A+ College Ready has been working over the last year or so to create materials, training, and study sessions for students and teachers in computer science. The team has worked to get the state Board of Education’s approval for computer science to be allowed as a math credit for graduation. We are making progress in helping our students be competitive in the global marketplace.
Hadi Partovi is head of Code.org, and he is a champion of computer science in high schools. Partovi served as an investor or advisor to several leading tech companies including Facebook, Dropbox, and airbnb. Alabama was mentioned several times in Hadi Partovi’s testimony before the US House of Representatives Committee on Science and Technology. In his remarks, he promoted the goal of giving every student in the U.S. access to Computer Science as part of their K-12 educational experiences.
Last month, over 17 million students across the United States participated in the Code.org sponsored “Hour of Code” campaign, which gave students their first taste of computer science. Partovi stated that, “This stunning result shows students clearly want to learn computer science, and we know that there is strong demand for these skills in the workplace.” In Alabama, there were 185 schools participating in the Hour of Code, which included almost 20,000 students.
Partovi testified about how Computer Science is not a first-class concept in most schools, despite the software industry being one of the hottest employment sectors in the United States. He stated that, “Computer science is simply not part of what we call the ‘core’ curriculum in our schools. It is an afterthought. As a result, cohort after cohort of students are being denied the knowledge and skills they need in our increasingly digital world. Our K-12 schools teach students how to dissect a frog, or how electricity works — it’s time they also taught how to ‘dissect an app’, or how the Internet works.”
Alabama was congratulated for being one of 6 states in 2013 that “flipped from treating Computer Science as an elective to allowing it to count toward a mathematics and/or science course.”
Partovi’s testimony included the following revealing facts about Computer Science in Alabama:
- There are 3,541 open computing jobs in the state
- This field is growing at 3.4 X the state average of other STEM fields
- There were only 541 Computer Science graduates to fill these jobs
- Only 26 high schools teach Computer Science
- 187,000 students participated in the Hour of Code in Dec. 2013 A+ College Ready is partnering with the ALSDE and the University of Alabama to train 50 new computer science teachers in the state by 2016. A new AP exam in Computer Science will be offered by the College Board and Alabama is positioning itself to be a leader in this new course.
Click here to read Partovi’s full testimony:
http://science.house.gov/sites/republicans.science.house.gov/files/documents/HHRG-113-SY14-WState-HPartovi-20140109.pdf
