Google Reflects on Its Contributions to Computer Science Education

This year’s Computer Science Education Week (CSEd), the second annual event of this name, has seen a huge increase in both attention and sponsorship from last year, including notable support from Google. Now, as CSEd 2010 draws to a close, it’s the perfect time for Google to reflect on what it’s added to the industry on the whole.

Google did just that on their official blog, talking about projects they pursued or expanded on in 2010 to help “to invest in the next generation of computer scientists and engineers.” According to their own reflections, their contributions in 2010 have been scalable education technologies, improving both the access to and quality of existing curriculum, and advocating for improvements in education.

In the scalable education resources, Google released the App Inventor earlier this year. The App Inventor is a resource designed for people wanting to create mobile phone apps for the Android market. This tool eliminates the need to write full syntax, and allows creators to use a visual interface to create appropriate behavioral settings for the app.

In improvements to the quality and availability of curriculum, Google released a set of lessons that had been co-created by Google engineering and experienced K-12 educators that can be incorporated into science and math; did a revamp on Google Code University, a set of tutorials, lessons, and more, designed to provide code learning resources for college-level students; and gave grants to thirty-five different universities, enabling them to conduct CS4HS (Computer Science for High School) workshops that promote computer science learning at the high school level.

To advocate for improvements in K-12 computer science education, Google sponsored or worked with advocacy groups, most notably “Computer at the Core,” the group that established CSEd.

Each year, Google’s contributions to the CS educational resources has increased; onlookers can wait with excitement to see Google’s contributions in the coming years.