a CS course and only 1% of students take such a course. CS will not be required of […]

The following is a blog post by Ran Libeskind-Hadas, R. Michael Shanahan Professor and Computer Science Department Chair at Harvey Mudd College and Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council Member, that was recently posted in the Huffington Post.  Here are three good reasons why every college student should take an introductory computer science course. First, computing has become an inextricable part of our lives. Understanding how computers and software work, what they can and can’t do, and their impact on society is, therefore, an important part of a modern liberal arts education. Second, computing is a creative endeavor at the crossroads of engineering, mathematics, psychology, and the arts. A well-conceived computer science course can integrate problem solving, […]