Based on nothing more than gut feel, I have strongly recommended, to anyone who has made the mistake of asking for my opinion, against taking up computer science as a subject in higher secondary school (11th and 12th standard).
I am now taking up a scientific approach to evaluate the basis for my gut feeling. I am starting with the prescribed computer science syllabi for 11th and 12th standard in both CBSE and ISC, going back a bit to look at the 9th and 10th standard syllabi for anything relating to computing and IT in both the school systems. It is intresting to note that there is no notion of a curriculum. There is just a syllabus that is available.
There are a large number of students who take computer science as option in the higher secondary school systems of the State Boards, but I will leave the study of these for a later time or for others to explore.
- CBSE Higher secondary CS syllabus
- CBSE Secondary School (9th and 10th)
- ISC HIgher Secondary CS syllabus
- ICSE (9th and 10th)
The syllabus along with the text book determines the intended scope of the material. In CBSE, we have a single text book for each subject that is brought out by NCERT and hence we have the option of studying the effectiveness of the syllabus in conjunction with the text book. However, in both ICSE and ISC, the Council does not prescirbe a text book, but leaves it to the discretion of the schools to specify text books, thus making it harder to study the quality of the prescribed ISC/ICSE computer science content.
A meta question immediately comes up. What is the basis for evlauation of the school CS curriculum? What are we measuring against? Is there an ideal CS curriculum for schools? There is no information I could gather for the above syllabi: Who formulated these? What are the qualifications of those that created the syllabi? What is the curricular basis for the current contents? Given the lack of such information, a global search for CS school curricula brought up the following:
Here at least I could get some idea of the syllabus, the basis for the syllabus and the identiy and qualifications of the authors. We could possibly study this and see if this is a good basis for our evaluation. A brief glance through the curriculum caused some red flags, especially with things like ‘keyboard with correct fingering’ as an expected proficiency for 5th graders. A more promising resource was referred to by the ACM report:
The Curriculum and Course Syllabi for a High-School program in Computer science, by J. El-Gazer and D. Harel, created for the Minsitry of Education in Israel in 1999 and since widely implemented in Israeli schools. I was very positively biased even before I looked at the report since I am a great admirer of Harel’s book, Algorthmics. A detailed reading of the report convinced me that this is an excellent basis for our purpose. Unlike the ACM effort which has fallen into the trap of technology, this curriculum clearly focuses on the science of computer science, and the quality and attention to detail shines through. So I declare as closed, my search for an objective standard for high-school curriculum.
And here is the report: Ministry of Education, Israel, High-School CS curriculum.
What a contrast this is to the CBSE syllabus linked above!
The authors realise that teaching such a curriculum requires teachers who have a good grasp of CS and some more. The following paper outlines their thoughts on this important issue.
What (else) should CS educators know?
This report has made the task of evaluating CBSE/ISC curriculum much easier. Unfortunately, most of it will have to be trashed:-(