Recently, I was forwarded an email from one of our CSTA members asking for some help finding curriculum resources for teaching computer science in the classroom. It was refreshing and satisfying to be able to answer this teacher’s email. Hopefully there will be some information in that email that will be of use to this teacher.
As the chairperson for the membership committee, I wish I received more emails of this type. What is it that our members want from CSTA? What curriculum resources are there that you need help identifying? I understand that we all would like more money for our programs, but there are great free resources that many of us use and are able to pass on to others.
Every two years, CSTA conducts a survey of its members to determine the importance of our current benefits, but sometimes just a person asking for help can be a better way of determining needs than a survey.
I encourage our members to use this blog as a way to ask for help.
What kind of resources are you looking for?
How can CSTA help you out?
Let us know!
Dave Burkhart
CSTA Membership Chairperson

At the end of the year, it is customary to reflect upon what has been accomplished during the year. Since it is near that time I thought it might be a good time to reflect upon some of the things that CSTA as an organization has accomplished.
CSTA chapters are growing and continue to support CSTA members locally. Chapters are meeting regularly and planning meetings that are pertinent to their members. The CSTA Leadership Cohort has been instrumental in developing strong chapters. The number of chapters has increased this year as well as membership in CSTA.
In July, CS & IT, CSTA’s annual conference, showed a strong attendance even in the face of tough economic times. With assistance from Google, Microsoft Research and Anita Borg Institute, teachers had many excellent workshops to choose from. In fact, many teachers asked for the symposium to be extended to two days. The planning for next year’s event is well under way and it will be a three-day conference. If you have expertise to share, I encourage you to submit a proposal. Submittal information is on the CSTA website at:
http://csta.acm.org/ProfessionalDevelopment/sub/CSITSymposiaSite.html
CS Education Week, which is celebrated during the first full week in December, was very successful. The Donald Bren School of Information & Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine and CSTA created 5 short videos that could be used during morning announcements or in individual classrooms to highlight the many opportunities computer science provides. CSTA also made available an audio announcement that could be used for schools that do not have video capabilities. One additional resource was a sports poster that CSTA made available to its membership which was also designed to draw attention to computer science.
I have only touched on a few of the accomplishments of our organization. None of this could have been successful without the leadership of our executive director, Chris Stephenson, and the many others that have devoted their time to each of these activities. This is the time to say thank you to all of those who have contributed to this organization and its accomplishments. But there is still more to do. We need to continue to work toward advocacy for computer science. For ideas about what you can do, read Shemeka Shufford’s recent blog posted on December 22.
Myra Deister
CSTA Board Member

By Hélène Martin
This blog piece is posted with the permission of Hélène Martin who posted it it first on her blog http://www.helenemartin.com/.
Yesterday was a long day well spent at Google headquarters for the Computer Science Teachers Association’s annual Computer Science & Information Technology Symposium. It was a fairly modest gathering. I think there were about 200 of us (soon to be 10,000) but a lot of great folks came out and there were fantastic conversations inside and outside of sessions.
Spaf on Soup to Nuts
Gene Spafford, of security fame, kicked things off with a keynote covering interesting puzzles to get students thinking out of the box as well as ideas on how to inspire students by showing them what can be done with computer science. Examples included training soldiers with Segway-based robots and discovering security holes that make power plants vulnerable to cyber attacks. Overall, it was an interesting, engaging talk. There was a lot I recognized from Ed Lazowska’s talks and materials I already use which I found comforting in some way.
Code as a Metaphor for Computational Thinking
I then went to Owen Astrachan’s Code as a Metaphor for Computational Thinking session. As he opened, he said he’d let us decide whether the talk was actually about computational thinking because he wasn’t sure. Interesting to hear him say that. I have a hard time with the “computational thinking” label because I haven’t seen a satisfying explanation of what it is. The talk was centered on three examples that involved reasoning about existing computational artifacts, writing some related code and then analyzing that code. At one point, he said something to the effect of “if you don’t write code in class, students won’t know how to do it.” I appreciated that and do believe that there’s something very powerful about seeing a (relative) expert go through the process of writing a program, making mistakes, verifying it, using tools like IDEs appropriately, etc. I’m very suspicious of instructors who talk about code without demonstrating how to write anything.
