Last month, CSTA Executive Director Chris Stephenson and I attended the organizational meeting for the Partnership for Advancing Computing Education or PACE. PACE was formed with the goal to “provide a basis for computing education organizations to communicate, cooperate and collaborate on activities that will advance the state of computing education.”
Founding member organizations include CSTA, National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT), IEEE Computer Society, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and Association for Information Systems (AIS). Mark Guzdial was appointed as the Director (you might want to check out Mark’s picture with the CSTA Sock Monkey in an earlier post) with Lecia Barker of NCWIT as chairperson and Andrew McGettrick as assistant chair of the Board.
CSTA hopes that the relationship with PACE and the other members will enhance our efforts to improve K-12 education. Each year, CSTA will send two representatives to the annual meeting of PACE with periodic phone conference calls in the interim. The goal for the organization within the next year is to increase the number of member organizations from five to ten.
If you know of an organization that is interested in joining PACE, contact CSTA and we can forward the information to Mark.
Dave Burkhart
CSTA Board of Directors
When i was in school 10 years ago, we didn’t have barely any computer education at all. it’s quite suprising how many people still don’t have basic knolwedge of a computer..
That’s awesome Dave, I think arming our youth with power to to create and make information accessible for themselves and others with through an understanding of computer technology is an incredibly important tool.