The Computer Science Teachers Association has come a long way since its fledgling days after its founding in 2005.
The area I am most proud of is our membership. From the very beginning, CSTA has been about building community among computing teachers and the people who care about them. Our 7300+ members range from elementary school teachers through graduate school professors. Through the Leadership Cohort, local communities have started to form. Each chapter has members from the K-12 and university arenas.
One of CSTA’s great strengths is its volunteers. Every single CSTA resource was created by a group of dedicated volunteers who gave their time and expertise to provide something of value for the community. The original steering committee who created the organization has evolved into a fully elected Board of Directors that encompasses representatives from all levels of education; all of whom give hours of their time each month to guide the organization. CSTA is also fortunate to have an Advisory Committee of experts from education, industry, and government who provide us with a broad perspective for all of our activities.
CSTA continues to host a number of key events that provide offer professional development for our community. The Computer Science & Information Technology Symposium has a ten-year track record. It has become the premier national professional development event for K-12 computer science and information technology teachers.
In an effort to provide more local access to professional development and community, CSTA also continues to work with in partnership with colleges and universities to provide workshops through the Teacher Enrichment in Computer Science program. We expect that this program will continue to expand as more local CSTA chapters are formed. Last year we have held two workshops (one at Google and one at SIGCSE) to help colleges and universities improve their outreach to K-12.
CSTA also continues to focus on providing key benefits to its members, including the CSTA Voice, copies of CSTA white papers, classroom posters, careers brochures, and curriculum resources just to name a few.
And because the needs and concerns of our field are greater than any one organization, CSTA is also building strong partnerships across the community, with groups such as ACM SIGCSE,the Anita Borg Institute, the National Center for Women in Information Technology, the College Board, and the National Science Foundation.
If you are a member, thank you for continuing to support us in all of these efforts. If you are not yet a member, come be part of this vibrant and dedicated community! You can join online at:
http://csta.acm.org/Membership/sub/IndividualMembership.html
Michelle Hutton
CSTA President

Fellowship and community are the central foundations for the Computer Science Teachers Association of Ohio. The 2008-2009 academic year has been one of building collegial networks. ”
Several informal meetings were held throughout the school year with the goal of forming a CSTA chapter in Ohio. The first phase occurred in October and November of 2008. We held two meetings in central Ohio. During these meetings we discussed the future of computer science, recruitment of students, curricular issues, forming partnership with local businesses in order to support the technology revolution, certification requirements, and shared exemplary projects. Fourteen teachers attended at least one of these meetings. And talk about a diverse group: a couple of teachers nearing retirement; one first year teacher, teachers from both public and private schools; a college professor, and one teacher from a high school career center.
A third informal meeting was held in late January. Interest was spreading as just two people had attended one of the previous meetings. Topics of conversation were brainstorming on funding for our programs and labs, student recruitment and retention, cool projects, and we discussed course content. To this point, we had had personal contact with at least 20 computer science/information technology teachers and professors. We felt we were progressing nicely toward our goal of forming an Ohio chapter of CSTA. This being said, we really did not know how many people to expect at our next scheduled event, which was at the eTech Ohio Educational Technology Conference.
Prior to the conference we had established contact with conference representatives and were granted approval to dedicate one of the three conference days for computer science projects and initiatives. Several CSTA members presented topics such as Scratch, robotics, CS Unplugged, and shared cool projects in an introductory graphical technology course. At the conclusion of the day we held another informal meeting in which we shared the current goals of CSTA, recruited new members, and discussed the need to reduce travel time for meetings. We decided to have regional hubs and meet via video conference.
The first video conference was held in March with two different sites, one in northern Ohio and the second in central Ohio. Our main objective was to initiate formal conversations to form at least one Ohio chapter. We decided that we would have one more meeting in May (after the AP test) to complete the chapter application process.
Our most recent meeting was held on Wednesday, May 13th, again utilizing regional hubs for video conferencing. Officers were elected via Survey Monkey. The application was completed and accepted this summer! CSTA of Ohio has been formed and will have the first official meeting in September.
One of the things we discovered was that Skype is great for use when 2 sites are involved, but if more than 2 sites are used the conference will be audio only. They are working on video streaming up to six for free, but it wasn’t ready in May. If this still is not complete, we will probably try using Oovoo instead of Skype.
Angie Thorne
CSTA Leadership Cohort (Ohio)

