I just returned from something called the Rebooting Computing Summit in sunny San Jose. The basic thrust of the three day exercise was to come up with new ideas about how we as a community can revitalize computing and restore the joy and beauty that was part of computing, but now seems missing. Data suggest that enrollments in computing and engineering are way down, the field appears boring to high school students, why?
My personal take on the problem is that computer science has lost its way. The vast majority of courses focus on theory that has little to do with the role of computing today. Our students may know differential equations and are able to prove that some algorithm is O(n2 + k), but can they write software. Very much like major industries that have been caught unprepared for the changes in software has wrought (e.g. music industry, newspaper industry), so is education having the rug pulled out from under it. When there is google, why does one need to sit in a room facing an instructor reading powerpoint slides. Between YouTube videos and google I can literally learn anything, in far less time than it takes me in a traditional class.
What to do? I believe the answer is problem-based learning. Give em an interesting problem and let them figure out what is needed -- learn it via YouTube and Google. Somewhere at the turn of the 20th century, our educational system got hooked on the german academic model, with fixed subdisciplines, just like we now have CS, EE, ME, CpE. However, what we forget is that much of the early education in America was open-ended, tutor and problem-based.
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