UMBC and Marie desJardins appeared in the New York Times. The article, “Computer Science for the Rest of Us,” describes the idea that all students should learn how to ‘think computationally’ and discusses the growing number of new efforts to teach non-majors how to do that, with or without learning how to program in conventional programming languages like Python or Java.

Marie desJardins, a computer science professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, says her department uses Scratch in its “Introduction to Computers and Programming” course, in which students can try a few basic concepts. About 25 percent of the semester is spent on programming.

Explaining why Scratch is used at the college level, she says that all students arrive on campus having taken high school classes in English, math, biology and so on, but that many have not taken a computer science class.”