To generations of students who sweated over trigonometry formulas, this may come as a shock. But the teachers say computer science accomplishes the same goal as geometry or calculus.
"Mathematics is the study of patterns," Siena College computer science professor Jim Matthews said. "It was never about the Pythagorean theorem."
Successful students learn to think logically and use data to solve a problem, he said.
Math is required for a high school diploma in New York state, but the definition of math may change soon. Some Board of Regents members have said they want students to be able to meet their math requirement by programming robots or learning coding languages, which they said could be more useful than repeatedly failing algebra.
They're not alone: computer science is becoming a requirement in other states and in New York City.
Teachers gathered at Siena College this week to get advice on implementing computer science classes in their high schools. They said it's the math of the future.
"In science, it's computational biology. In business, it's all data analytics," Matthews said. "One of the things we hear all the time here (at Siena College) is, 'Oh, my school didn't offer computer science, I'm so behind.'"
In 2021, about 5 percent of high school students, nationwide, were enrolled in a computer science course, according to the 2021 State of Computer Science Education report.
Teachers said students who don't do well in traditional math classes can unexpectedly bloom in computer science.
"My art students flourish, because it's tangible," said Guilderland High School teacher Rachel Peschieri.
Sometimes traditional high school math feels contrived. Students often complain that they will never use what they're learning. Matthews agrees with them.
Students' eyes glaze over when they're taught to find the intersection of a line and a parabola, he said.
But if he asks them to write a program that moves the line around the parabola, they're interested, he said.
He argued that a poll of successful adults would find that almost none of them use the specific skills they had to learn in advanced math, but that most of them would say they analyze data to solve problems. That's the true goal of math, he said, and they'll learn that "computational thinking" in computer science.
There's also something fundamentally unfair about not teaching students about computers, when they are such an important part of the world, said Ichabod Crane High School teacher Dave Vona.
"School helps kids understand the world they are a part of," he said. "How can we say we are educating kids if we send them out without any insight into the world?"
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