Social discussion of CS in K-12

[Charles Schultz <sacrophyte AT gmail.com>]

A little while ago, I had a conversation with some of you about Mathematica being available on the Raspberry Pi. The Wolfram team has outdone themselves and went a step further and made Mathematica available online. They even upped the "cuteness" factor by including a Twitbot.

Mathematica is a crazy powerful tool, and the Wolfram language has the opportunity to open up new doors for young and enterprising young coders. I heard that Wolfram is doing something with Kenwood in the near future, but I am not clear on the details. The thought of the synergy between Unit 4 and Wolfram excites me to no end. :)

But it's not just pretty pictures and crazy computations - they have whole sections on Educational topics like Chemistry, Physics, Engineering and more.

And here is the crunch. We do not have enough resources in the classroom to go one-on-one with every student. It would be totally awesome to "extend" school beyond just the building and between 8am and 2:30 pm. But to do that, every single child would need some kind of access to online devices. We are getting closer, but we cannot assume this to be true. And in fact, when I think about "home environments", I wonder if some home environments have too many distractions.

How do we kick open the doors of creativity and opportunity for those that currently "have not"? Providing "tools" is a stop-gap, but I don't think it is the answer. After school tech clubs? For me, what it comes down to is encouraging, feeding, inspiring, or otherwise wetting the appetite of wonder, an insatiable curiosity about the world around us. If any person has that, no matter what their age, I think they will seek out the "tools" necessary to keep the flame of learning alive.

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Charles Schultz