Wyoming Passes Forward-Thinking Computer Science Education Bill

https://edscoop.com/wyoming-passes-forward-thinking-computer-science-education-bill

by sizzle • 8 years ago

96 59 8 years ago

"With a population of just 579,315, Wyoming is positioning itself to become a leader in one of the fastest-growing industries in the world: cybersecurity."

No it's not.

Outside of Jackson and environs it is frankly a miserable place to live. Imagine a wind-swept steppe petro-state inhabited by a mostly rural, extremely conservative population. Cold in the winter, hot in the summer, and perpetually windy. I could say "windy" 8 more times and it still wouldn't capture the reality. Like many states in this position, mostly rural, most jobs don't require a degree, almost everyone who gets one leaves for better pay, usually to Colorado.

I do believe that this bill is a great idea, but it's not going to magically transform their economy.

klint• 8 years ago

And Jackson is really expensive. Not quite Bay Area expensive yet, but Seattle area expensive. There are some parts of the state that are cheaper, beautiful, and less wind blown, like the Big Horn mountain area where I grew up. But they're still cold, conservative places dominated by the extractive industries. I got out as soon as I could.

It is nice to see the state making an effort to attract new industries, but it's really hard going. This Bloomberg article[1] sums it up pretty well: The small population is a bit of a chicken and egg problem. People don't want to live there because there are no jobs, and companies don't want to relocate there because there are no people.

There's also cultural resistance to new industry. People (men especially) want their coal and oil and timber jobs back, not these new high-tech jobs. It's not even that the populace isn't smart enough to do them--mining is actually a pretty technical field at this point. But there's a deep rooted perception that sitting at a desk all day isn't a "real" job.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-12-19/why-wyomi...

elcritch2• 8 years ago

There are some parts of the state that are cheaper, beautiful, and less wind blown, like the Big Horn mountain area where I grew up. But they're still cold, conservative places dominated by the extractive industries. I got out as soon as I could.

Personally I prefer the more conservative environs versus the often over-bearing liberal attitude which dominates the Bay Area or other large cities. Perhaps the cold wind blown regions help people keep a level head. ;) So it's a matter of perspective.

Regardless, there are a lot of beautiful parts of the state and the K-12 education in many parts of the state excels [1]. Partly thats due to taxes from the mineral extraction industries.

There's also cultural resistance to new industry. ... It's not even that the populace isn't smart enough to do them--mining is actually a pretty technical field at this point.

Unfortunately the cultural resistance to new industries does exist and dampens the development of new industries. Wyoming has a lot of talented industrially minded people. Many people grow up mechanically inclined due to the culture (here and surrounding states). This leads to younger Wyoming residents who are much more open to technology industries and looking for ways to stay in the state and willing to start businesses or create new technologies [2, 3]. There's also technology initiatives by the University of Wyoming, which due to the small population, have a impact across the state [4]. There is even some interesting deep learning research happening at the university in conjunction with a well known SV company [5].

All in all, the state has a small population but a relatively out-sized opportunities for those inclined to find them. Initiatives like the one in the article do make an impact here.

1: http://trib.com/news/local/education/wyoming-ranked-th-in-na... 2: http://wyomingpublicmedia.org/post/laramie-farming-start-has... 3: https://gizmodo.com/maximize-a-lazy-summer-afternoon-with-th... 4: https://thejournal.com/articles/2016/08/19/wyoming-and-new-h... 5: https://eng.uber.com/vine/

chasedehan• 8 years ago

Jackson is REALLY expensive, even for a ski town and even compared to the Bay Area. Plus, there aren't any jobs that would allow anyone to live there for the house prices.

monocasa4• 8 years ago

So I want to address the people downvoting you. Last summer I went to Big Horn. The town next to it was somehow more third world than where I'm from, the Deep South. Examples:

* Google maps told me to get off at Exit 29B. It turns out it was exit 298, just somehow Google maps had only OCRed the signs, and as of summer 2017 no one had cared to correct them.

* Screw LTE or 3G, somehow the city center only had 2G. Outside of the city, even with visible line of sight, there was simply no service.

* I ordered biscuits and gravy at a restaurant for breakfast. I was informed that it would be a few minutes, as the owner's daughter needed to go down to the grocery store and pick up another can of biscuits.