The first example he discussed involved online gambling. He started by mentioning that it’s a good place to talk about the legal code as it relates to computing. Its also a good opportunity to show some interesting code for labeling hands. He showed us a flawed example of an “isPair” function that returned true even when the hand should really be considered a triple or better. We talked through different ways of resolving this issue and lots of good design ideas came out. My only concern would be that poker tends to be a high-income, white, nerdy male sport…using this example would require careful thought on how to present it without alienating anyone. I don’t really know poker and my first reaction was “yawn” though I warmed up to it once we got to the code. There really are interesting things that come up, here. One audience member suggested that the problem could be fixed by always calling the hand-testing functions in order of highest-scoring to lowest-scoring. True, but Michael Kolling of Greenfoot fame rightly pointed out that functions should work regardless of the context in which they’re called. This is a good type of conversation to have with and between students. Students can then implement all the hand-scoring functions and compare their runs to expected probabilities, using those to evaluate whether their implementations are correct. That’s an idea I really like.
Owen’s second example involved Tin Eye, a search engine that lets you upload a picture and find instances of it regardless of size, compression, format, etc. It’s interesting to speculate on how it works and to try to discover the limits of its tolerance. For example, Owen suggests that we ask students to use steganography functions to hide an unrelated image into a target image then see whether Tin Eye still recognizes the target. What if more of the target image were replaced? What if part of the image were cropped? One could do something similar with Shazam, a tool for recognizing songs. I like the “let’s figure this out” feel of this example.
Finally, he discussed an example from the “code of life,” finding repeated DNA substrings. This is an interesting algorithmic problem that can be discussed free from code and eventually be written as an exercise. The discovery for me was that Duke has a small set of problems with test sequences available here. I don’t know what computational thinking is, but what Owen discussed were definitely examples of it.
Pre-AP Recruiting
The next session I attended, “How does your geek garden grow? Identifying and cultivating the geeks of tomorrow (AP CS Feeder Course)” left a sour taste in my mouth. The speaker argued that we need to be better at communicating with math teachers and counselors to tell them that we are in fact looking for the bored, disinterested students at the social fringe who never do their homework. The reason for this is that they may make great ‘geeks,’ which is the type of person the tech industry wants to hire. Maybe my thinking is clouded by the luxury of having lots of motivated, social students who want to take my courses but I really do want to target the leaders, the social butterflies, the high-achievers as much as possible. Of course, I want my courses to be inclusive of all, but I feel that targeting unmotivated students at the social fringes is a pretty desperate move and not one I think will do a lot for the image or success of K-12 Computer Science. The speaker’s suggestion for getting those unmotivated students is to tell them that they’ll make video games, that there will be no homework and that they’ll pass if they play along.
This makes me uncomfortable but the speaker did report that this tactic has resulted in students finding something that they’re good at and continuing on to be successful in her AP class. That, I think, is a real victory and something to be celebrated so I’m a little torn. It’s possible that faced with low enrollment and a lack of strong students I would do the same thing.
A common theme in the talk was “let students do what they want to do so you don’t lose them.” The course she described seemed like everything but the kitchen sink and heavy on the tools (Visual Basic, Java, Scratch, Alice, Gamemaker) my head was spinning just thinking about it! Where I tend to opt for structured play and predictability, she really opens things up for students to experiment. It’s a matter of philosophy and I wish I could go see how things play out in her classroom.
One thing I really appreciated from this talk was getting some good reminders about where teenagers are in their development while they’re taking our courses. They’re identity-building and striving to find areas they’re successful in so we can have a very powerful effect by providing them with experiences that reinforce their sense of self.
