Meaningful computing education

Recently, I read two articles, one on Singapore and its success as a country and the other on Google.org and its not so successful attempt to make an impact in philanthropy. I find both articles inspiring as I continue my search for "meaningful computing education". I believe meaningful computing education can be built on the guided leaning approach of "problem-solution-impact". Here are some ideas of how to implement this approach from Thomas Friedman's recent article in the New York Times:

• Teaching and learning needs to make connections between “what world am I living in,” “where is my country trying to go in that world” and, therefore, “what should I teach in fifth-grade science.”, for example.

Here is another view of the problems that prevent Google.org, known as DotOrg, to achieve its bold objective of "ambitiously applying innovation and significant resources to the largest of the world’s problems" as suggested by Larry Page, Google founder, in 2004.

• The New York Times article reported that after five years "DotOrg has narrowed to just one octave on the piano: engineering-related projects that often are the outgrowth of existing Google products. Dr. Brilliant was sidelined in early 2009 after his loose management style created much disenchantment in DotOrg’s ranks."
• For example, "it focuses on projects like using Google Earth to track environmental changes and monitoring Web searches to detect flu outbreaks. Most of the experts it initially hired have left, and Google, a company obsessed with numbers and metrics, struggles to measure DotOrg’s accomplishments."
• What is the problem here? Joshua Cohen, a professor at Stanford, argued that Google has two different ideas about what DotOrg can do. One is that "DotOrg would completely reinvent philanthropy and, in doing so, reinvent the world and address a hugely important set of problems with solutions only Google with its immense intellectual talent and resources could find." And the other is that "DotOrg could make some headway, maybe a little, maybe a lot, in addressing these really big problems by doing what Google as a company is really good at doing, which is to say, aggregating information."
• Yet others attributed to the fact that Google used an engineering approach rather than a challenging problem approach makes it difficult for it to address important development problems. In other words, they are creating solutions and looking for problems instead of the other way around.
• For example, the idea of Google developed a system to track counterfeit drugs never got off the ground because it was proposed to build on top of SMS technology which did not excite Google engineers.
• Yet another evidence from previous DotOrg: "They never understood that technology is a means to an end, and that in the developing world, sometimes basic technology, like the collection and compilation of data, can have enormous impact."

All the evidence seems to point towards changing the way we teach computing to students.