Is there an upside to the decline in computer science enrollment?

Chris Stephenson of the CSTA has some interesting comments at the CSTA blog about a possible upside to the recent decline in post-secondary computer science enrollments. Chris's most interesting statement is this one:

Dropping enrollments are providing a powerful and long-overdue incentive for reenvisioning computer science education.

I think she has a great point there. We've been largely teaching computer science and especially programming the same way since before I learned how to program almost 35 years ago.

Oh there have been some paradigm changes (structured programming into object oriented programming) but mostly we've used the same sort of techniques and even projects. There have also been some helpful experiments such as Karel the Robot and the Java version in Karel J Robot. There have been some IDE developments like BlueJ and DrScheme. The biggest development would probably be drag and drop programming environments like Alice and Squeak. These are all good things (well I'm not so sure that using Java as a first language is a good thing but if you must ...) The real problem is that most of these tools are not being fully utilized and the growth path is not always clear.

By that I mean that while you can learn good concepts with something like Alice it is a big step to move from their to solving the sort of problems people get paid to solve. This problem is not as great when using BlueJ (or the Class Designer in Visual Studio which is very much like building classes in BlueJ but supported for several languages other than Java) in that you are dealing with higher level languages from the start. On the other hand other then the actual creation of classes not a lot more is simplified in the process.

There is a lot more than can be done. A lot more in the way of new and better tools. A lot more in the way of different teaching methods (think Computer Science Unplugged and other kinesthetic learning activities) can be done. I think there is a lot more as well but there are two problems. One is that enough people are not working on the problem yet. The other is that once good ideas are developed it is difficult to train teachers to use them. Time, money and inertia are all in the way. We're not fully using the tools we have yet. And administrators don't seem to care enough to provide the support and incentives to teachers. Or so it appears to me.

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