Draft curriculum adds important building blocks
Computer science lessons key for future, Cathy Adams, Mike Carbonaro, H. James Hoover and Paul Lu say.
Long-term economic diversification is grounded in a strong and agile K-12 and post-secondary educational system. Alberta needs a well-educated workforce in computer science to attract high-tech companies, nurture homegrown startups, and provide continuing leadership in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other emerging technologies. Digital technologies are now found across all sectors — large corporations to small businesses, health care, education, community, and government services. Nearly every aspect of our personal and professional lives today involves advanced computing and communication technologies.
On March 29, Alberta's draft K-6 science curriculum was released with an important new addition: computer science. For over 25 years, a large community of Alberta teachers, stakeholders, and professors has worked toward a K-12 computer science curriculum for our province. We believe passionately that computational thinking and digital literacy are critical skills today and will continue to be well into the future.
A K-12 computer science curriculum, however, is not about raising a generation of coders. It is about developing a solid foundation in this 21st-century science for all of Alberta's children and youth. As part of the new K-6 science curriculum, students will acquire early building blocks for:
■ Problem-solving, computational, and logical thinking skills. For example, many tasks that we learn informally, like sorting a deck of cards or searching for a secret number between 1 and 1,000, can be expressed as standard algorithms. Once you understand the general solution, you see how it can be used in many other problems.
■ Creative design and early engineering skills. For example, asking the question, “can we do it differently?” led to replacing the physical keys on cellphones with icons on a touchscreen. Things that are impossible to do mechanically become possible with computing.
■ Ethical awareness and critical examination of the positive and negative impacts of technology. You need to understand the potential of a technology to appreciate how it can be used or misused. For example, can software be designed to better protect basic human rights such as privacy and equitable treatment?
■ The ability to work in diverse teams. Building software is a social activity. It is a continuous dialogue between users describing what they want to do, and developers figuring out how to do it. In this process, users develop a better understanding of what they really want to do, and developers often suggest possibilities that users never dreamed of.
What do these computer science building blocks look like in the new K-6 science curriculum draft? In the early grades, children will learn computational thinking skills like “decomposition,” which involves breaking a problem or task into more manageable chunks which can then be solved one after the other or allocated to members of a team.
Teaching early grades does not even require computers. An example of such an “unplugged” activity asks one child (the programmer) to give verbal, step-by-step instructions to another child (the robot) to get them to perform a simple task like walking a two-dimensional shape, such as a square or circle, on the school playground (thus combining computer science and math). Without knowing the goal of the task, the robot must follow each instruction exactly as given. Children quickly discover the importance of formulating precise and sequenced instructions.
By later elementary grades, students will learn a visual-based block coding language and use it to represent content area knowledge, for example, to create a simulation of the food web, build a simple model of planetary movement, or program a robot to navigate around an obstacle.
We need a generation of critical users and creators of digital technologies if we want to ensure that technological innovations result in positive social change. By starting in kindergarten, the draft curriculum demonstrates that Alberta Education understands that computer science is too important for our children's future to be an educational afterthought.