A New Pedagogy to Address the Unacknowledged Failure of American Secondary CS Education

Abstract

As the new decade begins, by most accounts, it would appear that CS education in American public high schools is doing well. Visit classrooms and you'll find students working with robotic sensors, writing games and animations in Scratch, interfacing with Arduino microcontrollers, constructing websites, and building apps with MIT App Inventor. Groups like CSTA (Computer Science Teachers Association) and CSforAll, whose missions are to support and expand high-quality, rigorous and demographically equitable secondary CS education, proudly announce that more students, particularly young women, have taken AP Computer Science1 than ever before, ascribing the uptick to the new AP CS Principles course, e.g., Recent Good News on Participation and Opportunities for Young Women Studying Computer Science. [24].