Emmanuel Schanzer’s talk on Functional Videogame Programmingwas the day’s discovery and I’m glad Michelle Hutton encouraged me to see it. Emmanuel’s project, Bootstrap , is a full curriculum for using Scheme to bolster algebra learning. I think I’m going to ruminate on this one and write about it later.
Digitizing The World
The last session I attended was by two teachers from CSTA’s board of directors, current president Michelle Hutton and past president Robb Cutler. They presented extensions on a cool CS Unplugged activity on image representation. Michelle’s middle school girls “digitized” color images using graph paper and a color key. They discussed different algorithms for choosing the color to put in one square and changing the grid size allowed them to discuss tradeoffs between storage space and fidelity. I like it. Then, they extended the exercise further by using points to digitally represent 3D objects. Robb wrote a tool to interpret simple formatted text files and display the objects or scenes so they can be interacted with. Michelle had her students represent Lego shapes and their classroom. In a blog post about the exercise, she recounted one student’s inability to believe in her own success (spacial orientation exercises are generally more difficult for we ladies).
I liked their idea of giving “programming-like experiences.” I’ll have to see whether there’s a way I can adapt the activity or something like it for my high schoolers. I was also very impressed that Robb was modifying the tool and the text file’s syntax as the girls requested features. Their requests ranged from function-like syntax (reusable blocks) to naming the tool after them. Participating in this “client” way must definitely have given the girls a sense of the power of programming and I’d like to see whether I can replicate that experience somehow.
Megan Smith of Google.org
Our closing keynote was by Megan Smith, in charge of Google.org. She discussed .org initiatives including Flu Trends, RechargeIT, Clean Energy 2030, and PowerMeter and tied those nicely to generating excitement in our students about computer science. She’s an excellent speaker and closed the day well. Valerie Barr, an inspirational instructor who has revamped the CS1 courses at Union College, mentioned that Google is hurting computer science by calling its employees “engineers.” The same point was made to Marissa Mayer when she gave the keynote talk at SIGCSE in 2008. Megan had a good response but I now read that she’s not a computer scientist at all but a mechanical engineer! The problem may be partly on the computer science side as we still haven’t defined our field very well. Engineering brings to mind creativity, construction, collaboration and even I’m not sure what CS should make me think of.
Overall, a positive, inspirational day leaving me with lots of food for thought and wishing I could have spent more time with so many people I admire and enjoy speaking with.
Hélène Martin
CS&IT Attendee

By Doug Peterson
This is a reposting of a blog piece written by Doug Peterson on his blog http://dougpete.wordpress.com/.
Yesterday, I had the honour of attending the 2010 CSIT Symposium in Sunnyvale, CA. This symposium is hosted by the CSTA (Computer Science Teachers Association) which is sponsored by Google, Microsoft Research, and the Anita Borg Institute. This is one of the events that Computer Science and Information Technology teachers need to attend. Circle it and put it on your calendar. It’s an experience like no other. Often Computer Science teachers are the lonely runner in their schools so it’s so invigorating to be in a room with 200 others with a similar passion for a subject discipline.
The event travels from region to region in the United States and I have been a member of the organizing committee and presented sessions from at least 2002. The memory does fail over the years but the internet and the archival process makes sure that you can always dig back to relive things. That sure bailed us out as we were trying to put things in historical perspective yesterday. We all agreed that there was one year when we offered two Symposia but were really pressed to remember when or where!
This year’s event was held at the Google Headquarters in Mountain View which added a whole new level of attraction to Computer Science teachers. Excited at the prospect, we were shuttled from the hotel to the event. This was one of those things that you didn’t know what to expect but I didn’t expect this. I expected Silicon or at least a Valley or something. But, no, our approach took us to a very heavily forested area with very understated signs in front of the buildings. Even as I got out of the shuttle, I was wondering if we were even in the right place.
