The Chronicle of Higher Education has a great piece today describing the importance of an education that includes computational thinking, and lamenting the fact that more students aren’t becoming computer scientists. The whole piece is worth reading, but here’s a great snippet from the conclusion, which encapsulates much of the message groups like Computing in the Core and the CS Education Week effort are trying to get across to education policymakers everywhere:
Computer science exposed two generations of young people to the rigors of logic and rhetoric that have disappeared from far too many curricula in the humanities. Those students learned to speak to the machines with which the future of humanity will be increasingly intertwined. They discovered the virtue of understanding the instructions that lie at the heart of things, of realizing the danger of misplaced semicolons, of learning to labor until what you have built is good enough to do what it is supposed to do.
I left computer science when I was 17 years old. Thankfully, it never left me.
Read the whole thing.
