“Frankly, being able to recruit an adequate talent of people remains a challenge,” said Dan Reed, corporate vice president of technology policy and strategy at Microsoft. “We would hire more people if we could find more people.”
Alfred Spector, vice president of research and special initiatives at Google, echoed Reed’s sentiments.
“We are limited in the progress of our field and its impact on other fields by really the lack of talent and the creativity that talent will bring forth,” said Spector.
Summit attendees and ed-tech stakeholders hope the Computer Science Education Act, introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives in July, will help bring the focus to computer science education in public schools. The legislation includes plans to fund grants to develop state computer science standards and curriculum, form training programs for computer science teachers, and review the current state of computer science education.
“The Computer Science Education Act is really about trying to drive that engine forward to focus national attention on the need for states to act,” Reed said.
Shelton said it’s important for the states to take notice.
“That is where the standards will be set. That is where the course requirements will be set. That is where they’ll make decisions about whether to spend the resources to recruit teachers with those kinds of credentials … [who] actually could help with this kind of curriculum,” he said.
Schnabel, however, said there are still two important roles that the federal government can play.
“One is to make sure that every time there is a STEM piece of legislation, that it is clear that computer science is part of that legislation. The second is to encourage the states, and where possible fund the states, to both plan and implement programs that will lead to computer science education being much more fully involved,” Schnabel said.
As panelist and Pennsylvania computer science teacher Tammy Pirmann pointed out, this dearth in computer science education might be owing to a lack of awareness. Pirmann approached the Philadelphia School Board last year and asked it to make computer science courses a requirement, which it agreed to do without argument.
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