We just finished up a trip to Chicago for the second Leadership Cohort workshop. Going back for the second time help us to solidify many of the ideas that we put into practice over the last year.
At this second CSTA Leadership Cohort Workshop, teachers from 31 states were kept very busy exchanging ideas and strategies for computer science (CS) education advocacy. We had the privilege of being a part of wonderful conversations taking place between diverse groups of people with different state issues. Discussions involved how to best advocate to teachers, district personnel, community, and professional groups all the way up to legislative members.
Probably the greatest outcome from the workshop is that there were teachers from K-12 addressing issues together in a positive, forward-thinking process. Teachers from the Midwest were working through solutions with those from the East coast as well as other regions. All of us came together with the larger issue of promoting CS education regardless of specific situations in local schools or states. While there will always be passionate differences in CS education, for three days everyone was focused in the same direction with a common goal: promote and grow CS education.
It is great to be a part of an organization that makes leaders of its members!
Your four faithful friends
Renee Ciezki,
John Harrison,
Stephanie Hoeppner,
Deepa Muralidhar
CSTA Senior Leadership Cohort Members

Hello from Wisconsin, land of Harleys, cheese, breweries and great ethnic festivals!
As part of our work on the CSTA Leadership Cohort, Sarah Huibregtse and I have been busy with many advocacy activities.
On May 7 and 8 at the Wisconsin Mathematics Council Annual Meeting, we assembled a strand of nine sessions – sort of a mini CS/IT Symposium. The most popular were the GameMaker, Website Development, Visual BASIC and the FANG game engine programming using JavaWIDE (25-30 at each). We had a great discussion at the certification session, which included one of the two DPI leaders for the statewide committee. The Robotics workshop featured four “play” stations, each with a different kind of robot. The sessions on Boolean Logic and on ideas to broaden participation were also great.
About a dozen teachers attended a session that focused on forming a state-wide CSTA chapter. After much discussion, we decided to develop a website where we could post materials from sessions like those at this meeting plus other potentially useful materials. We also discussed asking our statewide teacher organization to put together a one- day strand (it’s a 2-day conference) dealing with CS and IT. Our immediate goal, though, is to continue to build our teacher network throughout the state.
Sarah and I have also been involved in a number of activities where a small group of us have been meeting with mostly guidance counselors in various parts of the state, trying to generate enthusiasm for CS/IT courses in their schools.
We also organized our 5th and 6th iFairs(sm), career fairs which feature an exhibit area set up in a trade show atmosphere. Businesses and a few post-secondary institutions sell IT and Engineering careers to visiting middle and high school students by showing how exciting and invigorating they can be. Over these 6 fairs, we had about 2800 student visitors from Milwaukee Public Schools. We’re already planning out 7th and 8th fairs during the next school year. The general website for iFairs(sm) is
http://ifair.pbwiki.com
As members of the CSTA Leadership Cohort, we have also been involved with the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction in an attempt to establish a committee to deal with the original CS Endorsement certificate (from 1986) and to establish CS/IT standards for K-12. We continue to seek funding for this.
We also continue to involve groups of business leaders from Washington HS of IT, Milwaukee Public Schools Partnership, the Milwaukee Partnership Academy and PoweredUp in our attempts to expand the visibility of CS/IT in the schools throughout Wisconsin.
Finally through these groups and other contacts, we continue to involve a number of both two and four year post-secondary institutions in this quest.
Joe Kmoch
CSTA Leadership Cohort Member (WI)

