机器人能造汽车却为什么不会造鸟笼？

　　Computer science - that's for geeks, right? In fact it holds the answers to some of the most intriguing questions of our age. Steven Bird and Bernd Meyer argue it should be taught in schools。
 

　　The majority of Australian teenagers sleep with their phone turned on next to their bed. It's an apt metaphor: they are inseparable from their technology. Yet when it comes to understanding how it works, they might as well be asleep.

　　Teenagers may be effective users of technology. However, if they are to become designers and creators of future technologies, they need a basic grounding in computer science at school.

　　This is the finding of a recent study in the UK conducted by the Royal Society, called Shut Down or Restart: The way forward for computing in UK schools (2012).

　　Computer science is surprisingly different from the content of existing IT courses, which are generally limited to topics in the use of IT applications and software development. Computer science is far more fundamental than this.

　　Computer scientists are interested in how we can automate intelligent reasoning and problem solving. We want to understand the raw power of algorithms and their inherent limitations.

　　Why can a robot build a car but not a bird's nest? Why is it faster to search billions of pages on the web than to optimally allocate 20 different tasks to 20 people? How can a computer automatically translate language without understanding it?

　　Answering questions like these requires knowledge about the underlying science of information and computation. It ought to be in the secondary curriculum as a fundamental study alongside maths, physics and chemistry.

　　In Australia, a recent study looked at children's perceptions of IT study at university. It found that children aged 12-13 are the most likely to believe that this would be an interesting thing to do. After this age, interest declines.

　　Some students assume that knowing how to use the technology is the same as knowing how it works. Some assume that they will be able to can easily create new technologies without understanding their inner workings. Some students assume that IT studies lead to isolated back-office jobs. All are significant misperceptions.

　　As a case in point, Steven Bird's work in computer science concerns endangered languages. He wants to find out how to use mobile technologies to record and translate thousands of languages while there is still time. This work has taken him to remote villages in West Africa and Papua New Guinea, and he's just returned from two months working in the Brazilian Amazon.

　　The work is not as idiosyncratic as it might seem: we try to solve information problems with algorithms, and to understand their impact on society.

　　Other people working in computer science have driving passions in genomics, sustainable agriculture, modelling human behaviour, and predicting future market trends.

　　Yet a different group of computer scientists tries to decipher computation and reasoning outside of digital computers, specifically in nature.

　　Bernd Meyer's work, for example, investigates how complex biological groups, such as ant colonies, collectively make rational decisions that are beyond the capabilities of the individual group members.

　　Like in Steven Bird's case, this requires not only computer experiments, but also work in the laboratory and in far-flung field locations.

　　In spite of the breadth and depth of the algorithmic approach to problem solving, misperceptions about the content of IT studies and the career options of IT graduates have led to declining enrolments and high attrition rates in university computing courses and an under-supply of graduates for the Australian IT industry.

　　At the national level, the government has just committed $6.5 million to a new Digital Careers Program which will raise awareness and promote IT careers through career fairs, programming competitions, camps, and other outreach activities.

　　This program, coordinated by NICTA, is sure to boost enrolments in tertiary IT courses. However, it is high time that real computer science had a real foothold in the secondary curriculum. This is now happening in Victoria, with the exploratory development of a new subject within the Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE).

　　The course is being developed by the Victorian Curriculum Assessment Authority (VCAA) in partnership with Melbourne and Monash Universities. The Institute for a Broadband Enabled Society (IBES) and Google Australia have just committed $100,000 to fund a proposed pilot course in 2014.

　　It is envisaged the course will, at least initially, be taught directly by the universities using virtual classrooms and a variety of cutting-edge broadband technologies. Classroom teachers will facilitate the learning, but will not be expected to have a computer science training. The existing VCE subjects in IT applications and software development will continue. This proposed new subject will focus on the science of algorithms.

　　It will involve extensive practical applications to complex real-world problems, or what you might think of as 'computational intelligence'.

　　The rigour of the course will appeal to students with a strong interest in mathematics and logic, and it will prepare them ideally for tertiary studies.

　　This is an exciting new model for the relationship between schools and universities: courses that can fluidly move between upper secondary and introductory tertiary curriculum, can be delivered at school or university, and are taught in collaboration between school teachers and university academics.

　　This is the next step in developing a new education model that bridges the secondary-tertiary divide, and which may be adopted in a wide variety of disciplines in the future.

　　Steven Bird is Associate Professor in the Department of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne. View his full profile here. Bernd Meyer is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Associate Dean of Education in the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University in Melbourne. View his full profile here.

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