I am excited by the explosive growth in our Georgia Tech computing workshops for Girl Scouts.
We started working with the Girl Scouts in 2005. I had been interested in using LEGO robots to introduce computing to kids but was worried about research that showed that in mixed gender groups boys often took over. One year at SIGCSE I saw a poster about the LEGO robots and asked the presenter if she had this problem. She said, “No, we are at an all girls school.”
I contacted the local Girl Scout Council and they already had LEGO robots and laptops but nobody knew what to do with them. I suggested that I bring female undergraduate computing majors to help with Robot workshops and we started with volunteers.
In 2005-2006 we did three weekends where Dads go camping with their daughters and we had them program pre-built LEGO robots. We also offered two 4-hour workshops where the girls could build and program the robots. We also trained camp counselors to offer the robots at one Girl Scout camp that summer. About 190 girls got an introduction to computing from these activities in 2005-2006.
In 2006-2007 we again did three weekends with the Dads and girls. We offered three 4-hour robot workshops and our first workshop on Alice. We trained camp counselors to do the robots at one Girl Scout camp that summer and also lent the Girl Scouts PicoCricket kits and they used these at another Girl Scout camp. About 372 girls got an introduction to computing from these activities in 2006-2007.
In 2007-2008 we received an NSF Broadening Participation in Computing grant which meant that we could pay students to help at our computing workshops. We did four weekends with Dads and their daughters with LEGO robots, three weekends with Moms and their daughters with PicoCrickets, and ten 4-hour workshops in total using LEGO robots, PicoCrickets, Scratch, and Alice.
We also targeted Hispanic Girl Scouts. We went to a local Elementary school for three weeks in a row and introduced the students to computing using PicoCrickets and LEGO robots. We also bused in Hispanic Girl Scouts for one of our 4-hour workshops at Georgia Tech. Again the Girl Scouts offered LEGO robots at one summer camp and PicoCrickets at another. About 1595 girls got an introduction to computing from these activities in 2007-2008.
For 2008-2009 we are planning on doing the Dad and Me and Mom and Me programs and have fifteen 4-hour workshops scheduled! One of the cool things is that originally we had 12-20 girls at a computing workshop and now we get 60 at a time with a waiting list. Only about 25-30% of the girls have been to more than one computing workshop so we are still reaching new girls. Our Girl Scout Council of Greater Atlanta, Inc. has about 40,000 girls in it so we still have many more girls that we hope to reach.
We do a pre and post attitude survey and are finding that we can change the girls’ attitudes towards computing in just these 4-hour workshops. We are getting the most statistically significant changes in attitudes with our PicoCricket workshops. We also get some statistically significant changes in attitudes with Scratch and Alice. We are currently not getting any statistical significant changes in attitudes with the LEGO robots.
I particularly like the events with the Dads and Moms and their daughters as research shows that one way to get girls interested in computing is to get their parents to support it. At these events we hand out career brochures from the Computer Science Teachers Association (“Consider Your Future in Computing”), ACM (“Computing Careers and Degrees”) and the new “Talking Points” from NCWIT. It is fun to see the Dads’ faces as they talk to the female undergraduate students and find out that they are majoring in Computer Science or Computation Media at Georgia Tech. You can tell that this surprises the Dads!
For more information see:
http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/ice-gt/201
for pictures from our Girl Scout workshops and our pre and post attitude surveys. See
http://csta.acm.org/Careers/sub/ClassroomCareersResources.html
for the CSTA career brochures we hand out. See
http://www.ncwit.org/resources.res.outreach.talking2.html
for the Talking Points from NCWIT.
Barb Ericson
Director, CS Outreach
College of Computing
Georgia Tech

