Lower Merion School District is planning to add new courses for the upcoming school year. I spoke with district administrators and attended a board meeting to find out more about the new course offerings
In total, the district plans on adding 8 new courses across Art, Math, Science, and English. This 4 part report will cover a different subject each week. We start off this week with computer science. I interviewed Mr. Jason Lilly, the supervisor of secondary STEM education and asked for his opinion on the new computer science classes.
Interview: We’re really excited about some of our new computer science offerings for next year. We’re going to have a new entry level course called AP Computer Science Principals. We’re also going to have two courses on par with our seminar course. One is called Cyber Security and the other is called Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Again, we’re just really excited about these new computer science offerings. Come on out to one of these new courses!
The committee cited many reasons for why they are proposing new courses. However, they emphasized that currently, if you start as a freshman, you will exhaust the number of computer science courses you can take by the time you are a junior.
The new Artificial Intelligence and Cyber Security courses will allow students to take computer science through all four years of high school. Additionally, the new AP Computer Science Principles will be an entry course alongside the existing Computer Science 1, however, it is designed to cover more than just programming basics and although it is an AP course, it can be taken as a freshman.
For Harriton TV, I’m Adam Gilbert. Now back to the news desk.