GBN restores AP Computer Science

Senior Danny Martens works on coding problems in Glenbrook South’s AP Computer Science class. Glenbrook North has not offered the class since 2009. Photo by Meghan Cruz.
Senior Danny Martens works on coding problems in Glenbrook South’s AP Computer Science class. Glenbrook North has not offered the class since 2009. Photo by Meghan Cruz.

Senior Danny Martens is methodical when picking out his outfit in the morning before he drives to Glenbrook South.

“I have to be careful not to wear a [Glenbrook North] shirt to class because GBS kids will always make fun of me for it,” Martens said.

Martens takes AP Computer Science A at GBS because the class has not been offered at GBN since 2009. However, at the start of the next school year, GBN is planning to put AP Computer Science back into the curriculum as a single block, full-year elective with an Algebra 2 prerequisite.

Math teacher Steve Goodman is set to teach the class next year.

“The focus of the AP curriculum is on programming and coding and all the different algorithmic structures you see in computer science,” said Goodman. “We’re just going to learn how to write a program and how to tell the computer to translate it into a code that it can understand and give us some output.”

Ryan Bretag, associate principal of curriculum and instruction, said he sees next year as the perfect time for the return of AP Computer Science, with some students, teachers, parents and members of Coding Club all expressing a “high level of interest” in the class.

When this interest was initially formed, Bretag said research had to be done to see how essential this type of class was, and the school found there is a high demand locally and globally.

“When there’s an important field and there is an economic need, we look to drive people into those fields,” Bretag said.

He said GBN stopped offering the class in 2009 because the teacher who taught the course retired and enrollment was too low.

According to Goodman, technology is growing “exponentially.” The class is important because technological improvement stems from a knowledge of computer programming, and the addition of the class would provide the opportunity to make GBN a “top-notch” school.

David Rogers, who teaches AP Computer Science at GBS, said although numbers have been improving, a problem he faces with the class is a large gender imbalance.

“You figure there’s 50 percent women in a high school, [but there is not] 50 percent in the class,” said Rogers. “It’s still at 25 percent sometimes or lower.”

Goodman said he has talked with students he knew and has seen both genders interested in taking the class.

Bretag said the thinking and collaboration skills learned from this class can transcend the field and will have “lifelong benefits.”

“The other thing with programmers and people that understand programming, they’re not only problem solvers, but they’re problem finders,” said Bretag. “We have a lot of problems in the world, and people with these kinds of mindsets … can identify the problems, articulate the problems and then can work to solve them. This kind of mindset can make you immensely valuable to any field.”

Of all the classes he has taken, Martens said AP Computer Science is his favorite, and the class provides critical thinking skills and the opportunity to think differently than students normally would.

“When people start seeing it’s not super overwhelming and not [as] math-heavy as it’s usually thought about, people will enjoy just figuring out these critical problems in a way that’s not like math class or science or English,” said Martens. “It’s kind of on its own, taking a little bit from everything.”