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When Anna Otto evangelizes about the power of computer science to transform lives, she's not just talking as the computer science coordinator for a suburban Colorado district.
She's speaking as a mom.
Otto's son, Aiden, now 9, was diagnosed with cerebral palsy as a baby. He underwent extensive surgery when he was 6 to be able to walk independently. Computer science undergirded every part of that process—from harnessing 3D motion-capture technology to determine if he was a candidate for the surgery, to stimulating sensory nerve rootlets during the procedure to determine which to cut, to using robotic legs to teach Aiden proper gaits during rehab.
“It's really motivated me,” Otto said. “We need to get this opportunity in front of more people because it's not just people who go into the field of computer science that need to learn this. … Any field you go into, if you have a basic understanding of computer science and what it's capable of in terms of problem-solving, just imagine the solutions we will come up with as a society.”
Otto is the computer science and online learning coordinator for the Adams 12 Five Star Schools district in the Denver metro area, a role she's held since 2016. A former elementary and middle school teacher, Otto was previously the instructional technology coordinator for the district.
But the seeds for Otto’s mission were planted much earlier: Her father was a programmer and her mother a tech-sector executive. Otto grew up with computers and watched her mom in a tech leadership role. She never doubted her place in technology when so many girls and women do.
Nationally, young men are twice as likely as young women to take a foundational computer science course, according to the nonprofit Code.org’s 2024 State of Computer Science Education Report. Nearly 33 percent of students enrolled in a foundational computer science course were girls, and about 68 percent were boys. Hispanic students are also underrepresented in computer science classes.
Many students who may be interested in taking computer science attend schools that don’t offer it. Code.org's report found that, nationally, 60 percent of public high schools and 37 percent of public middle schools offer foundational computer science classes. And students who are Black, Hispanic, or Native...