"The great thing about AP Computer Science Principles is that teachers can teach any language they want," Reyes said. One company that has fully embraced AP Computer Science Principles is Apple, which is developing and reviewing a new course along with the College Board that focuses on Apple's open-source programming language, Swift.Īpple announced on Monday that "in the next school year, Apple will release a free AP Computer Science Principles course syllabus and curriculum, giving high school students the opportunity to earn Advanced Placement credit for learning App Development with Swift." While there's still a lot of work to be done, the momentum of the course is providing a new cause for optimism in the tech industry's efforts to address its longtime pipeline problem: that most programmers tend to be white or Asian men. Now big tech companies - including Apple, Facebook, and Amazon - are throwing their weight behind AP Computer Science Principles, which gives students a score of one through five, like other AP courses, and is accepted as credit by many colleges. "We're seeing huge increases in the number of women taking AP Computer Science Principles over those who traditionally took Computer Science 'A,' underrepresented minorities, black students, Hispanics, and rural students," Maureen Reyes, the College Board's executive director of AP program management, told Business Insider. The idea was that high-school students who weren't already experienced in coding might be more inclined to try a college-level computing course if it had a broader curriculum. It was developed alongside the National Science Foundation, and programming is only one part of the class - other topics include data and information, the internet, and abstraction. The new course, called AP Computer Science Principles, covers a broader range of topics than the coding-focused Computer Science course. It introduced an alternative advanced computing class for high schools in the hopes that it might draw a broader, more diverse group of students into computing. Many engineers and software developers can trace their formative coding experiences to a class they took in high school: Advanced Placement Computer Science.īut two years ago, the College Board - the body that administers AP tests - decided to try something different. The course was designed to attract a broader group of students into the field and to ameliorate the industry's so-called pipeline problem. Big companies like Apple, Facebook, and Amazon are supporting a new Advanced Placement computing course for high-school students. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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