But, we were, and the very friendly folks wearing Google golf shirts escorted us to the second floor meeting room for the opening session (and breakfast). Unlike many businesses, the meeting room wasn’t separate from the rest of the place. We weaved our way through couches and meeting rooms and cubicles and offices or people already working hard at whatever they were doing. You knew right away that you were in the absolute middle of everything. On the drive over, I had a discussion with a college teacher from Los Angeles who taught media and had his camera and iPhone at the ready to grab some footage for his class. I had my very best camera tucked away in my computer bag to get some evidence of my own. Both of us immediately had the sense that we’d better seek permission first and expectedly were told not to record anything in the building. That’s only fair as throughout the building there were white boards with code brainstormed on them at the various informal meeting places. Of course, you could only guess as to what the content was. Perhaps it was all red herrings for interlopers?
The participants of the day were treated like royalty. At every turn, there was a Google staff member there to answer questions or guide you to where you needed to be next . This really isn’t a convention centre; it’s a place of work and we were just using space that was available for the day. We were truly in the heart of everything.
Armed with a coffee, the day started with a presentation about “Soup and Nuts” from Eugene Spafford. I think it’s cool when your keynote is referenced by everyone by his nickname! His session dealt with thinking outside of conventional thought and really pushing your mind. Once our minds had been limbered up, we dug into some of the serious issues of the day like privacy and security. I had thought that a serious talk like that would be a downer and it might be in some other camps. For us, it was an inspiration and an affirmation of the importance of Computer Science as a discipline.
My first concurrent session was a tough choice. I wanted to know more about XNA game programming and Computer Science contests but Dana Nguyen from Google was doing a presentation on the whole concept of Google Applications for Education. I’ve been following this with interest and we’re at Google so you can’t miss the opportunity to hear about the project first hand. Her presentation was vibrant and took us into many areas of the applications that I’d known about but really hadn’t experienced first hand. Of real interest was the free use of Postini within the suite of applications. I found her treatment of the myths of Google Apps particularly helpful.
Then, it was my turn to present. Where’s my room? Hah! There was no room. It was a formal presentation area right on a main thoroughfare through the buildings. As I unzipped my computer bag, there was a young lady from Google there to set it up for me. Power cords are permanently stationed at the podium as well as the Mac to VGA dongle. I realized that this country boy was in the big city. I had gone and purchased my own dongle and was prepared to do things by myself. Geez! The presentation area was spectacular with a couple of overhead mounted data projects for the audience and a ceiling mounted flat screen for the presenter to see. The only little glitch was in the transition to the video. My sleeping computer with Prezi ready to go didn’t play well with the settings on the data projector but that wasn’t a show stopper. It was just a moment and we were good to go. Audience was about 50-60 permanently there but it was weird to have Google employees walking through the pathways with their laptops and just drop in to watch. Those that couldn’t find a seat just sat on a couch across the pathway. All in all, they added about another 20 bodies by the time that I was through my presentation “Web that Works”.
We ate lunch outside buffet style on picnic tables covered with some of the brightest white table cloths that I’ve ever seen. It was a gorgeous day with bright sun and just a perfect setting that could have lasted all afternoon but it was back for PD for me.
I attended Pat Phillips and Alfred Thompson’s session on “Web Design and Development: A Key to a Growing Program” where Pat introduced us to Microsoft’s Expression Studio software. It was interesting to see the group’s reaction to the concept of free. Poor Pat explained over and over that Microsoft is making campus licenses available to qualifying schools. We did finally get to the nuts and bolts and got to see a bit of the software in action. This replacement for Frontpage packs a great deal of power into a single product. It’s going to take some time to play around and master.
The final breakout was a real treat. Just a couple of days ago, Google had announced a new product called the App Inventor which is a visual programming environment for the Android operating system. It looks a great deal like Scratch but accesses the components of Android like the motion detector and camera. While I had signed up on the website to get access to the resource, “for this day only”, if we sent a Gmail message we’d be upgraded immediately. You don’t have to offer twice. I’m there and, with the rest of the group, we built a simple little Android application. What a cool concept for Computer Science. Imagine having a class set of phones that the students can program? No phones? Well, there’s always the emulator!
