As the budget woes continue in California, my thoughts are turning to recruiting. If a sufficient number of students do not sign-up for the two computer science classes that I usually teach, then I will no long be teaching them. At my high school, gone are the days of small classes. Three of my four classes have enrollments of 38 students which includes my AP Computer Science class.
So my thoughts are turning toward what can I do to recruit students for the computer science classes? I usually produce a slide show where I embed movies of Alice projects and Scratch projects that the students have completed during the year. I also try to incorporate an Animoto Slide Show highlighting the collages the students have created. Then I ask the math teachers on campus to show the slide show and hand out the personal invitations that I printed to students that have the prerequisites to take the class or were on the AP Potential list I receive from the Guidance Office.
This year I want to add asking the math teachers to show the videos that CSTA is developing for Computer Science Education week. I am also thinking about asking my CS students to teach others to program using Alice during our Open House/ 8th grader preview night.
I am always looking for recruiting ideas. What do you do to recruit students at your school?
Myra Deister
CSTA Board of Directors

We are all aware that education is constantly changing- sometimes for the better, and sometimes for the worse. One of the items that gets caught up in this ebb and flow is professional development.
We hear from many people that school systems are no longer allowing teachers to attend conferences or workshops. Some will not even give teachers the release time to attend events even if the teacher pays for it. Additionally, time set aside during the school year for teacher in-services is dwindling and when it does exist, is usually set aside for topics that affect the entire school.
CSTA wants to help you. We value professional growth and hope you do also. But we need to know how to help you and what your needs are.
What should professional development look like in the face of the current education changes?
What does your school allow you to do for professional development?
What’s required of you by your individual state to keep your licenses current?
Please help us help you by posting a few comments that will help us shape professional development offerings in the future!
Mindy Hart
Chair, CSTA Professional Development Committee

I traveled up the coast of North Carolina to a town called New Bern and had an opportunity to attend the North Carolina Art Education Association Professional Development Conference thanks to an invite from the Art Specialist for Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. My intentions were to attend a “Video Gamer” workshop on a mission to continue efforts to Build the K-12 Pipeline for students who have an interest in STEM in the district. I was seeking to assess yet another avenue to engage K-8 students, as well as marry the interest of gamers to programming in grades 9-12.
The workshop was facilitated by the founder and CEO of E-LINE Media, Michael Angst. He promoted a browser-based game entitled Gamestar Mechanic. The game taps into real world experiences in the community as well as issues and places exposed to students on a daily basis. The goal is to encourage playing, designing and sharing games. The games developed by E-LINE Media are built on leading pedagogical research in the areas of systems thinking, 21st century digital literacy skills and STEM learning. It was a great workshop that wooed the minds high school students and teachers.
President Obama launched the National STEM Video Game Challenge to promote a renewed focus on STEM. According to data released in support of this initiative playing and making video games foster the development of critical thinking and design skills, problem-solving and encourages students to pursue careers in the field of STEM.
These portals are two great opportunities for districts or organizations to join forces and assist in creating opportunities for students and continue efforts to close the gap. We must continue to implement K-12 opportunities to make the connection between the demands of the workforce, the community of teachers as well as the learners in the classrooms.
Other resources:
Games for Change
Video Games and Middle School
Scratch
Alice
STEM CHALLENGE
Computer Science Unplugged
Shemeka D. Shufford
CSTA Board Member

I had a memorable time last weekend. My new Apple iMac came on a FedEx truck at about 9:30am. The publishing agreement for my textbook (second semester computer science) came about fifteen minutes later on a different FedEx truck. And then I turned 60 on Sunday. The first two were clearly exciting. (I am a new convert to the cult of Apple. My father was deeply observant, but I stuck with Unix/Linux, and what convinced me to convert was that I could get all the Mac features but still run X11 underneath and write, as I am now writing, in a standard Linux window with standard Linux tools. No need to dual boot)
I am scheduled to teach the second semester course in the undergraduate major next semester, using my pdf as the text. I started work on this book when I taught this course two years ago and wasn’t entirely happy with any of the books available. First of all, there is way too much material in the standard ACM/IEEE/ABET curriculum. It’s just not possible to teach all the material in the curriculum in one semester.
The approach I have tried to take in my book is that students in the first semester have become moderately capable of doing computing in a naive way. They should have mastered arrays and ArrayLists (we use Java in our first two courses as the programming language vehicle for teaching computer science and program design), linear search and lookup, and the organization of programs into perhaps three levels
of classes.
The computer can either be an object of study (if one is a hardware designer or a compiler writer) or a tool to be used for doing something useful. I assume that that there are far more students in the latter group than the former, especially when one is teaching courses that have students from other majors. For this majority of students who might use a computer to do something, the next steps after learning how to do things naively is to learn how to do things in a more sophisticated way, which would allow them to do bigger projects and run on more data.
Instead of linear search, then, binary search becomes the method of choice. More complexity and coding, yes, but more payoff if one has more searching to do. Instead of storing everything in an ArrayList, we use linked lists, stacks, queues, and such to provide more structure and allow for more efficient processing against the data.
And yes, there is some sophistication in the programming language that can be introduced. I view the entire notion of iterators as a way of eliminating the step that involves knowing what the underlying structure is. Instead of doing a “next” to get a node in a linked list, and then fetching the data in that node, we use the iterator to fetch the data directly. But again, this isn’t just a cool construct in the language that the compiler writers just had to do in order to show how clever they were; this is a feature that specifically eliminates one complication in naive programming and thus might reduce the number of bugs. As with everything, there is no free lunch; complexity in constructs requires complexity in program design and structure. But the complexity is sometimes necessary and must be mastered.
Or at least that’s what I am going to try to convince my students of next term.
Duncan Buell
CSTA Board of Directors

