Seven-year-old Carmen pushed a key on the computer keyboard and squealed, "Oh no! Look what I did!" Clapping her hands over her face, she peered through her fingers at the patterns of lines on her computer screen. Jimmy, sitting next to her, left his computer to look at hers.
"How did you do that?" he asked, examining the figure.
Carmen pressed the key and the computer repeated the picture. Then she put her finger on another key and the screen revealed the program steps that had created the picture. She and Jimmy examined the programming steps that formed the 10-sided polygon.
These seven-year-olds are learning programming at a public school in suburban Connecticut. From preschool up, American education has entered the computer age. In fact, 96 percent of American schools have at least some computers that are used for education, an increase of 78 percent from six years ago.
Unfortunately, the new developments may leave parents in a quandary. Raised in the "stone age," when graphite and chalk were the main teaching instruments, some parents don't understand the new tools or how they are being used in education. As a result, they have no idea how to help their children master the machines.
When parents think of computers in school, most assume they are being used for programming, though few know what that term means. Programming refers to coding the computer or giving the computer instructions to perform as you want it to. Jimmy and Carmen were using the computer to learn programming. They were giving the machine a series of instructions so it would do what they wanted it to do--draw a decagon.
Although programming is the most common educational use of computers today, "That will change drastically over the next years," according to David Morrison, chairman of the International Council on Computers in Education. Relatively few people will become programmers, he explains, but computers have already permeated business and the marketplace as tools for manipulating information and numbers. "Computer science and programming courses are giving way to computer-assisted instruction and computer-integrated instruction in the classroom," he reports.
Until recently, computer-assisted instruction meant onscreen drill and practice, such as typing in the answers to math problems or the names of the state capitals. This kind of software, called courseware, was not much different than opening a book or taking a multiple-choice quiz.
"We are just beginning to see the development of software that challenges a child to think and uses the graphic capabilities of the machine for decision making other than just giving multiple-choice answers," explains Dr. Patricia Browne, professor of elementary education at the University of Alberta in Canada, and creator of a prizewinning video on computer teaching tips.
Even on the preschool and elementary levels, Browne reports, "New programs are being used that allow children to play with language, print letters large and small, use different colors, and draw pictures to help them with letter and word
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