The final session was an inspirational talk from Megan Smith that all educators, not just Computer Science teachers, needs to hear. It’s a reminder that we live in a huge global community and we need to be aware of it all. Through the use of Google’s data management and visualization tools, we can truly see the social issues. We also were introduced to the things that Google is doing to try and make things better world-wide. It was just wow. You couldn’t help but sit there humbled and overwhelmed with all that was presented. For me, there were two issues that stood out. One was the time lapse imagery of the cutting of the rainforests. The second was a visualization of searches world-wide noting who is using Google services and who wasn’t. Of particular focus was the mapping of where submerged cable exists and how entire countries are bypassed and, as such, the citizens deprived of the opportunity to be connected.
The day came to a close too quickly. There was so much there that this could easily have been a week long event. Some folks are going back for a tour of the entire Google campus this morning but my trip home precludes me from joining. It would have been a really nice way to cap the experience. In a really nice tribute move, CSTA President gave a special recognition to Lillian Israel and Chris Stephenson who are the driving forces to keep this event relevant and an important priority year after year.
Doug Peterson
CSTA Member

By Dave Burkhart
Earlier this year, the CSTA membership was asked to complete a survey rating the membership benefits offered by CSTA. Over a thousand members completed the survey. Here are a few highlights from that survey:
* 92% of our members said they would recommend CSTA membership to their colleagues
* 84% s our members said their CSTA membership provides professional value
* 79% of the members surveyed feel that it is very important to belong to a group dedicated to excellence in K-12 Computer Science Education
* 91% of the members are pleased with the information offered to them in the Voice
* 86% of the members surveyed say that it is very important for CSTA to provide curriculum materials.
* 81% of the members who read the Advocate Blog are happy with the materials presented
* The CS&IT Symposium is the most visible professional development event for CSTA.
The one thing that really confuses us about the result, though, is the number of our members who are not aware of many of their member benefits. For example, 87% of our members were not aware that they could request copies of our brochures and posters!
When someone joins CSTA, they receive a brochure outlining all of their benefits. We also highlight new benefits on our website and Facebook page.
Can you think of ways that would help us make our CSTA members more aware of their member benefits?
Dave Burkhart
CSTA Membership Chair

By Steve Cooper
For the first time, CSTA used on-line voting for determining its representatives to the Board of Directors. I’d first like to start by congratulating the winners of the contested elections:
Duncan Buell: University Representative
Myra Deister: At-large Representative
Deborah Seehorn: State Department Representative
But the main point of this blog post is to discuss my experiences with the process of on-line voting.
The process used was to send the membership a SurveyMonkey URL where they could go to vote. The URL was “public” in that anyone could go to that URL to vote. The voting occurred over a specified period of time, and at the end of that time, the survey was closed. To vote, an individual was asked for their name and e-mail address. The ballot form contained a significant amount of information provided by each candidate and radio buttons which the voter could use to cast her or his vote for the candidate in each position.
At the end of the election, the list of voters was reviewed. The database of all of the ballots (stripped of voting information) was checked to identify duplicates by name, email address, and ip address. Each ballot was then individually checked again against the CSTA membership database (by both name and email address) to make sure that the ballot was cast by a member in good standing. For individuals who had voted more than once, their last (in terms of a time stamp) non-blank ballot was counted. Non-members’ votes were discarded. (We did identify several cases where a member attempted to vote twice. And, there were several votes from non-members.) We then sent each member who voted an email asking them to let us know if they did not actually vote. A few members emailed us to indicate that they had not voted but when they were given the ip address and timestamp for their vote, they realized they were mistaken and that they had, in fact submitted the ballot. Only one member indicated that he/she had not cast a ballot and that ballot was removed.
There were a lot of positive aspects about the on-line elections. CSTA saved money by not needing to mail out position statements and ballots. We could ask the candidates to respond to several questions, and could make those responses available to the membership. It was also much easier to tally the votes.
