Two nights ago I was working with my wife on her goal to introduce a computer science course of study into her high school. We ran into a problem when it came to costs, specifically the costs of textbooks. I had forgotten how expensive textbooks had gotten, even at the high school level. Now the schools do manage to buy math, science and other textbooks by utilizing long-term budgeting and planning. Trying to add a brand new course and finding the open FTE is one thing, but finding the budget for a whole classroom full of textbooks is a whole new problem.
So my big question to her was are textbooks even needed for high school CS classes? Intro to CS classes and Computer Science Principle classes don't even require textbooks. Right now Computer Science A requires a textbook, but does it really need one? This is not to say that students don't need references. In the age of a deluge of online tutorials are dead tree references the way to go? Teaching programming is best when you can manipulate examples. Being able to embed code examples that actually run and even have some be self-evaluating test problems is a huge benefit. Even if you don't make the websites dynamic, you can still cut and paste into your IDE of choice. Retyping from a hard copy seems the least efficient way to do things. Now I do acknowledge that many textbooks come with an online component, but I'm not sure if that is a point for or against dead tree textbooks.
Only two days after my conversation, I read the following on Slashdot: https://news.slashdot.org/story/18/01/31/1426251/high-school-computer-science-look-ma-no-textbook. This article provides a good review of the pros and cons of textbooks for CS teaching. I'm on the fence myself. Please leave comments if you have anything that might give me some more food for thought.
