As I prepare to meet with a local School Board member and a magnet high school principal to discuss implementing computer programming in the high school, I have to wonder what has taken them so long! It seems like a no-brainer to me (but then I guess I’m one who is singing in the choir). The Bureau of Labor Statistics states that “Employment of software developers is projected to grow 30 percent from 2010 to 2020, much faster than the average for all occupations,” so why aren’t students and parents beating down our doors? And then I remember my own daughter telling me (during my Accounting I class) “Mom, no one says they want to grow up to be an Accountant.” Insert Computer Programmer and there we have it! The student perception of these occupations is pretty dismal, but in fact the careers are far from dismal! (Given my druthers, I would most certainly choose Computer Programmer over Accountant although the combination of the two would be quite marketable.)
An article in our Sunday newspaper highlighted a Computer Science professor and two students at Wake Forest University working on a cure for cancer (Video Game vs. Cancer). The requisite skills for the team of scientists: “the ability to comprehend, interpret and apply complex concepts and data in a new format; the pursuit or completion of advanced degrees; patience and a tireless work ethic, and being a video game master.” Doesn’t everyone want to find a cure for cancer? Who would have thought that being a “video game master” was a required skill? Again, I guess I am singing in the choir on this subject as well. For our statewide computer programming curriculum next year, we will be field testing the use of XNA Game Studio to apply the C# programming concepts the students learn in class. We knew we had to do something when we saw the huge drop-off in enrollment from the first course to the second course. We’ll see how this goes, but preliminary word-of-mouth reports tell us that the students are very interested.
And, that’s not the only change we have made in our statewide curriculum. We have a new course for freshmen titled Foundations of Information Technology that will allow the students to see the kind of work that is done in each of the four pathways we have in the IT Career Cluster: Programming and Software Development, Web and Digital Communications, Information Support and Services, and Network Systems. Most ninth graders have no clue what a network engineer or network administrator does, let alone a software developer. And most ninth graders can see no connection between high school and his/her world beyond. This course is intended to appeal to the target market while directing them to further study while in high school and beyond. These young students do need to see the big picture so they can graduate from high school “college and career ready”.
Additionally, we have completely revamped our Network Administration I and II courses to provide students the opportunity to earn Microsoft certifications (something beyond MOS certifications that are available in every high school in our state). Also, we’re refreshing our e-Commerce I course by updating the content to teach HTML 5.0 and the applications of social media and mobile computing in an e-commerce environment. AND, we have also been fortunate enough to be asked to participate in a pilot of the Computer Science Principles course by partnering with Dr. Tiffany Barnes at UNC Charlotte. What a great opportunity for our teachers and students to explore the Beauty and Joy of Computing! We have eight classroom teachers participating in the pilot, and a section of the course will be taught through the state virtual public school.
We are working diligently in our state to interest and inform students about the world of opportunities that awaits them in the computer science world. It’s not just about computer programming, but that’s a great fit for some of the students. That’s where I got my start, but now there are so many more venues to explore. And the interrelationships among disciplines are fascinating and create even more opportunities.
What are you doing to interest students in the wonderful world of computer science?
Websites:
http://www.bls.gov/ooh/Computer-and-Information-Technology/Software-developers.htm
Video Game vs. Cancer: http://www.newsobserver.com/scitech/
Career Clusters: http://www.careertech.org/
Deborah Seehorn
CSTA State Department Representative

