The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) India has started a national education initiative (CSpathshala) to promote teaching of computing as a science in schools. Computing is everywhere and people from every walk of life will need to be familiar with computing in some form or the other. This will give rise to a huge demand for computing skills leading to a talent shortage. To address the skills’ demand created by the industrial revolution, the Sciences and Mathematics were included in the school curriculum in the early 19th century. Now as we participate in the digital revolution, we need to train our children on skills for the digital age. We need to train our children to be creators and inventors of technology and at the same time teach them to be socially responsible citizens. It is therefore imperative to teach computing, which promotes problem solving, computational thinking and critical reasoning skills, at par with Mathematics and Sciences.
CSpathshala is an initiative to bring a modern computing curriculum to Indian schools. Industry and top academic institutions are putting their heads together to achieve the desired goal. As part of this initiative, a curriculum and teaching aids in the form of lesson plans, presentations and worksheets are being developed that can be adapted by teachers. It will also involve training of teachers on the use of these aids. All the content will be available freely under creative commons license. A pilot project is being carried out to teach the new curriculum in 16 schools of Pune in 2016-2017 and the plan is to carry out pilot projects in Bangalore, Delhi and Kochi in 2017-2018.
CSpathshala, in partnership with Delhi Public School, R K Puram and ACM India Delhi Chapter, organized a workshop to initiate a broader discussion on the need to teach computer science in schools on 20th June 2016 from 9:15am to 3:30pm, at Delhi Public School, R. K. Puram with a participation of 90+ Computer Science teachers of schools from Delhi-NCR schools. Prof. Pankaj Jalote, Director IIIT Delhi, was the keynote speaker. Ms. Vanita Sehgal, Principal, DPS R.K.Puram and Dr. Neelima Gupta from Delhi University inaugurated the workshop and provided an overview of ACM India activities. Vipul Shah, lead CSpathshala initiative & TCS and Nikhil Karkare, Walnut School, Pune gave an overview of the initiative and shared the new curriculum with participants. Teachers, Mukesh Kumar from DPS R.K.Puram and Gurpreet Kaur from G.D. Goenka School shared their experiences teaching innovative topics. Prof. Dhananjay Gadre from NSIT spoke about physical computing and ATL labs.
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) www.acm.org, is the world’s largest scientific and educational computing society. It is a not-for-profit professional membership group. ACM brings together computing educators, researchers, and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources, and address the field’s challenges.
Special Acknowledgements: TEAM DPSRKP – Mrs. Romi Sharma, Mrs. Sangeeta Rana, Mrs. Shalini Harisukh, Mr.Mukesh Nagpal, Mrs. Anjana Virmani, Mrs.Aashima Nagpal, MrAjithkumar KG, Mr.Thomas Antony, Mr.Raj Kumar, Mr.D.R.Dhingra, Mr.Lalit Prasad
Google has provided seed funding for the initiative.