Obama wants CS taught in schools. MIT's former head of computer science knows where to start.

There has been a lot of recent discussion about introducing computer science earlier in schools.

New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio is pushing for CS education in all New York schools by 2020 and President Obama has spoken out about a national initiative. In fact, Obama has referred to computer science (pRogramming) as the “4th R” next to Reading, wRiting, and aRithmetic. 

There are many opinions and many challenges ahead. To help make sense of it, I turned to my friend and MIT colleague Professor John Guttag. John is a computer science professor and former Head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. He’s also a Fellow of the ACM and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. John teaches a highly popular online course on edX on computational thinking.

Anant Agarwal: Let me start by asking you John, do you agree that computer science is the 4th R? Is it as important as reading, writing, and arithmetic?

John Guttag: That’s a tough question. There is a limited amount of time for kids to study in school and I’d rather see them spend their time in elementary school on the old fashion 3 R’s. There is no gigantic rush to turn people into computer scientists. I do think it would be great if people got serious CS exposure in secondary school.

However, you can graduate from high school having never touched a computer and 4 years later leave college as a well-qualified computer scientist. So, while I think it would be great to push it down to secondary schools, I do not think it is necessary.

Anant: I’m surprised you aren’t waving the computer science flag from the rooftops like everyone else.

John: What flag is that? Computer science as a discipline isn’t well understood by most people. I suspect that if I were to ask Mayor De Blasio, Barack Obama, and Anant Agarwal what CS means I’d get three pretty different answers.

If by computer science were talking about people becoming skilled programmers, I think it’s incorrect to say that everyone in the world is equipped to become a coder. Think of it as analogous to arithmetic: pretty much everybody can learn to add and subtract, but that doesn’t mean that everyone can be a mathematician. Similarly, there‘s a big difference between knowing how to use computational tools – Excel, for example – and being a computer scientist. 

A lot more thought needs to go into what we are trying to accomplish; particularly at the elementary or secondary school level. Are you trying to identify and maybe give a head start to those people who go on to be successful computer scientists or are you trying to bring most of the population to the level where they can make use of computational tools?

As an educator, I think computational thinking is a critical skill in our society. But when I hear leaders like Obama and De Blasio talk about computer science, I do not hear any discussion at that level of complexity.

Anant: In your view, what is the difference between coding and computational thinking?

John: Let me put it in the context of science to start with. For many years people have talked about a distinction between experimental science and theoretical science. Experimental science would involve lab work in biology, for example. Theoretical science meant building mathematical models and using those to make predictions about the real world. 

Today, however, purely analytical models in science are being supplanted by computational models and simulations. People working in these sciences need to be able to understand what a computational model is, what you can and can’t do with it, and what conclusions you might be able to draw. That does not mean they need to sit down and code the model itself.

Now think of what happened in the business world. There was a period of time in finance where someone who was an accountant would go to a programmer and say please write this code to do this job for me. There would be a small group of people they would ask to write code for them. Today an accountant doesn’t do that  - she just brings up her own spreadsheet and does it herself because it’s easy enough. The computer scientist’s job is to build tools that will provide access to computational models for people who don’t necessarily have the skills to build the models with today’s tools. Over time it may evolve to a place where they can, so I think we will see an evolution there too.

Anant: Would it then be fair to say that computational thinking is about looking at real-world scenarios and coming up with a model for the problem, where the model can be processed by a computer?

John: Exactly. I think that is a very nice summarizing statement.

Anant: So, for the purpose of this discussion, lets assume that the goal is not to create a generation of Python coders. Rather, when we say computer science, what we are talking about is computational thinking. Do you think the U.S. is behind in bringing computational thinking and basic computer science into schools? 

John: It depends upon behind whom. I certainly think we are losing ground to the countries that we think of as our economic competitors. We have to think hard about what the right thing to do is.

I think over time anybody interested in a career in science or engineering including social sciences, economics, finance, and things like that is going to have to learn to think computationally. Whether or not they become a computer scientist, computation is such a powerful tool for understanding the world. Anyone who wants to understand any aspect of the world is going to have to learn to think computationally to do that properly.

Anant: Ultimately, what do you think the U.S. should do about teaching computer science?

John: What I worry about in the U.S. is that too many of the students who graduate from high school actively dislike math and science. And certainly many students graduate from high school having little sense of what engineering is about. I think the great advantage of introducing computer science or computational thinking into high schools is we can get young people excited – not only about computer science, but also about math and science in general.

If you go to a high school physics lab or a high school chemistry lab it is hard to have the students do creative things for safety, cost and other reasons. If you go into a properly designed high school computer science lab, however, the students can do creative things. I think that will build excitement and love of mathematics and science in general. That is what we need to do in this country.  That should be the goal, not just computer science for computer science’s sake. 

Read on for the second part of my conversation with Professor Guttag in which we discuss coding boot camps, inspiring learner stories, the skills-gap and more.

Photo Credit: Melanie Stetson Freeman/The Christian Science Monitor via Getty Images