In all, I believe that the voting process was fair. (I welcome criticism from those who believe the process we followed was not fair.) I was not 100% happy with the process, as a lot of work was required to check the ballots and contact all of the members who had voted to confirm that they did, in fact, vote. The filtering out of the invalid ballots turned out to be reasonably straightforward to accomplish, but a simpler solution would be desirable. Next year, we may try an alternate solution (ideally one that is free or nearly free). I welcome suggestions about alternative solutions to try. But do keep in mind that any solution must ensure the anonymity of votes. As elections chair, I do not want to know how any particular member voted.
Steve Cooper
Elections Chair

By Jill Pala
Tennessee is talking! Well, at least in a very small corner of Tennessee, Chattanooga to be precise, the community of Computer Science Educators is beginning to grow.
After the summer leadership cohort workshop in Chicago, I was excited to start working on the CSTA initiatives in my own state, but also a little overwhelmed. As a teacher at a private school, I was very much in my own bubble and had no idea what sort of CS programs were in place at other private schools or the Tennessee public schools. I decided to start small and make my first goal to identify teachers of Computer Science and other computing disciplines in my city and try to find enough people to start a local CSTA chapter. I figured I could deal with the state level later.
Then of course school started and any hopes of identifying and gathering these like minded individuals faded for a few months. Finally I found time to start calling around, and I was able to make contact with Dr. Joseph Kizza, the head of the Computer Science Department at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. I hit the jackpot! Dr. Kizza was not only very willing to host our meetings and participate in our chapter, he also had contacts with other K-12 teachers in the area! We arranged a first meeting to discuss chapter formation in February, and we had a whopping 4 people show up. Not to be discouraged, we had a great discussion about the purpose of a CSTA Chapter and what it would take to start the chapter, and decided to schedule another meeting in March to try to get more people to join us. Before the next meeting I went to the web sites of a few more local schools and found the people listed as Computer teachers and sent emails inviting them to our meeting, too. Our next meeting had 6 people attend! And only 3 were the same as the first meeting! Whoo hoo! We have enough to start a chapter!
In total we have identified 9 teachers from 7 different institutions interested in beginning our CSTA chapter. We keep trying new days and times to see if we can find the most accommodating meeting time. Our next meeting is April 12, and we plan to elect chapter leadership and finalize the chapter paperwork. Best of all, it is so wonderful to finally get a chance to talk to local people about our struggles and triumphs that we all face in our own schools. We’re really excited to get our Chattanooga CSTA chapter off the ground, and we can’t wait to grow even more. In fact, this year at SIGCSE in Milwaukee, I met another Tennessee teacher, Laine Agee from Memphis, who is chomping at the bit to start advocating for CSTA at the state level. We’re hoping that we can figure out a way to skype her in to our Chattanooga CSTA meetings, or even help her start identifying other teachers in her neck of the woods to start a Memphis CSTA chapter!
What strategies have you used to advocate for computer science education locally or at the state level?
Jill Pala
CSTA Leadership Cohort Member

By Dave Burkhart
Two CSTA members who completed the 2009-10 Membership Satisfaction Survey have been selected as the winners of our member survey raffle.
Deboarah Gilliam of Alma J. Brown school in Grambling, LA and Elaine Adams of Hollidaysburg Area Senior High School in Hollidaysburg, PA have each won a Flip video camera. In total more than 1400 CSTA members participated in the survey.
The survey, conducted every two years, is of great importance to CSTA because it not only gives us with a better idea of how well we are currently serving our members, but also provides key data that will be used to refine current projects and launch new member benefits over the next two years.
It will take us a while to crunch through all of the numbers, but the results of the survey will be reported in an upcoming issue of the CSTA Voice.
On behalf of CSTA, I would like to personally thank all of our members who took the time to participate in our survey and so provide us with their insight and suggestions.
