Teaspoon Languages for Integrating Programming into Social Studies, Language Arts, and Mathematics Secondary Courses
Mark Guzdial
Abstract
In 2016, President Obama declared a goal of "CS for All." In the intervening years, we have seen the percentage of high schools offering computer science increase. The 2021 "CS for CA" report says that 46% of California high schools now offer computer science. However, in few states do more than 10% of the high schools take computer science classes. Only 5% of California's 1.93 million high school students take any computer science. We now know that the "All" are unlikely to ever take a "CS" class. If we want more students to experience and learn about CS, we may have to take the "CS" to where the "All" are. Task-specific programming (TSP) languages are designed to be highly usable, rapidly learned (less than 10 minutes, typically), and matched specifically to learning activities that non-CS teachers want in their classrooms. These are "Teaspoon languages" (playing off the TSP abbreviation), because they add a teaspoon of computing into other subjects. We have developed prototype Teaspoon languages now for social studies, language arts, and mathematics classes. This approach is novel for involving non-CS teachers in designing new languages with a high degree of usability. We should be talking to non-CS teachers about what they might want with computing, building prototype tools for them, and expecting withering criticism. That's how we'll learn to build CS that works for All.