Re: College Board Kills AP Computer Science AB (Score 2, Insightful)

Actually, I don't think it is a big loss. Don't get me wrong. I think it is great that high schools prepare students by learning them some computer skills. However, things I see is that freshmen, in a computer science course, lack the basic skills. They seem to have almost no skills when it comes to math, physics or even general problem solving skills. Heck most freshman can't even spell. (And when they spell something wrong it's not even done in a consistent way). Something else. It seems that students are taught things either wrong, out of context, or in the wrong context. That is really an obstacle, for the student AND a teacher in college. You won't believe how often the phrase "Well, than your computer science teacher in HS had it wrong" sentence is used in the first year in college. So if I would be asked, and actually that question was asked at the ACM SIGCSE meetings this spring, what it is students should be taught the answer would be: Math, geometry, how the solve 'logic' problems etc etc. I do think it is a good idea to teach HS students computer skills, focusing on that would help quite a bit. I don't mind that students are shown some simple programming 'things'. However you won't believe how many students do know how to wrongly create all kinds of code but are not able to copy a zip file from one drive to another and extract it in such a way that it results in an organized way of storing their lab and project work. The wrong 'programming' techniques we can usually fix but the lack of math, logic, geometry, science/physics etc is something that keeps haunting them all the way through college.