Hi Frank,

Thanks for sharing your thoughts.  Your concerns are completely understandable to me.  We also talk about the challenge of ensuring we don't neglect foundational knowledge and skills when bringing in new initiatives.  

In our district, we do emphasize that each student has to have a strong foundation in core areas (3 Rs if you will) in order to be successful in our society.  Viewing CS as a fourth literacy should not come at the expense of these other literacies.  Intentional instructional design is one way we achieve this; in other words, integrating key CS or AI concepts and skills into existing units.  For example, the following CSTA standard (Decompose (break down) problems into smaller, manageable subproblems to facilitate the program development process.) can connect to other content areas, such as math or science.  Making that connection explicit helps at the least develop awareness of CS; more experienced teachers can incorporate CS-related assessments (such as creating a Scratch program or programming a Sphero) into their instruction.  

We also do prioritize some things over others.  For instance, we don't offer keyboarding much anymore.  There are obviously some drawbacks to this, but if it comes to keyboarding vs. coding, then we choose the latter because of the value and importance of that content to that student's future readiness.  Reducing or cutting other programs is definitely not always easy, but at the end of the day, we can only offer so much, so we have to focus on priorities that best support our students.  CS/coding/AI - all of these are, for us, priorities at this point.

I hope this is helpful.  I'm curious as to what others are thinking.

Axel

On Tue, Oct 22, 2019 at 8:54 AM Frank Wolf <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

Dears Axel:

Thanks for your thoughts and contribution to AI early education. I hope all this can be achieved without missing out on the basics like “writin, rithmatic and readin”. What society seems to admire nowadays is the 5-year old who makes $1,000 by operating a lemonade stand and later sells an AI unicorn to investors before the age of 19 and then makes the cover page of Forbes Magazine. I am now on research projects with younger than I (most people) PhDs’ in AI-related specialties who can’t write; hence my concern! 

I am “like totally OMG ” in support of what you are doing, but fear neglecting the basics of classical education can lead to a technology managed by illiterates.  

Frank



On Tue, Oct 22, 2019 at 9:32 AM reitzig, axel <xxxxxx@svvsd.org> wrote:
Hello everyone,

This topic drives a lot of discussion in my school district (St. Vrain Valley Schools, Longmont Colorado), namely how do we prepare students for jobs that don't yet exist?  We certainly are investing a lot in bringing skills from the most relevant fields into our classrooms, like coding, design, and applied engineering (so application of math, physics, etc. to authentic tasks).  However, from reading and researching as well as numerous discussions with folks in industry, the emphasis on the content looks to take us only so far.  Beyond teaching the hard skills is ensuring that students develop the capacity to be self-directed, self-regulated learners.  A big part of this for us is helping students (and teachers) have an agile mindset, demonstrate the capacity to deal with ambiguity, show grit and perseverance, collaborate with diverse team members and stakeholders, and manage complex tasks.  Colorado now defines these as Essential Skills and school are beginning to incorporate these into regular instruction.

Interestingly enough, I spoke with an HR director from a prominent software company yesterday.  She emphasized that they recruit and hire based on how strong a candidate's skills are in these essential skills.  Moreover, she pointed out that they can train up anyone's skill set (i.e. coding) if they have the right mindset.  This of course works against many of the currents in public education, which is still driven by considerations around standardized testing.  

A final thought to share is in regards to the challenge of developing a general literacy around CS, and more specifically around a topic like AI.  There are so many misperceptions about what AI is, many based on depictions in media and entertainment.  Helping inform a broad array of stakeholders about AI fundamentals, and how AI impacts every aspect of our lives, is a key goal for us.  Emphasizing topics like data and data analytics, human-technology relationship, and principles of IoT at early ages is an important part of the foundation we are trying to build.  We then hope to create distinct pathways on top of this foundation to provide students who want a deeper experience have them.  These pathways can then be leveraged to bridge to post-secondary opportunities in industry and higher education.

I appreciate everyone's contributions to this discussion and look forward to more thoughts and interaction.

Best regards,

Axel Reitzig

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Coordinator of Innovation
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On Fri, Sep 27, 2019 at 10:05 PM Pat Langley <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
Ikka,

> In about the next five years, we use roughly the same amount of
> energy for deep learning than for cement production, globally.
> This, in my view, is a very concrete indicator...

Was that an intentional word play? Either way, it was good.

More seriously, this assumes that deep learning will continue to
dominate the field. Applications of machine learning have relied
on far more efficient methods in the past, and it seems very likely
we'll develop more efficient ones in the near future.

Regards, -Pat
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