I just attended the May meeting of the National Center for Women in Information Technology (NCWIT). NCWIT is now 5 years old. The organization has two main goals: to increase the number of girls and women in computing and to make diversity in computing matter to individuals, organizations, and society.
The meeting had some wonderful talks. We heard from Vivian Lagesen who is researching why some countries, such as Malaysian, have a much higher percentage of women in computing than we do in western countries. She found several important differences.
1) The government ran a campaign to encourage women to enter computing fields.
2) The parents encourage the girls to enter computing fields.
3) The field is not considered to be a “male” field.
The researcher said that the women in Malaysia found it very hard to believe that computing is considered male in western cultures. They couldn’t see why it would be perceived that way since you work indoors and sit. Roli Varma also told of research in India which shows that women there think of computing as a lucrative and female-friendly field. People who are in the field in India are considered to be smart and social.
Several speakers described projects that help the developing world. Bernadine Dias, the founder of TechBridgeWorld at CMU described the development of a low-cost digital device for blind kids to practice writing in Braille. It was very inspirational.
Joi Spencer talked about an intensive study into the differences between math education in the United States and other higher performing nations. One of the biggest differences was in how we teach math to students. In Japan for example the students are introduced to a new mathematical concept by leaning about a complex problem that they are asked to solve. The students spend many days thinking about the problem and trying to solve it in different ways. Then they might learn a new procedure for solving the problem. In the United States we first teach students the procedure for solving problems and have them practice but we rarely ask them to use it to solve a complex problem. Kids in the United States are also often taught that there is only one way to solve a problem. My own daughter, for example, gets mad at me when I try to show her more than one way to solve a math problem. She says, “the teacher wants us to do it this way.”
NCWIT has also produced many high quality materials for teachers and parents. The Talking Points card, for example, provides suggestions and information for family members who want to talk to girls about computing. NCWIT also evaluates techniques for introducing girls to computing and have identified promising practices such as CS Unplugged, Scratch, Alice, and Media Computation. You might want to show your students some of the slides from some of the talks from this last meeting. You can download these resources and more from

Home Page

Barb Ericson
CSTA Board Member
Co-chair, NCWIT K-12 Alliance

As part of my work on the CSTA Leadership Cohort, a Southern New Jersey Shore Chapter of CSTA has been created. On Tuesday, March 26th Dr. David Klappholz from Stevens Institute of Technology spoke to our chapter at its monthly meeting regarding ways to attract young women and minorities to computing majors. His talk was titled The Real Projects for Real Clients Course ( RPRCC) Initiative: Attracting Young Women to Computing Majors: An ACM-W Project.
Dr. Klappholtz spoke to the group of high school teachers and college professors that were present about the overall low numbers of females in the computing fields and how the female point of view is necessary in the design and development of everything from consumer products to defense related systems. It is feared that the rate of production of software development will be far lower than necessary to fill job openings over the next five to fifteen years, especially given the baby boomer generation will be retiring soon.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts a large increase in the need for B.S. and M.S. computing graduates in the next decade. The largest untapped pool of potential computing majors and, eventually, computing professionals, is science- and math-talented high school students, but only about 10% of entering undergraduate majors in computing majors are female. Despite the many initiatives aimed at attracting young women, the number of female computing majors keeps dropping.
Gender equity in computing has long been a national goal advanced by those concerned with fairness and by those who know that the female point of view improves the design and development of software systems. Unfortunately, though, the percentage of young women entering computing-related majors keeps falling, and the female dropout rate is higher than the very high male dropout rate
The intellectual underpinning of the RPRCC Initiative is a 35 year psychological Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY) that followed 3,000 + MPYs from middle school into middle age. They focused on understanding the career and life paths of the MPYs. SMPY discovered that MPY females chose STEM fields involving organic things (fields involving people, helping people). Female MPYs have considerably higher verbal skills than MPY males, accounting for their preference for inter-personal interaction, rather than solo work. MPY males chose STEM fields involving inorganic things (fields involving machines, software development, computer hardware, physics, engineering, chemistry, abstractions).
The point of the initiative is to recruit young women into and to retain them in computing-related undergraduate majors. Only 30% of the typical software development project involves solo inorganic work (writing code). The majority of the remaining 70% has a highly organic, teamwork and interpersonal interaction based nature. Women are better at listening to what their client is saying and understanding what they want. This is especially true if the software’s client/customer is a socially relevant agency (such as an adoption agency, a child-care agency, or a poverty agency).
The RPRCC Initiative is a based on courses in which students work in teams – initially on the 70% to produce real software for real clients. There are three aspects to the initative: The High School- Level (for recruitment), the Pre-Choice of Major (for recruitment), and the Post Choice of Major (for retention). For more information, contact Dr. David Klappholz at [email protected]
Debbie Klipp
CSTA Leadership Cohort

