Computer Science Teacher Profile: Casey Donahue

Casey Donahue is a Business and Technical Education teacher at Bozeman High School. This is her fourth year of teaching — previously she taught in Ennis, a small town in southwest Montana, and Colstrip, a small town in eastern Montana. Here, Casey talks about teaching and learning coding, her current unit on privacy and encryption, and why she thinks students today need access to computer science.

What Coding Class Looks Like at Bozeman High School

I teach two computer science classes this year: Coding I and Coding II. Coding I is based on the Code.org AP CSP curriculum, and Coding II is a dual enrollment Python class with Montana State University.

I have three periods a day devoted to coding. Kids sign up for one of the coding classes and are mixed into whatever class period works for their schedule. This provides more flexibility for students and enables more of them to take the class.

The morning classes are 60:40 boys to girls. At the end of the day, there are more boys. The girls’ engagement is high — they’re very interested. I think the Code.org curriculum itself contributes to that — it has more creativity and writing involved instead of “sit down and program this.” And girls are more into talking to people and connecting with their classmates.

Teachers are Key to Integrating Computer Science

I’ve taught some coding in other classes but this is the first class I’ve dedicated to coding.

At my previous schools, we fit coding into whatever class we could — Keyboarding or Beginning Computers or Intro to Business. I had six classes a day, all different. Yearbook, Broadcast, Beginning and Advanced computers, Accounting. They wanted to keep them all, so it was difficult to add coding as its own class.

It’s important to have a teacher that gets into it — if a teacher is interested, they’ll fit it in. If the teacher isn’t into it or doesn’t know it or is afraid of it, then that school isn’t going to get it, they’re not going to push for it.

That’s one of the biggest barriers to getting computer science into schools, is teachers being afraid to teach it.

Why Computer Science Matters Today

Not matter what kids do after high school — workforce or college- they need some understanding of computer science. They need to know how the internet works, data collection and privacy, and how all of that affects them. All those concepts are pertinent whether you’re in that field or not.

So I think they need that part of computer science, not necessarily learning a language.

At some point or another they’re going to be on a computer, they’re going to have their information compromised, and they need to know why that happened and what to do about it.

Some digital literacy teachers still focus on kids using Microsoft Word or Publisher. But a lot of schools aren’t buying Microsoft products anymore — so many schools have Google Apps for Education. Kids need to understand what’s underpinning all of these tools.

Computer science — this is where we are now.

Current Unit: Privacy

We just started on the privacy unit. All of the students’ sentiments about it were like “It’s already out there… who cares?” They’re not so concerned with privacy about themselves.

I thought they’d be more with it. But, they know their information is out there so they’re like numb to it. But it’s like “that’s really scary, you guys should maybe be concerned.”

They do know it’s important not to have their SSN, bank account, out there. But, they googled themselves and one kid found this entire photo album of himself. His address, his baby photos.

They don’t care as much.

With that said, they’ve all got fake accounts. Fake FB accounts, snapchat, twitter accounts. But we’re not talking about citizenship or choices about their online presence. It’s a bigger deal than they think.

Also, having them on lockdown on the internet at school doesn’t mean they’re not going to do this stuff on their phone without Wifi or at home. They’re going to look at the same crap in your class on their phone. All it means is that you’re not helping them think about their online presence — as a teacher you’re not helping them make good choices.

Learning Computer Science to Better Teach Computer Science

It’s hard to pick a direction to go when I’m learning because I can’t keep up with them. They’re trying to learn all these things — they want to use Unity to make games, or use Python to make apps.

That’s the hard part.

It’s also really rewarding to learn computer science myself and dive in a little more. Then, when I do have those kids who are already into coding, I have other avenues for them so they can teach themselves while I go catch everyone else up.

And, that’s really rewarding to watch them go and learn, based on what they’re excited about.

In Code.org’s app lab, I had a kid make his own encryption program, well before we even got to the big data encryption unit. He made it entirely in block code, which apparently doesn’t allow addition within strings, so he subtracted negative numbers and he made it all work. And he did this all in his free time. He’d be in there at 8 o’clock in the morning, 30 min before class starts, just “I’m just working on my encryption program.”

You can’t be mad about that.