Computer science becoming a high school staple
Lindblom computer science teacher Jesus Duran helps Malik Rayfield build a web page. (Photo by Marc Monaghan)
It doesn’t take much for Jesus Duran to get his students to pay attention. Young and laid-back, with a scruffy goatee and gray T-shirt, he commands respect from the 18 teens in his class. Most of them were glued to their work before he even opened his mouth.
“Hoo-kay!” Duran bellows after the class bell rings, startling the pupils sitting closest to him. “Open up your HTML files, and let’s get to work.”
Silent but for the clacking of keyboards, the pristine computer lab at Lindblom Academy in Englewood is booted up for Exploring Computer Science, an introductory coding class. The ninth and 10th-graders in the class have already learned the basics of computing and are now building the skeletons—in technical parlance, wireframes—of their own webpages.
Lindblom, a selective-enrollment school with a focus on math and science, isn’t a typical CPS high school. But at the outset of a campaign to make computer science a requirement of the high school core curriculum, administrators hope to use Lindblom’s roll-out of Exploring Computer Science as a template for other schools.