CSTA Now HAS RSS

Posted on September 25, 2008 by CSTA Blog

CSTA has just added an RSS feed for its news updates on the homepage. If you already have an RSS reader either installed in your browser or through a service like Google reader, just use the orange icon to have your reader include our news!
If you don’t have an RSS reader set up, you should consider it! It is a great way to have updates from your favorite web sites sent to you like email. Rather than having to navigate the web, you can simply choose to have your favorite news, blog posts, or other RSS-enabled information sent directly to your reader.
There are RSS reader programs that install directly to your email or you can use something like Google reader to help you organize the feeds. I suggest you check out Google reader or just do a search for RSS reader and the name of your email client in order to see what is available.
If you are interested in a way to have our CSTA news sent directly to your email, you can check out the blog post I did a while ago about RSS. It provides a link to a tool and directions that allow you to send any RSS feed to your email inbox.
Leigh Ann Sudol
CSTA Volunteer

Getting Moms and Dads Involved

Posted on September 16, 2008 by CSTA Blog

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

Leadership Cohort Activities in Gwinnett County, Georgia

Posted on September 11, 2008 by CSTA Blog

I began this school year with a renewed spirit, after having attending the Leadership Cohort in Chicago, IL this summer! It was so empowering to be amongst folks with like minds and a passion to grow our computer science programs at our schools.
As the Program Specialist for High Schools in Gwinnett County, Georgia, I serve as a liaison between the Computer Science teachers and the Director of Technical Education, Computer Science, and Apprenticeships. During the week of pre-planning, the Assistant Principal of Curriculum at my school stopped me in the hallway and asked me if I had any ideas about how I could possibly help to increase the number of students in the Computer Science program. I said, “Do I?!” He came into my classroom and I told him about the cohort, and all of the activities that we’d done to that end. So, we both left our little impromptu meeting feeling very encouraged. As part of an aggressive recruiting program this year, I will be at the feeder middle school’s Orientation Night, equipped with a Smartboard showing some Greenfoot programs, Scratch animations, and Alice movies. I will also take along a couple of Lego NXT robots. The idea is to get the upcoming freshman class students “amped up” to take computer science courses as early as their first semester in high school. To get some of the current students at the school interested in our courses, I’m going to work with teachers in other disciplines to create projects that incorporate computer science in their other courses. For example, one year, one of the Foreign Language teachers and I created a project in which my Advanced Web Design students created a Flash matching game to help with Spanish vocabulary. We each had our own rubric to grade the project, and the students were very proud of their work. I will also recruit more female students by going to the softball team and cheerleaders, and encouraging them to register for computer science courses with a “buddy”. There’s been some research that indicates that female students feel less isolated in a computer science course when they take the course with a friend. I’ve done this before, and it seemed to be true.
This summer, my goal is to facilitate 2 or 3 Computer Science camps at one of the local middle schools, to teach upcoming 7th and 8th graders Scratch, Alice, and Lego robots. I will also speak with the Program Specialist for Middle School Computer Science as well, to see if he’d be interested in participating in this project with me.
I’m very excited about my endeavors this year, and I’m hopeful that my efforts to create “One Voice” are successful.
Michelle Venable-Foster
South Gwinnett High School
Math / Computer Science Teacher
Program Specialist for High School Computer Science
Gwinnett County, Georgia

Maryland and Technology Literacy

Posted on September 11, 2008 by CSTA Blog

So the people in the computer science field are constantly asking “Where do we fit in terms of technology literacy?” Some believe that every student should have some programming experience, while others believe that it should be selective students that get that instruction. (how we select is a whole different argument)
Maryland has adopted learning.com’s Tech Literacy assessment according to this article in order to gauge how well their 7th grade students are doing in acquiring 21st century skills. If you go to the TechLiteracy assessment modules page you can see the core skills they are working on.
It is anextensive list in terms of applications usage, but is lacking in the more conceptual knowledge (except the social and ethical tabs). Lets consider what would happen if we added another box: Computer Science. What 1 sentence description would you provide for the module? What elementary and middle school examples of computer science skills would you want all students to have? (answer one or both, doesn’t matter – I’ll post my own ideas later in the comments to let people think about what they value before they see what I do).
Leigh Ann Sudol