CSTA’s membership continues to grow, and as it does, we strive to find better ways to serve all of our members no matter where they happen to live.
At present, about 13% of CSTA’s members live in countries other than the United States and as you might guess, the state of K-12 computer science education varies enormously from country to country as does the level to which CS teachers have organized themselves professionally. In some countries, there are already highly active organizations. Israel, for example, has a top-notch Computer Science Teachers Association which provides a wide variety of services for its members. In other countries, there are organizations which serve the needs of technology-using teachers, but which provide very little for computer science teachers. And in some countries of course, there is nothing at all.
Last week, I met with several members of the CSTA Board to discuss how we could best serve the needs of these international members. What we discovered is that the situation is even more complex than we thought. Not only do we have to ensure that whatever we do does not conflict with or undermine the efforts of local organizations and educators, we have to ensure that we protect CSTA from risk. For example, there is considerable fiscal liability associated with international chapters and, at this time, CSTA does not have the resources to manage this liability.
So we have decided for the present to put our efforts into building affiliate relationships with organizations that already exist in countries other than the U.S. and to providing expertise to interested members where no organization presently exists to meet the needs of K-12 computer science teachers. Our plan is to “package” the collective experiences and wisdom of those involved in setting up CSTA as an effective voice for CS teachers into a kit that teachers from other countries can use to set up computer science subject associations that will meet the needs of their teachers and students.
This is an ambitious project and it may take us a while to complete, but we believe that the potential for all parties is exciting.
Margot Phillipps
CSTA International Director

During the time since the first Leadership Cohort Workshop in July, members have been busy with advocacy efforts in their various states. Previous blog posts by individual members have reported on some of those activities. In this first of future monthly updates, I want to share some of the highlights from the Fall.
One of the key efforts that we have encouraged is the creation of local CSTA chapters. Local chapters provide a support network for computer science teachers to share their ideas, plan outreach efforts and professional development, and work with local colleges and universities. Leadership Cohort members have been instrumental in establishing new local chapters in the following areas: Arizona, Buffalo, Chicago, Southeastern Virginia, and Southern California.
In addition, some activities of particular note are:
* Texas: Local area Computer Science contests and CS related conventions are being used to build interest in chapters and recruit members.
* Maryland: Meetings with the Director of Curriculum for the state have led to conversations with a variety of stakeholders regarding recognition of computer science as a core discipline.
* Silicon Valley and Oakland, California: Meetings with superintendants and principals have raised awareness of the need for a more substantive computer science curriculum
* North Carolina: Meetings with the Department of Public Instruction are being used to discuss the state of computer science in the state.
* Wisconsin: A presentation to local businesses was used to raise awareness.
* Oregon: The Oregon chapter of CSTA hosted three Fall SuperQuest conferences. One was held in the Portland area and one in southern Oregon covering game design/contests and robotics. The third was in Salem covering Gridworld. (For more information visit http://www.techstart.org/superquest.html
* Ohio: A computer science strand has been scheduled for the state educational technology conference.
These are just a few of the activities that are beginning to have impact.
Gail Chapman
Director: Leadership and Professional Development
CSTA

