If we were talking about a course for Computer Science.
Having recently graduated from a high school and currently pursuing my undergrad degree in CS, I think I might be able to offer some degree of insight into pain points people generally faced when starting their college CS degree, and how well high school prepared them for that.
Most of my peers have taken an Intro to CS-A class, which basically went into the AP Java curriculum.
A lot of the struggles I've seen people have when entering CS is struggle in setting up their environments, understanding how the software pieces fit together, and also having the know how to explore beyond the basic coding concepts and actually being able to apply what they've learned to work on a project.
I think a lot of high school Intro to CS classes focus on high level coding concepts (loops / classes / etc) and then some very basic algorithms.
I think actually setting up an environment from scratch (beyond just a basic IDE), like introducing students to the terminal and teaching them how to get around, and then teaching them how to install the software they need to start programming would be incredibly valuable.
For a general information technology class, I think having the history of computing would be nice. Potentially it covers foundations of being able to understand what is a computer device, what sort of things can it do, (load store memory, perform operations, and interface with other items). Then also going over how the internet and other computer concepts work from a high level. And maybe towards the end provide more insight into new computing ideas that are being developed (VR/AI/etc).
Having recently graduated from a high school and currently pursuing my undergrad degree in CS, I think I might be able to offer some degree of insight into pain points people generally faced when starting their college CS degree, and how well high school prepared them for that.
Most of my peers have taken an Intro to CS-A class, which basically went into the AP Java curriculum.
A lot of the struggles I've seen people have when entering CS is struggle in setting up their environments, understanding how the software pieces fit together, and also having the know how to explore beyond the basic coding concepts and actually being able to apply what they've learned to work on a project.
I think a lot of high school Intro to CS classes focus on high level coding concepts (loops / classes / etc) and then some very basic algorithms.
I think actually setting up an environment from scratch (beyond just a basic IDE), like introducing students to the terminal and teaching them how to get around, and then teaching them how to install the software they need to start programming would be incredibly valuable.
For a general information technology class, I think having the history of computing would be nice. Potentially it covers foundations of being able to understand what is a computer device, what sort of things can it do, (load store memory, perform operations, and interface with other items). Then also going over how the internet and other computer concepts work from a high level. And maybe towards the end provide more insight into new computing ideas that are being developed (VR/AI/etc).