Dave Burkhart
CSTA Membership Chair

I decided to read Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell as it was recommended to me by several people. That in turn let me to read his first book Tipping Point. This may seem a little unrelated to CS but bear with me.
Tipping Point addresses how epidemics get started from certain fashions to widely accepted thoughts. The idea is that there are these critical people that help “tip” things. They are people who are good salesmen or who are connected in many different circles of influence. Here is where I started thinking about the leadership cohort and what we are trying to do.
Someone referred to the leadership cohort as a grass roots movement in CS Education. I think this is a reasonable description and I started thinking about how to get to our tipping point. When does CS Education become a trend or a popular catch phrase in education?
Those of us in the leadership cohort were all trained in advocacy for different stakeholders, but everyone concerned about computer science education deals with some set of stakeholders every day. If I may stretch this a little further when we are presenting to stakeholders or deciding who to approach perhaps we need to also consider what type of person they are. Taking cues from the book we need connectors, mavens, and salesmen on our side. I think it might be as important to look at the type of person we are approaching as well as what type of stakeholder they are.
If we can find those people that can sell or influence what we are trying to promote and educate people on, we can have our tipping point. We need to find stakeholders who can get excited about computer science and then pass it on for us. I have found in my own experiences this past year that while I am working with different stakeholders it has been much more successful with people that have a passion like mine and who have some type of influence. It really has been more about the particular person than what level of stakeholder they are.
I think we are all headed in the same direction for that “one voice” for CS Education and I am just looking at ways to keep progressing. Sometimes outside sources such as the book Tipping Point can influence the way we go about things. I am not promoting that we all have to read the book but just that we need to think about different ways to approach our stakeholders and evaluate what they can do for us.
Hopefully we all find the right people to help us as we move forward!
Stephanie Hoeppner
CSTA Leadership Cohort Member (OH)

I am fortunate that my fellow Arizona representative on the Leadership Cohort, Renee Ciezki, is a friend from the same school district. Although this has probably limited our vision a little, it has made it very easy to communicate. It also turns out that we share many common values about teaching and CS. So during our Cohort training we were able to quickly get on the same page and form a concrete set of goals that we wished to pursue. I would encourage cohorts to develop a strong partnership with one another as much as geography allows.
The natural starting point for us was getting the chapter established, so we made this a big priority. As I recall, about 8-10 people attended our informational meeting, and several others expressed a strong interest but could not attend. We immediately got started on the chapter creation process and we were officially recognized in early February. We had agreed to meet every other month at different venues in the Phoenix metro area to try to accommodate teachers in various parts of town. In April, several of us were in Tucson for an FBLA conference, so we held a meeting there to reach out to teachers in that part of the state.
This was all very exciting of course, and I think Renee and I both felt like we had accomplished a number of our goals. However, at the end of the (school) year when it was time to actually evaluate our state of affairs, we were a little surprised. It turns out that we hadn’t actually looked at our “goals document” in many months! As the chapter came together and began to establish its own initiatives, Renee and I got caught up in those, and I guess in our minds those efforts became our goals for the year. There was never a moment when we consciously abandoned our Cohort goals, of course; I think our CSTA efforts in general just blurred together. The net effect of this is that we failed to make much headway on the Cohort goals we had set when we went through the training.
I don’t think the Chapter work needs to be completely distinct from our goals as cohort members, but in our case the two happened to be very divergent. As cohort members, we had set goals relating to advocating the importance of CS education, while as a Chapter we wished to work on professional development opportunities. So it becomes a question of priorities. Time that we spend on chapter activities is time we don’t have to spend on our advocacy goals.
The summary here is that there is enough work for everyone in the effort to expand and improve CS education. While we as cohort members need to continue to remind ourselves of the advocacy goals we have set and work toward them, there are many other activities that need attention. As cohort members reach out to the CSTA membership in each state, we encourage you to get involved. Everyone can make a contribution.
Tim McMichael
CSTA Leadership Cohort Member (AZ)