Classes started at the University of South Carolina this morning, and I taught my first class at 9:30. Last year I taught our first-term (CS1) course because I felt it was (long past) time for me to get to know the freshman students, to try to understand why they were here in our classes, and perhaps to understand why there weren’t more of them here in our classes. This year I promoted myself to teaching the second term course, and I spent a fair part of the summer getting ready to teach this, my 12th new course since 2001. It was a little scary last year teaching freshmen, knowing that they hadn’t been born the last item I had taught freshmen. This year I see a lot of familiar faces from last year. Since I am teaching the only main section of our CS2 course, I know that these students are either happy to see me or else just gritting their teeth and hoping to get beyond me for next
term.
Teaching these first two courses has given me a chance to see first hand what we do in the intro courses and to think about whether we are doing it right. I have long had some misgivings about the object oriented ideology; not that I am not willing to teach objects, but that I think students at this level need to see first and foremost that computer programs can be used to do useful things. Since students are naturally going to be making mistakes, the metaphysics of *why* we use objects will probably come to them after they make some necessary educational mistakes.
On Monday I will speak to our incoming class in our “freshman seminar” course. We created a one-credit course to try to get students introduced to the larger world of computing to which they will be exposed after they master some of the technical basics. If I thought I could get away with it, I would teach this using science fiction; by the time these students get to be my age in about 2050, they will be living in a very different world. It can’t hurt for them to anticipate now what is to come by then, and the opening half-dozen pages of Charles Stross’s *Accelerando* are only just barely fiction.
Duncan A. Buell
CSTA Board Member

Today I enter my third decade in the teaching profession.
The first day of school is always an exciting one for the students, parents, and yes, for the teachers too. Our school has seven days of pre-planning before the students arrive. We have various tasks to do, including updating our curriculum maps, getting the computers ready, writing lesson plans and lots of meetings. Too many meetings!
Today, I’m ready to teach!
There have been many changes at our school. We had a 750 seat theatre built last year that has now opened up. There is also a new black box theatre for students and a new fitness center with state of the art equipment. My computer room was also carpeted over the summer and the sound of computers humming is very quiet.
The students seem eager to be back at school hooking up with old friends and anxious to make new friends as well.
This semester, I teach three sections of Web Design, one section of Honors Programming I, and one section of AP Computer Science. I’m using Moodle again this year and I am trying to get new teachers to use it as well. It is going to be very convenient to use because I built the course syllabus with links and files last year and now I just use it as needed.
This year marks the first year that my oldest daughter will be teaching kindergarten classes in Alexandria, VA. She went back to school recently at George Macon University to study elementary teaching because she got the teaching bug. She’ll make a good teacher. I like to think that it runs in the family.
Brian Scarbeau
CSTA Board of Directors

For most of my teaching career I was on a 12 month contract because I was also the technology coordinator. That meant I was in the school building most of the summer. So for me the first day of school meant one thing – students! Being in a school that is empty of students can be a depressing time. The building is too quiet. The interactions are all with adults. Now there is nothing wrong with adults and I was always fortunate to work with talented, committed and interesting faculty and administration people. But there is nothing like interaction with students. When students show up for that first school day the energy is palpable. It is rejuvenating. It is exciting. For me there is nothing quite like it.
As a teacher the first day of school is a chance to set a tone for the year. I don’t just mean the laying out of rules (though that is especially important in lab-based classes) and outlining the curriculum for the year but establishing a feeling of collaboration – a goal of learning together. I get excited about what I am teaching and I want to share that excitement. I see each new school year as ripe with opportunity for teacher as well as students to learn new things, to do interesting things, and to create new partnerships for learning. That is the tone I always tried to set for the school year. I’m not sure I always succeeded but that was always the goal.
This year I don’t have classrooms of my own. I will likely not even be in a school on their first day. I’m on a number of advisory boards for computer programming/computer science programs at high schools near me and the meeting invitations are already coming in. So I know I will get some first day of school reports very soon but it is not like being there. I am seriously thinking about dropping in on some teachers I know just for the experience. We’ll see about that. But over all I have a personal goal to visit more classrooms this year. If I can help out in a classroom that is great. Speaking to students is a very grounding experience and one I really believe helps the speaker as much as the listeners.
My wife and son are both teachers and are deep in the throes of preparing for the start of their school year. While they are enjoying the last of their summer vacations they are not facing the start of school with dread but with anticipation. I have to say that I am excited about and anticipating the new school year as well. A lot of teachers I work with made plans to learn new things over the summer and I look forward to hearing (and helping where I can) how those new things work when introduced to the classroom and students. The preparation is nearly complete. The planting is about to start. What sort of growth will the school year bring?
Alfred Thompson
Academic Relations Manage, Microsoft Corporation

It is hard to believe that it is already time to turn our minds to the new school year.
For some, there is almost enough time left to do all of the projects we promised to do around the house. For others, it is a mad dash to get everything ready for the students. This is especially true for those hardy souls who have been working all summer to set up new servers and labs or get the old equipment ready to take one more year of student “love”.
Where ever you are along this spectrum, it is likely that you are meeting the new school with both joy and trepidation and that you have dreams of your own that will come into fruition or die as this year moves through its paces.
The new school year can always be a fresh start, a new beginning, a chance for us to grow together with our students.
So tell us. What do do you wish this year to be for you and your students?
Chris Stephenson
Executive Director

