Designing a Service-Oriented Computing Course for High Schools

Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) is becoming the dominating paradigm for software development in many areas, including e-business, robotics, gaming, and scientific computation. One of the key issues lagging behind is the education. In spite of significant progress in SOC applications, SOC education has not been taught in introductory classes. Existing SOC courses are graduate or senior-level courses in universities that require full programming background. While various issues regarding SOC are being explored and discussed, the issues for SOC education, especially at high school level, still remain uncultivated, which does not match up with the importance of SOC paradigm. Sponsored by U.S. Department of Education, the Computer Science & Engineering Department and the College of Education at Arizona State University, in cooperation with Scottsdale Unified School District and Coronado High School, we pioneered the first SOC course for high school students in Spring 2007. The same course was taught to high school teachers in summer 2007, and the service-oriented robotics development part was taught to high school students in a summer camp in 2007. This paper discusses the design of the course and reports the experience and lessons in teaching these classes.