Computer Science

General Information

CS Education

Initiatives

Professional Learning

^{*Video Footage from "Computer Science Education in Maine Public Schools" Filmed Prior to March 2020.}

Maine schools are continuously improving and expanding Computer Science and computational thinking instruction across multiple content areas to ensure that all Maine students have opportunities to learn, develop, and enhance these critical 21st Century skills in authentic and applied ways.

Rather than offering Computer Science as an “add-on” option for some students, we encourage interdisciplinary approaches that provide all students with opportunities to build problem-solving and logical reasoning skills (cause-and-effect; inferential; inductive/deductive; etc.) and engage in computational thinking, innovative design processes, and real-world application in addition to the traditional hard skills such as programming languages and robotics.

Building these skills across various subjects and content is critical to the development of innovative, entrepreneurial thinking that will allow Maine students to apply their knowledge and skills nimbly and fluently to solve problems and invent solutions in a dynamic world. Many off-the-shelf curricula provide contextualized, siloed instruction in CS, but these programs often fail to make connections to authentic, real-world applications.

Maine DOE offers guidance and support for schools that are eager to:

• generalize the thinking and reasoning skills that are foundational to CS across multiple content and contexts;
• engage educators in the development and professional sharing of cutting-edge CS instruction and applications; and,
• eradicate the real and perceived barriers to engagement that “add on” CS curricula and programs often present.

For more information, please contact the Department of Education's Computer Science Specialist, Emma-Marie Banks.

Icons sourced from Flaticon.

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