Computer Science in Growing Numbers

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Photo courtesy of Business Insider

Nabor Garcia, Staff Writer

Now a days, computers are used for multiple tasks and on multiple levels. For example we use our smartphones, tablets and laptops to do homework, check our stats on our fantasy leagues and watch videos of people dumping ice water on themselves. The thing that’s amazing is that we really don’t know how all this happens in a matter of seconds or what is going on inside these devices that lets us watch gangnam style a billion times. This is where computer science ties into the equation.
Now in case anyone thinks that computer science is another science class in which we dissect computers instead of frogs I just want to say there is no dissecting here. Instead, computer science is the study of programming and how particular applications work on individual computers. Now let’s take a look at how this science is impacting Naz and the world as a whole.

Last year, the AP Computer science class had only eight students in it and CP computer science class had about twenty. Both of the classes were so small that they were taught in the same room at the same time, with one half of the room dedicated to AP and the other half to CP. But with only one teacher, Ms. Kathy Biga, teaching two different classes it was kind of hard to get your individual questions answered or discover the reason why you kept getting the same error five times in your program. Nevertheless, Ms.Biga handled the class professionally and used her 35 years of experience in the computer science field to educate her classroom in an admirable fashion.This year’s AP class now has 25 students and both AP and CP now take place at different periods of the day so Ms. Biga can teach both classes in much more depth.
Still with 25 students taking her class Ms.Biga wishes she would see more girls taking Computer Science and she says “I would love to have a technology class just for girls just to show them what this is all about and reassure them that they can participate in something like this.”

This just shows the type of commitment she has to teaching students about this fast growing field of study. Last year Ms. Biga also hosted something called Code for one hour after school, in which students had the opportunity to go sit down at a laptop and learn to make small games using lines of code and just learn what computer science was about.

Although it wasn’t a big turn out it definitely got some students interested and Ms. Biga says “it’s important to start teaching them at a young age because we are in dire need of good programmers; all the big businesses need them and they are hard to find.”
This is no joke, especially when we see it in numbers. By 2020 there will be 1.4 million computing jobs but only half a million students will be able to fill those gaps which means that is a $500 billion opportunity lost which just shows we need to start sooner than later.

Just two weeks ago, The Crimson (Harvard’s own daily newspaper) announced a similar trend of increased enrollment in computer science. The class Introduction to Computer Science (aka CS50) at Harvard had a record-breaking enrollment number of 875 students. This was a huge surprise for two reasons, one being that Economics had always been #1 at Harvard, and the second being that just ten years ago the enrollment number in this class was under 100 students. Computer Science was so unpopular that in 2005 Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, went to give a lecture at Harvard and less than 20 students showed up.
Fast forward to present day and Mark Zuckerberg is worth billions of dollars and CS50 has nearly a thousand students enrolled. CS50 Professor David J. Malan says that many students are now taking Computer Science because they notice that it is becoming more prevalent in today’s society and is an important skill to have since it opens up a lot of doors and trickles into many other fields of study. While Computer Science may seem like a daunting class to take and something that’s hard to comprehend at first, don’t let that intimidate you from trying it out. Of course you’re not going to become the next Bill Gates in a week or be able to create a website like Facebook in a month, but you will learn something that’s very valuable and needed in today’s world.