* At said restaurant, I was asked if I wanted smoking or non. The two rooms had no separation, and both were filled with smoke.

I love Wyoming, it's a beautiful state and I'll be back this year, but they aren't going to be the next forefront on cybersecurity.

paulddraper3• 8 years ago

One time I went to San Fransisco and literally waited 30 minutes to go three blocks.

Then I went to a restaurant and was charged $15 for coffee.

There also seemed to be a lot of people who had become homeless.

Terribly slow and difficult city; I don't see how it gets anything done.

Jesus_Jones2• 8 years ago

If it's so windy, and they have experience in energy fields, a natural thing would be to use that to develop new and better wind based power gen. Of course, it's really hard to embrace the new thing that is killing the old thing you made lots of money from.

sewer_bird• 8 years ago

They do: there's a very prominent amount of windmills along the I-80 in Carbon County that's quite a sight to drive by :)

http://www.uwyo.edu/werc/wind-wyo.html

scroot• 8 years ago

Given what they'll probably teach, I bet it's actually backward-thinking

jimbokun• 8 years ago

That's not the fault of the legislators. They are not experts in writing a CS curriculum suitable for elementary and high school students.

The key question is whether they can identify competent people to do so. Recognizing an expert in a field where you are not an expert is always a difficult problem.

Larrikin• 8 years ago

This seems like a really bad attitude to have against people that are trying to improve in a meaningful way. It's like making fun of an overweight person sweating hard in the gym.

kriffo• 8 years ago

Yes, let's try to have some more empathy for people who are overweight or live in Wyoming.

aakash58• 8 years ago

Passing a bill is certainly a small step forward but the focus should be in the implementation (like in every other thing) and the details within it. Factors such as the provision and quality of teacher training, resources for teachers to integrate CS in the classrooms, support for students to work on meaningful projects rather than dry, academic projects, and job prospects will probably be more influential in making this a "forward-thinking" step.

elcritch2• 8 years ago

See my other comment, the Arduino education program for teachers takes a hands on approach to educating teachers around the state.

nemild• 8 years ago

I'm confused, what does better early computer science education have to do with cybersecurity?

Spooky23• 8 years ago

The latter is attracting a lot of dumb money and grants to pay for the former.

ldayley• 8 years ago

I’ve lived in Wyoming in the past (one of the pretty parts), it’s different than most places.

The key to understanding this bill is that Wyoming is subsidized entirely by energy exploration. There is no corporate or individual income tax, low property and sales taxes and no will to raise them any time soon. With coal, natural gas, and oil prices permanantly sagging they’re thrashing around looking for ways to replace those royalties. This is one of the prongs in the state’s new approach, they are also drafting legislation attempting to capitalize on blockchain tech using thier biz-friendly culture and cheap energy.

I hope they figure it out, people I care about have jobs tied to state funding.

adventured• 8 years ago

Oil prices permanently sagging?

WTI futures are at $65 and heading north. Most oil production in the US is now solidly profitable at those levels. Some of that production is extremely profitable there, which is why US oil production has been soaring. The dollar, which heavily dictates the price of oil, is heading south with the vast endless sea of budget deficits inbound over the next ten years.

Higher commodities prices due to a debased dollar, is an easy bet for the next decade. The trade wars will likely make the dollar damage worse.

soundwave106• 8 years ago

I think it's credible to be concerned about a government that is funded entirely based on fossil fuels, given the likelihood of electric vehicles and renewables / alternatives playing an increasing role in transportation and energy in the future.

Medium term, this is probably not an issue, IMHO. But the outlook could be grim if "peak oil" actually happens due to lack of demand, and no reform has happened. The Economist pointed out (https://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21738583-tradi...) that this already has happened in Venezuela (a very different situation than Wyoming in terms of government contract, of course, but one that shows the dangers of overreliance.)

hortonew• 8 years ago

How do you identify one capable to teach CS, capable to teach ages K-12, and willing to work for very little pay? Is the goal to train existing teachers (would they make more money because of it?), or hire a CS veteran to teach?

sizzle• 8 years ago

Fizz-buzz for teaching CS concepts?