Leadership Cohort Activities in Ohio

Posted on September 10, 2008 by CSTA Blog

I am very excited to be a part of the CSTA Leadership Cohort. I was impressed at the workshop this summer with all of the insights into CS education, where we have been and where we hope to be. We are doing our best in Ohio to advocate for CS education. Our two main goals are to set up a CSTA chapter and have a CS emphasis one day at our state wide Etech conference.
My colleague Angie is working with contacts in Central Ohio to host a first CSTA meeting which hopefully will lead to the formation of a chapter. We have both been working on our Etech conference emphasis. It is a 3 day event and I am working with one of the program coordinators to have one day offer a computer science session for
each time slot. We are working with a professor and a couple other CSTA members along with ourselves to write proposals for sessions. Our topics are most likely going to include Alice, Scratch, CS Unplugged, Phidgets and some other topics. We want to offer sessions that will offer free solutions (or minimal cost) to add to school
curriculum. Our plan is that other CS educators will walk away from that day with a handful of ideas and resources plus our commitment to continue helping them advocate for CS in their school district. Our goals are lofty but are in the process of being realized.
We appreciate all the support we are getting and the excitement that is passing from us to those we come in contact with. Hopefully our efforts will help promote our “ONE VOICE” for CS and bring support to those trying to keep computer science in the schools.
Stephanie Hoeppner
Clermont Northeastern High School
Angie Thorne
Hilliard Davidson High School

Leadership Cohort Activities in Georgia

Posted on September 10, 2008 by CSTA Blog

I was asked to address all the teachers in my county (Fulton) in Georgia towards increasing teacher training and collaboration for teaching CS courses. Our county Department Chair, for Career Tech, Business and Computer Science at the county, asked me to conduct a survey on what kind of interest teachers would have towards being more successful in teaching CS courses. The choices offered had a wide range of courses from AP Computer Science to Introduction to Computer Programming. The response was awesome. Most teachers said they felt lost and responded that the training would help a lot. In Fulton (my county) since last year all students K-12 have an early release day once a month (Sept., Oct., Jan, Feb and March). Teachers are expected to use this extra time toward Professional Learning and counts towards adding to their PLUs. I am cashing into this and offering training in different CS courses. I plan to start with AP Computer Science (only because I have other teachers with whom I collaborate with and I have most success teaching this course).
This kind of project is the first of its kind. I am not sure how things will turn out. I guess I will solve the problems as they come along. As I progress, I will keep you posted of my successes, frustrations and failures.
Deepa Muralidhar
Northview High School
Johns Creek Georgia

CSTA Looking for Local Volunteers

Posted on August 27, 2008 by CSTA Blog

If you are interested in working to improve K-12 computer science in your state, now is the time to get involved by working with your new CSTA local teacher leaders.
In January, CSTA was awarded an exciting new two-year grant with the overall objective of developing a cohort of K-12 teachers who will serve as educational leaders at the state level. Thirty-two people representing 17 states participated in a leadership-building workshop in July. The workshop focused on the leadership qualities needed for effective advocacy, identifying and building partnerships with appropriate stakeholders, and developing a toolkit of advocacy materials to be used in each state. (Individuals from the remaining states will be invited in winter 2009 to participate in a workshop during summer 2009 and continue their work through 2010.)
Since the workshop, participants have begun implementing outreach plans in their respective states focused on establishing K-12 computer science as an essential academic discipline and participating in a cohort online community to share experiences, strategies, and successes.
These local leaders are now working toward organizing local and state chapters of CSTA. CSTA chapters will meet on a regular basis, and address key issues such as community building, curriculum reform, and professional development.
In order for all of these efforts to be effective, members of the leadership cohort will be seeking volunteers to assist them. We will need the combined forces of all CSTA members in order for this project to be successful. For further information on participating states and contact information for local teacher leaders, please visit http://csta.acm.org
Gail Chapman
Leadership Cohort Coordinator

Getting To Know the Freshman Students

Posted on August 22, 2008 by CSTA Blog

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

Where Did All the Years Go?

Posted on August 15, 2008 by CSTA Blog

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

Setting the Tone for the School Year

Posted on August 13, 2008 by CSTA Blog

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

The CSTA Advocate Blog

Author Archives: CSTA Blog