Growing up in the ’70s, John Halamka was a bookish child with a penchant for science and electronics. He wore black horn-rimmed glasses and buttoned his shirts up to the collar."I was constantly being called a geek or a nerd,” he recalled, chuckling.
Now 47, Dr. Halamka is the chief information officer at the Harvard Medical School, a practicing emergency-ward physician and an adviser to the Obama administration on electronic health records.
Hybrid careers like Dr. Halamka’s that combine computing with other fields will increasingly be the new American jobs of the future, labor experts say. But not enough young people are embracing computing — often because they are leery of being branded nerds.
Educators and technologists say two things need to change: the image of computing work, and computer science education in high schools. Teacher groups, professional organizations like the Association for Computing Machinery and the National Science Foundation are pushing for these changes, but so are major technology companies including Google, Microsoft and Intel.
That message must resonate with parents and school administrators, they say, if local school districts are to expand their computer science programs.
“We need to gain an understanding in the population that education in computer science is both extraordinarily important and extraordinarily interesting,” said Alfred Spector, vice president for research and special initiatives at Google. “The fear is that if you pursue computer science, you will be stuck in a basement, writing code. That is absolutely not the reality.”
Kira Lehtomaki can attest to this. She came to computing by way of art and movies. Art projects, not computers, were her childhood passions. She loved watching videos of Disney movies like “Sleeping Beauty” and “Dumbo,” and wanted to grow up to be one of those artists who stirred life into characters using pencils and paper.
She even took a summer job at Disneyland as a “cookie artist,” painting designs and Mickey Mouse faces on baked goods, because she was allowed to spend a few days with Disney’s animators.
Yet as a 19-year-old college student in 2001, Ms. Lehtomaki saw the Pixar film “Monsters, Inc.” and was impressed by how good computer animation had become. At the University of Washington, she pursued computer graphics, graduating with a degree in computer science.
Today Ms. Lehtomaki, 27, is an animator at Walt Disney Animation Studios, working on “Rapunzel,” which is scheduled to be released next year. She does her drawing on a computer, using specialized graphics and modeling software. Her computer science education, she said, is an asset every day in her work, less for technical skills than for what she learned about analytic thinking.
“Computer science taught me how to think about things, how to break down and solve complex problems,” Ms. Lehtomaki said.
Reformulating a seemingly difficult problem into something a person can know how to solve is “computational thinking,” which the new high school courses are intended to nurture. Some schools in Los Angeles County are experimenting with the introductory course, called “Exploring Computer Science.” Last year, 35 students were in one pilot program, and this year the course is being taken by 130 students.
Students from low-income families create projects that address subjects of their interest, like gang violence and recycling. Others choose to make simple computer games.
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