Coding from college to high school

It’s not often that a high school elective class can make students immediately employable. Jenny Barnes, John Notestine along with Colony High Teacher Brian Mead are bringing a surplus of job opportunities to students. It’s called CS50, and the plan is to have it be the most popular class in school.

CS50 stands for Computer Science 50. It’s a MOOC, massive open online course, started at Harvard by Professor David Malan. At Harvard, the class became so popular and well-loved that Harvard decided to take it on the road, teaching coding to high school students.

The high school version of CS50 takes the semester long university course and extends it over an entire school year. It builds on the notion that when students know how to understand and write the language of computers, jobs in every sector open up for them. Wasilla High’s CS50 teachers Jenny Barnes and John Notestine counter this idea with a mission of their own.

“It’s not just because we want kids to have jobs; it’s because we need people to do these jobs,” Barnes said.

Even though Barnes and Notestine are both equally excited to teach CS50, it is hard to match the enthusiasm for CS50 like Colony High’s Brian Mead. Mead had previously taken some CS50 coding classes, working through problems with people from all over the world.

“Then I saw that [Harvard] they were offering it as an AP class and I thought- Hey! that’s for high school!” Mead said.

With support from former Colony High principal and now MSBSD Director of Education Justin Ainsworth, Mead pitched the idea of the course to a committee of teachers and the “bigwigs in the school district.” Right before school closed in May, CS50 became a reality for Mead, and he rushed to bring Notestine and Barnes along for the ride, working on streaming the class with digital media so that both schools could collaborate while teaching the course.

In July, Mead and Barnes attended Harvard CS50 certification training at Microsoft in San Diego. Colony HS and WHS are just two out of 40 high schools worldwide that teach CS50. Mead said that CS50 has the potential to change the two Valley high schools into high tech powerhouses.

Computer programming jobs include systems design and related services, software publishers, finance and insurance, manufacturing, and administrative and support services. There isn’t an industry that doesn’t rely somewhat on coding in one fashion or another.

Barnes added that GE [General Electric], a huge employer in America, announced that they are going to require all of their employees to know how to code- from the receptionist to the CEO.

In this digital era, the key to technology is and will always be coding. That’s where CS50 fits in.

Coding uses a system of symbols to represent words or letters to send a message, which become the instructions for a computer program. These instructions written by the programmer are called source code. Without these important instructions a computer does not function. Essentially, a computer is only being obedient and follows messages created by the programmer through the source code.

But coding is only one component taught when it comes to CS50. CS50 not only teaches coding, but about the different coding languages: C -the most widely used computer language that is general purpose and procedural, PHP -a server scripting language for making interactive web pages, and Java-a general purpose programming language for use in the distributed environment of the internet.

Barnes has high hopes and goals for the CS50 class, “The goal of this class is to make sure that everyone who takes it has a general understanding of computer science and programming. [With CS50] You can start by turning on a computer, and you can end by knowing how to do some basic programming in several different languages, web design and a have basic understanding of how computers work.”

Notestine said that jobs aren’t the only reason coding should be taught.

“No matter where you are going to be working you are going to be working with computers. Technology and computers are with us in everything we do,” Notestine said.

Barnes said that computer science might- and even should- become just as important as reading, writing and arithmetic. She said she hopes coding becomes a required class for graduation.

“It seems like in high school we operate in this sphere where our classes are isolated. We only work alone. We aren’t working with each other, and we aren’t getting online and using our resources,” Notestine explained. But, CS50 requires students have to collaborate and go out to find their sources and information. An example of this type of collaboration was Puzzle Week.

Colony and Wasilla High were the first schools in the nation to host a CS50 Puzzle Week. The August Puzzle Week kicked off a school wide CS50 event. During Puzzle Week students throughout the school teamed up with a partner to try to solve eight mind puzzles, using computers and logic to complete them. At the end of the week, participants from both schools met to discover the correct answers and win prizes at the Extreme Fun Center.

Mead and the Wasilla teachers plan several more CS50 events to keep the students sharp: hackathons, coding activities such as problem sets, puzzle weeks and the end of the year CS50 Fair. The fair will be the student’s final problem that requires a computer to solve it.

WHS junior Timothy Raska said that he signed up as soon as he found out about CS50, “I have had some moderate coding experience, and I’ve always wanted to go into that kind of career field. My freshman year I looked for a class like that[CS50] and I couldn’t find one.”

Raska believes that as society advances technologically, more people who have even a slight understanding of coding will excel. He said having a class like this on a resume can be a big help.

But, computer science isn’t just for kids interested in computers. Mead said that for students who aren’t fully interested in computer science, CS50 is still a lucrative and open class.

Barnes agrees and doesn’t want CS50 to be a class designed for the strong math students. Barnes said, “I’m passionate about making sure it’s available to everybody,”

‘Steve Jobs didn’t create Apple by himself. And in the real word nobody sits in an office and makes Microsoft Word by themselves. Being able to work independently is only a small part of the real world,” Mead said.

There isn’t always a lot of significant information and lessons in school that students can utilize immediately in their adult lives. But with CS50, no minute in this class will be wasted, online or in real time.

Janee Wilson is a junior at Wasilla High School. She is a Journalism II student for the Wasilla High Warrior Word.