As we started the new school year, our small group of five (three college and two high school educators) is entering round two of starting a CSTA chapter. We created it last year and barely got it up and running. Now, we are committed to pushing ourselves into the educational battleground of Long Island.
The question we posed at our first meeting seemed simple enough: who do we recruit to be active members of the chapter? We made several attempts last year to solicit members through email and letter campaigns based on high school and college directories received from New York State Department of Education. Most of our attempts have yielded disappointing results.
We were brainstorming this at our first session this year:
Do we build computer science programs at the high school level by working from the top down by getting superintendents or principals to support CS?
Do we work with teachers even though our efforts to date indicate that very few teachers in our districts consider themselves computer science teachers (computer applications or computer lab administrators or tech teachers seem to be the norm).
What about parents? If parents demanded more CS wouldn’t administrators be forced to support the programs?
Are guidance counselors the answer? It would be nice to have a way to work with all these groups but time, money and manpower are limited.
What about the students? Can we go directly to the students and try to find ways to encourage them to push their parents to push their guidance counselors to demand of their administrators to build computer science into their curriculums?
Sounds like a bad nursery rhyme, doesn’t it? Hopefully, by the end of this school year, this group of CSTA chapter members will have found an answer, or at least a small hole to climb through.
What suggestions do you have for CSTA chapters that would like to attract more than a small core of teachers?
Ron Martorelli
CSTA Board of Directors

For the second year in a row, the Grace Hopper Conference included a Town Hall meeting on K-12 CS education, bringing together K-12 teachers with people from industry, academia, and research. One of the questions discussed was what teachers feel they need. The answers ranged from political and infrastructure responses to “in the trenches” needs. Here are some of the responses:
* Teachers need a political partner, someone from the political world to witness our discussions and begin to understand that CS is in crisis, understand what teachers need. How about getting a U.S. senator or Arne Duncan to come to SigCSE to talk about the CS education act, etc. And, most important, get CS included in STEM.
* Teachers need equipment and training. Labs in many schools are too slow and too outdated.
* Teachers need access to research and data, plus help on how to put together grants in order to get resources into their schools.
* If companies cannot donate equipment, maybe they could bring commitment in on loan. Or set up a bus of equipment that could arrive at the school periodically so that students would have access to state of the art machines.
* As is often mentioned, teachers need help changing the image of computing within K-12 so that girls will be more likely to want to take the courses. In particular, need ways to reach girls in 5th-8th grade, which is the time when they start to fall out of math and science.
* Need a groundswell of support, educate parents and others in communities so that they understand how important it is that CS be taught and be required. People need to know that CS isn’t required, so that they can lobby for it to become required.
* Need teacher certification and teacher training programs that are focused on CS.
* The K-12 situation would be helped by a disarticulation of the pieces of CS. We need better understanding among administrators and policy making boards that CS is not IT, CS is not computer applications, but that CS is not just programming either.
* Teachers asked for online self-directed learning modules so that they can get up to speed on new CS material.
* Because standards differ in every state, administrative support is critical, as well as trustworthy curricular materials.
One issue raised was that there are many communities in which CS is not taught at all, so those communities would not have any teachers who could attend a town hall like this one.
The next question asked was what people who are not K-12 teachers see as their role in the work around K-12 education, either personally or as a group.
* We can break down the isolation many individual K-12 teachers experience. (One of the suggestions I made during my opening remarks at the Town Hall was that people in industry or college/university settings invite area K-12 CS teachers, giving them an opportunity to connect with each other).
* We can target the people who help kids make decisions. For example, a new corporate partnership will be announced soon which will reach out to parents and guidance counselors.
A final closing comment was that we figure out how to “network” our passion and sustain it so that we don’t leave meetings like the Town Hall and then lose all of our enthusiasm and energy. There are many ways ti do this but two good places to start are by participating in CS Ed Week and helping with CS activities in your area schools.
Valerie Barr
CSTA Task Force Chair