Now that the AP Computer Science test is over, my thoughts have turned to the next school year. I had finished my recruiting campaign in February but I had to wait for the data to be entered. I was anxious to get those numbers because I had tried something different this year and was hoping that it was successful.
My California school district administration has expectations of a “reasonable” number of students when offering an elective class. With the budget deficit, that number seems to be increasing each year so I felt I needed to try a different approach to recruiting students. During the Grace Hopper Conference in Portland I had attended a breakout group about recruiting. One of the suggestions was to mail home letters to the parents. I decided to try it even though I would have to find the money to pay for the postage.
I went to work and asked for lists of students from the data tech. I used recruiting letters that other computer science teachers had successfully used to create a letter that would meet my needs. Next, I personalized each letter using mail merge, printed labels, assembled them and mailed them off I did get responses. Students dropped by the computer lab to speak to me about the class and I received phone calls from parents who told me they did not realize that computer science was offered at our school and wanted to know more about the class. I was hopeful that the efforts would pay off. What I learned last week was that my numbers are up in A.P. Computer Science by about 40%. However, because I did not send as many letters to the introductory students my numbers remain about the same.
After I asked about the number of students who registered for computer science, I spoke with the new assistant principal about other types of recruiting activities I could be doing. He suggested that I visit math classes. That is something I had wanted to do but was I was never offered the opportunity by the previous administrator. For next school year that is added to my list. Another surprise, I received is that the principal told me that she also mentioned my computer science class at the PTSA meeting and told the parents that I offer a supportive environment in which to learn computer science. I plan to remind the administration about computer science by sending them examples of student work and invitations to the peer reviews of student projects so that they will continue to help me recruit students.
Another development that could help with recruiting is a recent change to the minimum graduation requirements in California. With permission of the school board, computer science can be substituted in place of the Visual and Performing Arts requirement. I will be investigating how that process works and soliciting the assistance of my administration.
During the summer, I will continue to investigate successful classroom management and delivery strategies for multiple subjects during one class period. I want to improve my students’ experience in the classroom which is why I enrolled in an online teacher certification program. I want to use those techniques to improve the learning experience for all of my computer science students.
In June and July, I am looking forward to the professional development opportunities that I can take advantage of. I will be attending a Tapestry Workshop where I will learn more about recruiting and retaining students in computer science and the CS & IT Conference where I am always exposed to more ideas to try out and investigate. Summer is my time to recharge and think deeply about what I want to try out the next school year.
Myra Deister
CSTA Board of Directors

Video games are just plain fun! Your students know it, you know it, but so do administrators and colleagues who sometimes think that if you are teaching something that much fun, it can’t be truly educational.
To include game design in your CS class you might need a little help in pointing to evidence that not only is game design serious CS, but it is also serious business that involves serious money and seriously worthwhile topics. I’ve been gathering a few pieces of evidence “for the defense.”

The University of Washington struggled for over a decade to discover the structure of a protein that helps the human immunodeficiency virus multiply. After they posted on online game, Foldit, the problem was solved in three weeks by 57,000 players, most of whom hand no training in molecular biology!
Gather more evidence from an interesting article in Delta Airlines Magazine:
www.pageturnpro.com/MSP-Communications/38639-Distance-LearningCorporate-Training/index.html#/12
Don’t you just love it when you learn something six miles in the air?
And for something a bit more scientific about serious games and crowdsourcing, read Gaining Wisdom from Crowds in the March 2012, Communications of the ACM (cacm.acm.org/magazines/2012/3).
To see serious games in academic social, cultural health education in action, visit Serious Games (www.seriousgames.dk/node/511). And don’tmiss the US Army site with games for marksmanship, teamwork, and helicopter flying (www.goarmy.com/downloads/games.html).
All of these resources can give you and your students plenty of evidence and ideas for creating games and simulations that go beyond entertainment.
And if you’re looking for teaching resources with a focus on creating games for social causes, look at the XNA Game Development teaching resources from Pat Yongpradit, CSTA member and CS teacher at Springbrook High School in Silver Spring, Maryland (www.microsoft.com/education/facultyconnection/precollegiate). Pat will be presenting Project-based Game Design for Social Causes at CS & IT in Irvine, California, this summer.
Pat Phillips
Editor, CSTA Voice

CSTA Board member Shirley Miranda with her students Namrata Das and Noa Glaser.
Recently I attended NCWIT’s Aspirations in Computing Southern California Awards Ceremony in Santa Ana, CA. Two students from my COSMOS (California State Summer School for Mathematics and Science) cluster on “Computers in Everyday Life” had won awards. I was invited to the event as their teacher (and probably because I wrote letters of recommendation for them). Regardless of the reason, it is always great to hear from the organization if the students won an award and to be invited to the ceremony.
The Aspirations award was done in conjunction with a conference that was being held. This allowed the young women who won the opportunity to see the work currently being done by university students and to speak to a panel of students and professionals. As a student, I would have loved that. As a teacher, I love it. Young woman (and men too) don’t hear often enough the potential for being a part of the computer science/engineering fields. There can be a feeling of isolation if they don’t know where to look. Often, the students going into the fields are fairly introverted to begin with and aren’t going to seek out a community. But if they know the community exists, they gravitate toward it.
Not only were the young ladies in high school given the chance to talk with the students presenting their poster boards, but were explicitly told that their award isn’t simply about a one-time meet and greet to receive their award. They are part of a larger community of organizations and companies that want to help them network and provide support. That they are expected to give back and participate.
These young women are already interested in pursuing CS as a field. We need to keep them there. I think what NCWIT is doing with their Aspirations awardees is a great step in the right direction.
You can find out more about Aspirations in Computing at http://www.ncwit.org/award/award.index.php
Shirley Miranda
CSTA Board of Directors

