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The author discusses efforts to develop computer science (CS) education into a STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education discipline. Topics include U.S. President Obama's January 2016 announcement of the CS for All initiative to make computing education available to all U.S. students, U.S. Congress' pass of the STEM Education Act of 2015 which made CS part of STEM, and the invisibility of computation in children's daily life.

The author discusses the importance of training K-12 teachers in computer science (CS) education in order to permit colleges and universities to offer CS, computer programming, and STEM education courses to undergraduate students.

In this article the author considers indicators that U.S. K-12 students will study computer science. Topics discussed include the addition of programming to children's computer games, insights on the overall projected populations of school children in the U.S. and details on the learners of computing versus other learners of STEM.

The article discusses the question of whether the U.S. education system is in a state of crisis or not. A report by the U.S. National Academy titled “Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Revisited: Rapidly Approaching Category 5” is cited as arguing that the U.S. economy is at risk because of poor STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education. Contrary arguments are also described.

A reprint of the article "The Danger of Requiring Computer Science in K-12 Schools," which appeared as a blog post on "Communications" magazine's website at http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm, is presented. Topics discussed include the ramifications of making computer science (CS) a required subject for U.S. schoolchildren, insufficient number of CS teachers, and concerns about a higher CS standard's impact on special education students. Requiring CS courses in higher education is also cited.

The article provides an assessment of the first full year of massive open online courses (MOOCs) in the U.S. in 2013 and gives an employment outlook for computer science (CS) graduates. The Gates Foundation has provided funding to Georgia Tech University to develop a MOOC approach for a first-year college physics course. The San Jose State University in California released a report stating that the measures of student effort beat all other variables tested for their relationships to student success, such as demographic descriptions of the students, course subject matter and student use of support services. Computing careers are predicted to make up 73% of the jobs in STEM careers in the current decade.

Information is provided on the 2016 Computer Science (CS) New Faculty Teaching Workshop that prepares college faculty for teaching computer science. Topics, including women students in STEM education majors, academic integrity, syllabus development, active learning in the classroom and classroom size, are discussed.