Dive Brief:

• Last year the North Colonie school district, near Albany, let students volunteer their tech support skills in the school library, and this year, it's giving them half a credit to participate in an expanded IT program.
• The Times Union reports the program will give students interested in technology, as well as art and design, an opportunity to solve problems with their own ideas in addition to spending one hour per week on tech support.
• Educators are being purposefully vague about the problem-solving possibilities so as not to limit students’ ideas, and they expect groups of students will decide to work together, collaborating as they might in a workplace.

Dive Insight:

At the college level, schools are creating cross-curricular majors that allow students to combine interests in art or social science with technology and computer science. Giving students the opportunity to foster this type of multi-disciplinary thinking early is important, as it makes clear how broadly many subjects can be applied in the workplace. One reason experts suspect fewer girls go into computer science is because they do not see the field as it truly is. Instead of recognizing computer science is being used to solve major world problems, they think computer scientists spend solitary hours coding for projects that are irrelevant.

The type of problem-solving North Colonie students will be able to do is exactly what schools should be asking students to think about with technology. In the classroom, teachers too often use digital tools as a replacement for paper-and-pencil assignments that have hardly changed. But they hold the key to entirely new ways of doing things in the school building and beyond.