A bit of a shaggy dog story. In the summer of 1975 I participated in the Bell Laboratories summer program for women and minorities. I spent the summer evaluating Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) programs, making a recommendation for which program to include in the PFORT portable Fortran library. It was a fabulous experience. Go forward one year to the summer of 1976. I spent that summer at Argonne National Laboratory on their summer program for women and minorities. Yes, imagine an era in which government labs and corporations actually had sanctioned affirmative action programs! That summer I worked on the BLAS, the Basic Linear Algebra Subroutines that are at the heart of LINPACK, a software library for carrying out linear algebra operations. My supervisor was Jack Dongarra who is now an internationally recognized expert on supercomputing and the keeper of the “top 500 list” of supercomputers (www.top500.org).
Fast forward to today. My department, with the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) CS department, hosted a visit by Jack Dongarra. Jack generously visited Union in the morning, spent the afternoon at RPI, and then gave a talk. My guesstimate is that the room held 160 people. It was completely full. There were 8 women there. Four faculty, 4 students. Jack gave a wonderful talk, really fascinating. But I came home completely depressed. We’ve all been trying lots of things to get more women into computing, but it sure seems that the impact is pretty minimal these days. Why am I in CS? Certainly the two summer experiences I had played a big role! I can look back at the projects on which I worked, the sense that I was doing real work that would be important to other users, and the rich, exciting settings in which I did that work. I know that it made a difference. I know that those projects sent me back to college motivated to continue my studies. And all of that was in an era in which majoring in CS wasn’t even a possibility at my school. But I still did independent studies in CS, worked on projects for faculty, did whatever I could to get my hands on computers.
So what do I conclude from this? We need to get back to a point where affirmative action is not a dirty word. As a country we are desperate for people to fill CS and IT jobs. The latest update from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that employment in all computer occupations will increase by 22 percent by 2020. Among software developers demand will increase as much as 32 percent. Where are the people going to come from to fill these positions? We need all hands on deck, but first we need much more aggressive strategies to get increased numbers of all kinds of people to consider CS and IT. All kinds of people. And that means bringing back affirmative action strategies that will help us to quickly get critical mass so that we can recruit and retain larger numbers of women of all kinds and larger numbers of underrepresented minorities. We need dramatic change quickly. Imagine the potential impact if Jack Dongarra and his lab colleagues had been able to have a few women and minority summer students every year from 1976 to now. I’m sure the demographics in the auditorium at RPI today would have been quite different.
Valerie Barr
CSTA Computational Thinking Task Force Chair

I recently was surprised at a faculty meeting by receiving an award for teaching from my colleagues. After receiving the award I was given a writing assignment which was to respond to the question, “What is Your Greatest Accomplishments in the Teaching Profession?” This was a difficult question for me to answer. I believe that any time I influence students positively this is a great accomplishment! Below is a portion of my essay about my accomplishments.
I periodically reflect on the many students that I have taught over the years. One particular student comes to mind is Bianca. She was a student who enrolled in Computer Science A AP. She was successful, enjoyed the subject and decided to continue on to take a second year. She struggled and I gently assisted her as well as her classmates. I adjusted assignments for her, encouraged her, and helped her after class. She successfully completed the class and learned persistence in the process. She chose to major in computer science in college. She has recently graduated and is working in the computer science field. She is one of my accomplishments.
I frequently reflect upon my current students. One who comes to mind is Stephanie, a freshman enrolled in Visual Basic. On her survey form she stated that she wanted to learn more about computers and she does not have a computer or Internet access at home. My desire for her is to become more proficient using a computer to improve her employability after high school. She started the course unable to run a program or navigate to a file without help. She now has confidence to copy files, use software and other tasks on her own. She is another one of my accomplishments.
William Butler Yeats stated, “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” I know I have lit some fires; those are my accomplishments I hold dear.
Now that you have read what I think are some of my greatest accomplishments, what are your greatest accomplishments in the teaching profession?
Myra Deister
CSTA At-Large Representative

The March issue of the 2011 National Secondary Computer Science Survey . As you might expect, if you compare the responses for any state to the national results (or compare one state to another), you’ll find some interesting variations.
For example, students in introductory CS courses earn a wide variety of types of credit:
“Technology (38%) and Computing (36%) are the most common types of credit given for introductory CS courses, followed by Business (25%), but 69% of Georgia schools allow Business credit, 52% of Virginia schools give Math credit, and 58% of Colorado schools give Elective credit for introductory CS courses.”
This variation is not surprising, since states also vary widely in the certification requirements for teachers who teach CS courses.

The reasons for some other state-by-state variations are not so obvious (to me, at least). For example:
I wonder what factors contributed to the wide range of rates (among schools that offer any CS course) of schools that offer AP CS: from 77% in Maryland to 9% in Kansas.
Why is Scratch the most commonly-taught programming language in introductory CS courses in Colorado (the only state for which that is true)?
Another puzzle: Most states’ teachers reported that the greatest challenges in teaching CS were two of these three:

So why is “Lack of hardware/software resources” considered to be one of the greatest challenges in Alabama, Kansas, Michigan, and Oklahoma, while “Lack of curriculum resources” was critical for teachers in Indiana and Washington? And why is Texas the only state whose teachers reported that “Difficult subject matter” was one of the greatest challenges?
The results that were highlighted in the Voice article are only a few of the variations present in the state-by-state results; you may find detailed survey results for each of the 29 states with 15 or more respondents.
We invite your own comments and insights on the survey results for your state; perhaps you can enlighten the rest of us about special factors that have shaped CS education in your state.
Debbie Carter
CSTA Research Committee