Jesus_Jones2• 8 years ago

you can't teach them fizz buzz, that's my genius secret interview technique. There was this guy who used it a microsoft I knew...

caust1c2• 8 years ago

My guess would be training. You can have an online-supplemented course where most of the material is pre-canned and the teachers know just enough to guide the students through a semester or a year of class.

I doubt they intend on teaching much beyond the basics at that level, which shouldn't be hard for any teacher to learn.

HarryHirsch• 8 years ago

Good Lord. Here's an excellent talk about why mathematics teachers should know mathematics: https://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/Lisbon2010_2.pdf

That's mathematics, not didactics of mathematics.

dboreham• 8 years ago

Haha haha. Source: I have tried this.

saagarjha2• 8 years ago

Nope, this doesn't work. You get teachers who can basically teach students to memorize a bunch of computer science topics, but not those that can help at all in helping students when their code inevitably doesn't work.

jcranmer• 8 years ago

Teach the math teachers how to code, and they become your CS teachers. This is more or less how my HS got enough teachers to teach the CS courses, as they made it mandatory for all students to learn.

askvictor• 8 years ago

Learning how to code is easy; a lot of teachers can do it. Learning how to debug is quite a bit harder. Learning how to debug someone else's code is a lot harder. But this is essential in being able to teach coding effectively (not debugging someone else's code as such, but being able to find the bug and steer the student into a way of finding it themselves).

Your proposition also assumes that you have enough Maths teachers, which Australia is certainly lacking (for the same reasons as OP)

saagarjha2• 8 years ago

This is also how my high school did it. It didn't work out well, although as far as I know they're still teaching. These weren't bad math teachers: they were probably some of the best in the school; it's just that the couple months or a year of training they must have received was clearly not enough for them to handle those classes at all.

throwawayjava2• 8 years ago

I think the best way to do this is to hire on CS veterans who want an early retirement but still need the health benefits and wouldn't mind a bit of spending money. Especially targeting people who are moving from a higher CoL area to a lower CoL area. Have them teach a half load on a 2/3 salary and with full benefits.

This gets complicated because of teacher's unions, but I think it's the best bet at getting high quality folks in CS classrooms.

Others will mention HS math teachers. Having spent enough time in US k12 classrooms to have an opinion on this topic, I think this can work out really well, but I'm not at all convinced it's a panacea. Mostly because many, many HS math teachers have learned how to teach specific math courses, but don't actually have a firm understanding of mathematical thinking in general. Training them to become CS teachers will fare about as well as teaching history teachers to become CS teachers (again, it can be great but lots of variance).

caust1c2• 8 years ago

This is great! But I wouldn't call it forward thinking. Forward thinking would be doing this in the early 90s. At this point it's very much reactionary.

SlowRobotAhead• 8 years ago

As opposed to all the places you can’t get computer science education outside of college? I’d say they are ahead of most.

I was lucky computer science was taught in my highschool, but I’ve been shocked how much of the country doesn’t have it.

kevindong• 8 years ago

Here's the actual bill: http://legisweb.state.wy.us/2018/Enroll/SF0029.pdf

pflats• 8 years ago

Not bad.

The best change in real-world implementation is probably going to be letting high school kids take CS for math or science credit. Opens up a lot of options for students.

The next big issue:

"Each school district within the state shall provide educational programs sufficient to meet uniform student content and performance standards at the level established by the state board of education in the following areas of knowledge and skills."

Now the BoE has to establish good CS standards. I don't really love the CSTA standards (my issues with which are beyond the scope of this post) but they're a decent starting point.

http://www.csteachers.org/page/standards

ams6110• 8 years ago

But how do they define "computer science?" At my kids' school it's learning about Microsoft Office.

cbcoutinho• 8 years ago

In high school I took a MS Office class my senior year - that was pretty much the extent of it. That was the beginning of my CS career, and I'm grateful that it was offered.

zrobotics2• 8 years ago

Honestly, the 'office skills' class I took was one of the most genuinely useful courses I took in middle school, simply for the keyboarding instruction. Although in 06 my high school, which was very proud of it's Cisco networking programs, didn't offer any CS courses.

sli2• 8 years ago

I was forced to take that class my first time through college. Somewhat predictably, I was one of only two or three students under 40 in that class. Also somewhat predictably, none of the under-40 students had any trouble or needed any help.

