SOL: Your interest in teaching and developing the next generation of engineers?

JW: I think there are two things to your question. One is, how do we get children at the K through 12 level interested in science and engineering? How do we get them to study math and science in high school? Whether they continue on studying science or engineering or mathematics in college or not, it's basically ensuring a minimum level of mathematical sophistication by our society. And I don't see that in the United States. I don't even see that much of an effort to encourage children to stick to math and science. And I think it is a cultural problem that we all understand, and presumably school boards are aware of the problem and do their best to address it. But a lot of it has to do with parents, peers. It takes a collective effort to really stress the importance of math and science. And I'm not talking about everyone having to become scientists, I'm just talking about everyone having a minimum level of sophistication in math and science. And when you have people dropping out of math by eighth grade, you're going to have a pretty minimal level of sophistication, in contrast to, say, India and China, where you see incredibly high levels of sophistication among all grade school and high school students in math and science.

The difference is quite noticeable. So that's the first problem. And that is something that an individual as a teacher can't solve alone. But if enough of us collectively, like IEEE Spectrum and IEEE in general, and other professional organizations that support science and engineering and mathematics, get the word out and speak up about the importance of studying math and science at the grade school and high school level, then maybe we could change the culture. I don't know, maybe not in our lifetimes. But that's one of the problems, and maybe our society will never solve that problem. Certainly not when intelligent design is being taught now in high schools.

So the second problem is something a bit more specific to your question, which is my own education in education and teaching. I think that's probably just a given for any academic. I've always loved to teach. In fact, I probably knew I wanted to be a teacher before anything else. I didn't even know what I was going to teach, I just knew that I liked to teach. So of course I have an interest in teaching. As far as education goes, more broadly, I'm always thinking about two things. One is keeping curricula fresh and up-to-date and relevant, and the other is ensuring that people get their fundamentals, their foundations, because again, if you have strong foundations then you can almost do or learn anything. And there's always a balance in any kind of educational program between fundamentals and applications, if you will, or practical, state-of-the-art. You really do need to keep a balance.

I would just emphasize that right now I have a grand vision for the world. And that is perhaps partly biased, because I'm coming from computer science. But my grand vision for the world is to have everyone be able to think computationally. Let me back up. My vision is that computational thinking will be a fundamental skill used by everyone in the world by the middle of the 21st century. And if there's one thing you want to put in crazy bold letters attached to this Q&Amp;A, it's that particular vision. And the boldness of the vision is that, imagine every child, in addition to reading, writing, and arithmetic, knowing and using computational thinking. And we already have seen evidence of computational thinking influencing other sciences and engineering. It's revolutionized statistics, through machine learning, which is computational thinking. I think our interest by society today in computational biology is really an ambition from the computer science side of things to say that computational thinking can inform biology. And I think we're going to see this in nanocomputing and even quantum computing, when you want to think about computational thinking influencing physicists.

But the boldness of the vision is not that computational thinking influences just scientists, but it's everyone, So that, not perhaps in my generation but maybe in our children's generation, we will start seeing the prevalence of teaching at the grade school or high school level of ways to think like a computer scientist. And I really do think of this as a way of thinking, and a way of solving problems, and a way of defining systems, and a way, in fact, of understanding human behavior that's very, very different from any of the other kinds of ways of thinking that we know today or that children learn today. So that's quite a grand vision I have, but that's completely consistent with the complaint I told you before about ensuring and encouraging children to stick to studying math and science, and how if we can do that we can elevate the overall analytical skills and abilities of our population. We need to do that if we're going to retain an edge, if you will, in science and technology. That's why I plant this vision in people's heads today.