Two years ago I wrote the following blog post.
“Training” should be a four-letter word
“We need to train more teachers.”
“Teachers need more training in order to be successful at teaching computer science.”
“More teacher training programs are needed.”
Statements like these are common and reading a recent post on another blog reminded me of just how much I hate the word “training” when it is used in reference to teachers and teaching. (I even had a professional title once that included the word training and I fought against it then.) Not that I believe that those who use the word intend to be mean-spirited or do harm; it has just become part of the language we use when we talk about the various needs surrounding teacher education.
I’d like to challenge our community to make a conscious effort to remove training from our vocabulary and replace it with words like education, preparation, and professional development.
Is anyone else bothered by this? Will you accept the challenge?
With all of the attention being focused on professional development right now, I hope everyone will accept the challenge.
Gail Chapman
Director of National Outreach
Exploring Computer Science

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

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

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

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

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

Do you remember the “writing across the curriculum” push? If you’ve been teaching for more than about eight years, I’m sure you do – in addition to everything else we have to do, teachers across all curriculum were going to teach students to write. I believe my reaction may have been something like, “Why are they taking up my time doing the job of the English teachers who are trained for it??”
Jonathan Osborne refers to my former attitude as the “vaccination model” where we think teaching certain skills is someone else’s responsibility. (And notice how we computer science teachers feel when everyone else wants to push the computer skills into our curriculum!) Science teachers – and computer science teachers – believe that doing science is the most important part.
It turns out that doing it isn’t the only important part for understanding. It’s equally important to be able to talk about content, read about it, and write about it. Not only is language how we communicate what we know and how we think, but it is how we are able to label our ideas and even come up with new ideas.
Many of us have an intuitive idea that’s true – we would not feel comfortable that a student who could write a program but not explain what it does or how it works had completely mastered the material. Unfortunately, few of us are trained in how to support students literacy practices in our disciplines – how to help them learn to read manuals or man pages or even newspaper articles about current events. Grading programs is hard enough, the idea of grading a substantial piece of writing can be very intimidating.
However, those skills – the ones we often rely on the English teachers to provide – are just as important for computer science. Not only is there specialized vocabulary that the English teachers won’t teach (called “Tier 3” by the researchers), but more importantly, there are words which are somewhat common, but have different meanings in different contexts (called “Tier 2”). Examples of tier 2 words are variable, theory, parameter. Tier 2 words are likely particularly hard for English Language Learners, yet we tend to ignore them in favor of tier 3 words which we know students won’t know.
The good news is that if you have access to an English teacher, they’d likely be thrilled to offer you suggestions of how to help students read, write, and speak well about computer science. What other tips do you have for supporting literacy in your classroom?
Michelle Friend
CSTA Past Chair

n January 2008, CSTA launched the CSTA Leadership Cohort. The goal of the cohort is to identify and support two teacher leaders in each state who are working to improve K-12 computer science education. Among other responsibilities, cohort members work in their respective states to establish K-12 computer science as an essential academic discipline. The cohort members participated in CSTA Leadership and Advocacy workshops and have helped to strengthen the CSTA leadership by identifying and building partnerships with appropriate stakeholders, and by working toward organizing local and state chapters of CSTA.
Information about the cohorts can be found on the CSTA web page at:
http://csta.acm.org/Advocacy_Outreach/sub/LeadershipCohort.html
Presently thirty-three states have cohort representatives. Although many of the cohort members have been instrumental in initiating local CSTA chapter formations, many CSTA chapters have been started by teachers like you, non-cohort members that are interested in improving and promoting K-12 CS education. CSTA now has 35 chapters, including two Canadian chapters. You can make a difference. Join your local CSTA Chapter. A list with chapter contact information can be found at:
http://csta.acm.org/About/sub/CSTAChapters.html.
You don’t see a listing for a chapter near you? You can make a difference. Why not take the first step yourself.

If you have the interest, we will help you get started. Send an email with your ideas to:
[email protected].
Join with the cohort members and the current CSTA Chapter members and make a difference!
Fran Trees
CSTA Chapter Liaison