UM professors try to give computing broader appeal

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Professors from two University of Maryland campuses are hoping to draw more women and minorities into the field by implementing a new high school course across the state.

“There are many schools in Maryland where the only computer class is keyboarding,” said Marie desJardins, professor of computer science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “Our goal is to get college-preparatory computer science classes in every school in Maryland.”

DesJardins teamed up with Jan Plane, a computer science professor at the University of Maryland, College Park to develop a course that will prepare high school students for a new Advanced Placement Computer Science Principles exam that will be offered by the College Board at the end of the 2016-2017 school year.

Working with an $845,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, desJardins and Plane worked with a group of teachers last year to develop a curriculum that Maryland teachers can use to prepare students for the test. Some teachers have already taught pilot version of the class, and another 27 teachers are being trained this summer to teach pilot classes in the coming school year, desJardins said.

While computer science classes traditionally focus almost exclusively on the computers themselves — on programming language and skills — the new course has a broader focus. Students will learn some programming, but will also study the foundational principles of computing and discuss how data can be analyzed and used to solve real-world problems.

That focus on real-world applications is intended to make computer science more appealing to a broader range of students, including females and the African-American and Hispanic populations, which are typically underrepresented in the field, said Plane, who is also the director of the Maryland Center for Women in Computing.

There’s also a social stigma surrounding children who are interested in computing, particularly girls, but if students are shown how broad the applications of computer science can be, they’re more likely to find an area of the subject that interests them, Plane said.

Interest in computer science at the college level has spiked in recent years; the number of students majoring in computer science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, has increased 65 percent over the past eight years, desJardins said.

In the fall 2014 semester, 2,262 UMBC undergraduate students were majoring in computer science, computer engineering and information systems, according to the university.

At the College Park campus, Plane expects there will be between 2,100 and 2,200 computer science majors for the 2015-2016 year; two years ago, there were about 1,400 majors she said.

“We’ve gotten to the point where if you don’t possess computational thinking skills, you’re not able to [fully] participate as a citizen,” said Joe Greenawalt, one of two teachers who offered a pilot version of the class at North Point High School in Waldorf this past year.

Without an understanding of how to interpret data, it can be hard to know how to feel and how to react about current events, Greenawalt said, citing news reports about health risks as one example.

Student response to the pilot class was “very positive,” and the students performed well, he said.

Rather than just writing programs — which only some students show an affinity for — the students took data on topics such as public health, transportation, or pollution and were encouraged to think of questions that data might be able to answer, Greenawalt said.

The students then used their new programming skills to analyze the data; some even took a more creative path and used computing skills to develop music, he said.

Greenawalt said he expected the class would make computer science interesting for just about every student, not just a select few.

“I think the course will help a lot,” he said.