I had an interesting email conversation with Carrie Toth from Insight Schools about the difficulties of finding computer science teachers, a challenge we share for different reasons.
CSTA membership has grown very quickly, from 0 members in 2005 to over 5300 members today but we know that there are still many teachers we would like to reach and we simply cannot find them. We can use market data companies (and we do) but we know they are only touching the surface of our community as well.
The situation is made worse by the fact that CSTA is often called upon for research and the one question we just cannot answer with any certainty is “How many CS teachers are there in U.S. high schools anyway?”.
For people like Carrie, the situation is just as frustrating. She has a number of computer science teaching jobs available and no way to advertise and fill them.
There are a number of reasons this problem exists. I think one of the primary difficulties is that, because there is no certification for computer science teachers in many states, no one keeps track of them at the state level or nationally. And until someone does, they remain invisible to the system as a whole.
Setting up some kind of careers board may seem like a potential solution but there are several issues (cost, liability, and verification just to mention a few) that make it prohibitive for associations to get into the job posting business. We have thought about it, but there is just no evidence that it would be of sufficient value to the majority of our members to make it worthwhile.
In the short term, the best we can say is, if you are a certified teacher looking for an online computer science teaching position with a virtual school, you can complete the Insight Schools application at:
https://edzapp.com/applicant/loginprivate.aspx?origincode=22748
or contact Carrie at
teachers@insightschools.net
And if you are not yet a CSTA member, contact me at:
cstephenson@csta.acm.org
Chris Stephenson
Executive Director, CSTA

While Jane’s E-Learning Pick of the Day is not purely about computer science education, I feel very strongly that good educational practices span disciplines and so it is one of the RSS feeds that Google reader automatically retrieves for me daily.
Jane recently blogged about a professional development program that she created, centered around her top 25 e-learning tools. I highly recommend going to the site and working through the activities for any of the tools you are unfamiliar with. Some of them, like Firefox, are things you probably already use, but Jane highlights some of the extra functionality of the browser as well as some useful extensions.
The tools are divided into categories including: Keep Yourself Up to Date, Manage Your Own Productivity, Set Up a Blog, Website and/or Wiki, Share Content with Others, Build Content and Share it with Others, Bring People Together, and Develop and Manage Courses.
To start a little discussion here please tell us what your favorite e-learning tool is (whether or not Jane agrees)? I use many of the things on her list and I think Google Reader has drastically improved my ability to find new and useful things as well as be aware of what is going on today in education. I used to have to go to 20-25 web pages first thing in the morning to see what the latest headlines were, who posted something new on blogs I read, and forget about trying to find new research as its published. Now with Google Reader, I go to one place and get EVERYTHING. It is separated by the feed (where it came from) so I can pick and choose what I want to read when I have time. It truly has changed the way I interact with the Internet on a daily basis.
No matter how small or how large leave a comment and share your favorite e-learning tool here.
Leigh Ann Sudol
CSTA Communications Chair

Over 1000 computer science educators gathered in Portland Oregon for the 2008 ACM SIGCSE conference. The 39th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education provided a wide selection of technical sessions and opportunities for teachers to network and to learn. The topics ranged from innovative strategies for increasing classroom diversity to hands-on techniques with applications and curriculum.
I love the excitement of SIGCSE, especially the opportunities to catch up with friends and the discovery of new and innovative teaching strategies. I managed to catch up with some of the presenters and participants who I thought you wouldd value hearing from.
Please listen in on the following CSTA Snipits podcasts.
A GridWorld Quickstart with Ann Shen
Medium: MP3
Listening Time: 9 min.
Interview Location: ACM SIGCSE 2008 Portland, Oregon
Interview Date: March 2008
Ann Shen, The Bishop Strachan School:
Case studies expose students to large programs, enabling them to understand the importance of design and good programming style while encouraging teamwork and active learning. The AP GridWorld case study provides a graphical environment in which students can experiment with different types of objects and observe how programming changes will affect the behavior of those objects. It is significant that the test results show a smaller score difference between males and females on the case study questions than non-case study questions. In our visit, Ann describes this learning tool, compares and contrasts it to the previous AP case study, and gives teachers suggestions for using it in their computer science classroom.
CyberCivics with Jeanna Matthews and James Owens
Medium: MP3
Listening Time: 8.5 min.
Interview Location: ACM SIGCSE 2008 Portland, Oregon
Interview Date: March 2008
Jeanna Matthews and James Owens, Clarkson University
CyberCivics was developed as a novel computer science outreach program, designed to introduce diverse groups of talented high school students to hands-on activities that reflect the myriad ways in which computing technologies directly impact their everyday lives. The cyberCivics program integrates hands-on computing experiences with the study of contemporary social and political issues. One such curriculum, focused on electronic voting and was used with a high school AP Government course. Jeanna Matthews and James Owens describe the philosophy behind this approach and give suggestions of how to implement in the classroom. They are pleased with how it reaches a larger, more diverse and more academically prepared group of students. The materials are available at:
www.clarkson.edu/projects/cybercivics.
Listen to these and many more Snipits podcasts at:
http://csta.acm.org/Resources/sub/Podcasts.html
Pat Phillips
Editor, CSTA Voice

