Someone asked me earlier today if it would be worth Mozilla’s while going to SIGCSE (the big annual computer science education conference in the US). I said, “That’s where the teachers are.” They said, “But we’re teaching non-programmers.” To which I should have replied, “So are most people at SIGCSE, most of the time.” Many (maybe even most?) of the people in “Computing 101″ classes at colleges and universities have never done any programming before, and the grade school teachers who show up are always working with beginners as well. One difference between Moz and regular classroom teachers is that many (most?) college and university instructors focus on students who are likely to become full-time programmers. Another (probably more important) is the setting: free-range vs. battery-farmed. I’m not sure what to do with these observations, but I think they’re worth pondering. I also think there’s a lot both groups could learn from each other…
I’m a CS professor and right now only 14 out of my 90 students are CS majors. This is the first time that 4 out of my 5 classes are CS1 but the numbers are not that far off previous semesters.
So yes, I think it is worth their while. The focus of 3 of my 4 sections of CS1 is teaching programming to non-programmers. Most of them will only ever take this single CS course.
There’s also a presence by projects that target similar demographics as Mozilla — on the youth front there’s Alice and Scratch, in the teen-but-not-CS-major track there are all the computing-for-nonmajors courses and most CS 101 classes, plus those who teach robotics, bioinformatics, or other cross-disciplinary work. And there are folks at SIGCSE who work with (or even focus on) informal learning environments. After school programs, clubs, museums, library outreach, etc. So yeah, I’d say it’s worth a trip; go for two years in a row and see what happens.