I figured there would be more than two or three, since they forced us to take it, but there were not.

hugh4life• 8 years ago

While this is a good thing, I don't see this helping them out as a state. TBH, this could even result in more people to move out. This is actually a huge problem throughout the whole world where where the top talent gets scooped up in the most developed areas.

For this effort not to go to waste on other states(and states are not the nation and nor are they families so it may not be a big concern), Wyoming would have to improve it's infrastructure and turn itself into a migrant hub for the type of people they'd want in. And I don't think the Richard Florida methods are going to work.

My advice for Wyoming is to court rich billionaires who want to be in charge of their own cities. Or intentional communities for higher IQ ethnic/religious groups that want some kind of cultural autonomy.

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/why-bill-gates-wants-to...

seanmcdirmid• 8 years ago

What is Jackson Hole if not a rich playground. I can’t see it developing much of a tech industry, however.

zrobotics2• 8 years ago

The trouble is, very few of those rich people actually live here, aside from vacations and for tax purposes. Sadly, most people here (especially the politicians) seem convinced that this current coal bust is part of the normal cycle, and the revenues will come back in a few years. At the point that even China is looking to reduce coal usage for environmental reasons, I highly doubt that the mine revenues will ever return to peak levels.

The only tech that the state seems to have attracted is datacenters, but those don't provide much in the way of tax revenues or jobs.

scarface74• 8 years ago

I've seen so many articles about schools teaching coding and acting like it's a new phenomenon. I took an AppleSoft Basic coding class in both middle school in 1988 and high school in 1992. Both in regular public high school. Did schools stop offering programming classes?

sli2• 8 years ago

Did schools stop offering programming classes?

Yeah, pretty much. My high school nixed their programming and other CS-related classes while I was a sophomore. This was 2001. Probably a terrible move, but they did it anyway. I assume they've wisely brought them back by now.

dagw• 8 years ago

Did schools stop offering programming classes?

Basically. Sometime around the late 90s - early 2000s many schools started to drop computer classes.

pw• 8 years ago

Ha! Former Wyomingite here. The key person mentioned in this article--State Superintendent Jillian Balow--was my junior high English teacher. I can safely, and, sadly, assure you these folks have no idea what they're doing. In recent years, Wyoming has made a habit of cargo-culting tech trends and this is just the latest. It will invariably be a boondoggle like all the rest.

galieos_ghost• 8 years ago

All it really takes is awareness. There's a lot of untapped talent in these states where for most most kids CS isn't even on the map as a career path, where I'm from smart kids get told to be doctors or lawyers. I didn't start coding until I was in college and went from nothing to full stack development with some machine learning skills in 12 months through self-teaching. I wish I'd had something like this when I was younger. Even if the implementation is awful some kids will take to it like a sponge and continue learning on their own.

Avamander• 8 years ago

I totally agree with what you said. I'm really quite sad how late I got into programming (at 14) by basically some random occurrence. Yeah, at the moment I'm ahead of my peers by significant amounts, but I know I could have done\would be doing a lot more, a lot more efficiently if I had had any formal education from the start on related topics, lessons that start with the sentence "Today we're learning how to use Microsoft Word" don't really count.

posterboy• 8 years ago

I can safely, and, sadly, assure ...

why don't you go on and do it then with a good argument. No need to go all out, a glimpse of an argument would help, otherwise mentioning a person from what, 10 to 20 years ago is simply ad-hominem. There is no doubt that cs education is more than a fad.

arcticfox• 8 years ago

Just because someone was an English teacher doesn't mean they can't design an effective program to teach a different discipline. If you think it's because she was a bad teacher, maybe she was a bad teacher and a good administrator.

It's just a matter of marshaling the right talent to build the right parts of it.

whatyoucantsay• 8 years ago

This appears backward thinking. A focus in CS would have paid off spectacularly over the past 25 years.

Forward looking might involve focussing rather more on the human capabilities hardest for machines to replicate—relationship building, comedy, sales, and one on one coaching or counseling.

Wyoming Passes Forward-Thinking Computer Science Education Bill

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