Elizabeth Jackson is different from other 17-year-olds.
"Most kids are like, 'Ooh, a computer! I can go on Facebook,' " the Ligonier Valley junior said. "They don't think, 'What a cool piece of technology!'"
Jackson, on the other hand, has long been interested in how technology works.
"I always liked pulling things apart, taking apart remote controls," she said.
Today, she is studying mechatronics, a combination of mechanical and electronic engineering, at the Eastern Westmoreland Career and Technology Center in Derry Township. The class is centered around building and programming robots, and students graduate with knowledge of computer hardware, software and programming languages.
Although those skills are applicable to a variety of careers, mechatronics is one of the smaller shops at the vocational school, with just 19 students.
"When I was in school," said teacher Jeff Mori, "we had to make the computer display something, and you had to write code. But that challenge doesn't exist anymore, because all of these kids were born with an iPhone."
As computers have become ubiquitous in Americans' daily lives, computer science is declining in public schools. It's an irony that troubled the authors of a recent report, "Running on Empty," published by the Association for Computing Machinery, a membership organization for people who work in the industry, and the Computer Science Teachers Association.
"As the digital age has transformed the world and work force, U.S. K-12 education has fallen woefully behind in preparing students with the fundamental computer science knowledge and skills they need for future success," the study's authors wrote.
The authors found that between 2005 and 2009 the number of secondary schools offering introductory computer science courses dropped by 17 percent. The number of high schools offering Advanced Placement computer science plummeted by 35 percent.
An impending shortfall
Leigh Ann Sudol-DeLyser, a graduate student in the school of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and one of the study's authors, said that states should have standards for computer science, requiring that certain concepts be taught.
Pennsylvania's science and technology standards, which are not enforced, require that students learn to use computers for various tasks, but not that they learn how computers work.
"It's not only important for a student to learn to write a letter in Microsoft Word," Sudol-DeLyser said, explaining that every student should learn about basic computer security, media production and simple programming, and interested students should be encouraged to study computer science in depth.
"We're only training about half the computer scientists we need," Sudol-DeLyser said.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, computer software engineering and information technology are among the fastest growing careers, with more than 300,000 additional jobs expected to be created by 2018. These jobs also will be among the highest paying.
To address what experts say is an impending shortfall, U.S. Rep. Jared Polis, D-Colo., introduced a bill last year that would promote and fund improved computer science education in states. The bill did not become law, but it was backed by technology companies such as Google and Microsoft.
"People are starting to listen, (those) who are in policy roles," Sudol-DeLyser said.
Programs face challenges
But despite the attention computer science has received at the national level, local computer science programs still face challenges.
At Franklin Regional Senior High School in Murrysville, Carolyn Stewart has been teaching several levels of computer science since the early 1980s, when the school had only 10 desktop computers.
"In the beginning, all you could do was write programs," Stewart said. "You wanted to learn what a computer did."
In an Advanced Placement class recently, 15 students sat before their own glowing screens, working on a program that would flip a virtual coin.
"Coin myCoin • new Coin ( )," the students wrote, using the programming language Java.
"I joke with my students and say, actually, it's a very, very foreign language," Stewart said. "This isn't a language you'd speak walking down the hall."
Stewart said that her goal was to prepare the next generation of doctors and scientists, but many of the brightest teens find it difficult to fit computer science into a packed schedule. While she would like more students to take computer science, Stewart said, "something has to give."
Upper St. Clair High School computer science teacher Todd Ollendyke has watched his enrollment decline steadily, dropping from five periods a day in the 1980s to just one now.
At the high-performing high school, many students feel compelled to take two science courses at once, often skipping lunch to do so, Ollendyke said. Many don't consider computer science because it does not fulfill any of the school's core requirements.
"It's an elective — it competes with the other electives," Ollendyke said.
Vijay Viswanathan, 16, who decided to take computer science instead of a more popular elective like art or music, said that other students were missing out.
"Computer science provides an interesting way to think," he explained.
Anthony Lindquist, 18, who is studying information technology at the Eastern Westmoreland Career and Technology Center, also appreciates the challenge.
"Through this class, I am no longer able to just go on the Internet," he said. "As soon as I click that button, I think of what happens. And it's amazing every time."