Education changes so quickly that it is often difficult to keep up with the our professional associations. So, in case you haven’t had the chance to Google the newest members of the CSTA Board of Directors I decided to “virtually” sit down with the new Directors that I met in June, ask them some questions, and share these introductions with you.
Brian Scarbeau is our Board’s newest 9-12 Teacher Representative. Brian is currently working at Lake Highland Preparatory School and brings not only computer science knowledge, but enthusiasm to the Board. Last year, Brian launched the “Grace Hopper Day” to be held at schools to help students and guidance counselors understand more about computer science.
Where are you from and what are you doing now in addition to being one of CSTA’s newest Board members?
I am from The City Beautiful, Orlando, FL. I am a Microsoft MVP and I help teachers and professionals work with ASP.NET and XNA (both programming packages). I am also the user group leader for Dotnetnuke, which is an open source framework for creating Enterprise Web Applications.
It sounds like you have a lot of computing knowledge, what got you started in education?
I was a recreation leader for a summer job and wanted to work with kids.
Why computer science education?
I sold Apple IIe computers and the IBM PC and I’ve worked on all kinds of hardware. I enjoy computer science education because its challenging and fun to teach.
CSTA has a clearly defined mission statement as well as purpose listed on the front page of our website, for you personally which of the statements from CSTA’s purpose has the most significance?
This statement:
Provide teachers with opportunities for high quality professional development.
CSTA has sponsored a symposium for professionals that is by far the best professional development opportunity for cs teachers. The CS&IT symposium has been an event held after the National Education Computing Conference each year. I have had opportunities to go to this event as a speaker and as a participant. I look forward to going every year.
Enough about the serious stuff, what do you like to do other than teach?
I love being with my family and like to golf.
Is there anything else you would like to mention to help the membership get to know you better?
I’m tall, dark, and handsome.
Clearly Brian will be an asset to the organization and our board of directors. If you are interested in his work with Grace Hopper Day you can check out his website at: http://sws.lhps.org/computerscienceed.
I invite you to leave a comment and ask him any questions you might have to get to know him better :) and watch for the next two installments in this series where I introduce other new Board members to you!
Leigh Ann Sudol
CSTA Communications Chair

Two weeks ago I was in a conference call with an agenda that included discussing possible strategies for promoting CSTA’s Teaching Engaement for Computer Science (TECS) workshops for teachers. During the meeting, we talked a bit about ACM’s recent Job Migration study, and also about how and when to publish our upcoming CSTA white paper on strategies for successfully developing and implementing a high school computer science—the result of a fascinating panel discussion that took place last summer during the CS&IT Symposium.
Each of these topics is a single piece of one daunting puzzle. How do we redress our country’s misperceptions about the nature of computer science in order to bring our students in line with their peers across the globe?
I left the meeting with a renewed sense of purpose. I was so inspired in fact, that before I set out to tackle the action items from the meeting, I sent a quick mass email to a long list of CSTA institutional members who have expressed an interest in volunteering their time to our projects. (Some of you may have received that email.) The message was an appeal to faculty to consider hosting a TECS workshop for the teachers in their region. In the email, I described the TECS program as a tangible, proven resource for high school teachers that relies on committed volunteer faculty for its survival.
The email must have struck a nerve, because in the two weeks since I sent it, I have been inundated with dozens of letters of interest from potential TECS workshop hosts! I’m so happily occupied answering the new hosts’ questions and helping them organize workshops that I’ve been hard-pressed to find the time to actually publicize the workshop series (the intention of the original conference call)! Of course, this is the ideal situation, since positive word of mouth is what truly makes our programs grow and grow.
I am hoping that some of you reading this blog will be interested in joining our efforts. We want to give every high school computer science teacher an opportunity to attend a TECS workshop, and to do so, we need to organize a lot more workshops!
Let me quickly describe the program. TECS workshops provide one, two, and three-day workshops for high school computer science teachers as well as high school teachers from other subjects who are curious about learning, and/or teaching, computer science. The workshops are hosted by college and university CS faculty members, who volunteer their time and effort. The workshops cater to teachers within reasonable driving distance of the workshop sites.
Hosts build their workshop curricula from a broad and flexible list of modules that range from the relationship between math and computer science, to principles of computer organization, to an introduction to programming languages! Additionally, at every workshop, hosts address issues of equity and ethics in computing. As part of our program, all hosts agree to provide follow-up community building activities after each workshop, allowing teachers to solidify their relationships with one another.
TECS is grass roots community building for CS teachers, executed on the local level, resulting in a multi-tiered mentoring infrastructure of educators from secondary teacher to university instructor.
We are literally reinvigorating CS education in the US, one workshop at a time.
(If what you are reading sounds familiar, you may be have heard about JETT, our workshop series focused on preparing AP CS teachers to teach Java. Indeed, the TECS program works the same way, but with a different audience of educators. JETT, for the record, is still going strong!)
TECS exists because we believe that we in the importance of working together to support K-12 comptuer science education. Our program relies on your interest and involvement! If you would like to learn more about hosting or attending an upcoming TECS workshop, please feel free to call or email me! I would love to hear from you.
Jennifer
JETT and TECS Coordinator
[email protected]
212 626 0507