I have just returned from the Game Development in Computer Science Education (GDCSE) conference. I was lucky enough to be chosen as one of the 10 Electronic Arts Scholars. The conference was sponsored by Microsoft and Electronic Arts in cooperation with ACM and SIGCSE. It was an intense conference and I did learn some interesting things.
* The game industry is now larger than the music industry. It became larger than the movie industry about 4 years ago.
* Making a game can cost 30 million dollars and many years of development.
* There are many different types of games from 2D arcade-style games, to role playing games, to first person shooters, to web-based games, to movement games (like the Wii), to serious games that try to help people change their behavior.
* Game developers need to know about networking, artificial intelligence, machine learning, physics, parallel programming, and more. Games also need artistic and creative people who can create compelling and fun experiences.
* I was glad to see more women and minorities than I had expected, but still the majority of the attendees were white males.
Some of the ways people are using games in CS education:
* as a few assignments in introductory computing courses. Kelvin Sung
* as a context for early computing courses or AI courses. Wanda Dann, Alice Project, Douglas Blank
* as a platform for learning computing concepts by having the students play games Tiffany Barnes
* as a course on game design for non-majors to try to draw them into computing Dianna Xu, Jim Whitehead
* as a degree program centered on games Michael Zyda and DigiPen
* using the flight simulator 3D world as the basis to improve global STEM education David Gibson
Overall, many of the talks were about fairly new initiatives with little evaluation. Many of the talks expect to offer more results in the following year. Some of the results that I found interesting were:
* Students didn’t like doing just the hard back-end of a game Kelvin Sung. They want to be creative and not just program. Kevin Bierre
* Some students were discouraged because creating games is much harder, time consuming, and more tedious than they thought. Women are much less likely to want to make first person shooter games than men. Dianna Xu
* Some students are highly motivated by the context and come early and have to be thrown out to make room for the next class. This context appeals more to men (80%) than to women (20%). Jim Whitehead
In summary, it seems that games can serve as a context for some computing courses. Games courses and degree programs can attract more students to computing courses. But, one concern is that women are not as attracted to this context as men. There was a call for the creation of a game platform that was easier to use for computing education purposes.
For more information on this conference see https://www.msadgd08.net/Main.aspx.
Barb Ericson
CSTA Board Member

Medical shows and Crime Scene investigations have sparked students imaginations. They imagine themselves as criminologists solving crimes and doctors saving lives, both rewarding and important careers with an expectation of job satisfaction.
Computer scientists often get to work in similar fields. In fact, much of the high tech equipment used by both doctors and criminologists was developed with the help of a computer scientist.
In my time here at Carnegie Mellon University as a visiting lecturer I have had the opportunity to see computer scientists work on robotic surgeons A Miniature Mobile Robot for Precise and Stable Access to the Beating Heart), and using human computation in order to help computers make more books available to more people through the Internet Archive recaptcha.
I recently came across a website called Computing Life published by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. This publication focuses on highlighting the ways in which scientists use computers to increase our understanding of the human body, medicine and a variety of other topics. Take a look! Go and talk to you science teacher about a collaborative project – what can you help your school’s students model?
If you have any great resources, or any collaborative projects you have done along these lines, comment here and share!
Leigh Sudol
CSTA Communications Chair