No abstract

A year's work on the NSF/University of Tennessee High School Computer Science Project (HSCS) has indicated that it may indeed be possible to dissociate computer skills from the scary, elitist traditions of science and math curricula in high schools. Teachers and students remote from the traditional science/math constituency are learning to play/work With the computer. The development of HSCS is chronicled and some likely scenarios for its arrival on the high school scene are presented. The essential context is that of a race between declining computer hardware costs and declining support for public education. HSCS is succeeding because it exploits computing's unique ability to bridge between the worlds of play, study and employment.