By Joanna Goode
This term, I am teaching an Education course to University of Oregon undergraduates entitled, Teachers as Cyborgs. Most of my students are juniors who intend to eventually pursue teacher certificates and Masters’ degrees in education. All but a handful of the 80 students are interested in teaching elementary school. Since they are not yet in a teacher licensure program, this is not a formal methodology course.
The course covers a variety of issues and topics, including the social considerations of children growing up online, the racial and gender stereotypes found in media, copyright law, privacy, security, gaming and learning, and how the Internet has changed our view of knowledge construction. But, I have also designed the course to develop students’ understanding of computing as an academic subject area. To this end, I have come up with three strategies for introducing computer science to future elementary teachers:
* They will read Jeanette Wing’s Computational Thinking article, and work towards a definition of computational thinking that applies to the K-5 setting.
* Students will experience several Computer Science Unplugged activities and be introduced to the fantastic CS Unplugged website of K-5 lesson ideas.
* Students will learn Scratch, and design a project which incorporates a well-known story or fairy-tale, but incorporates a new ending with a social justice message.
As a former high school computer science teacher, this elementary realm is new territory for me, and so I am looking for any feedback or ideas from the K-5 computer science community on how to introduce future elementary teachers to computing.
Am I on the right track?
Do any of you have thoughts on other activities/readings that might strengthen this course?
Joanna Goode
CSTA Board of Directors

By Pat Phillips
Engaging every student in computer science is a goal we all share. We label it diversity and know it is critical to a balanced industry and a competitive country. We’ve all struggled with encouraging students to try our courses through elaborate promotions, active recruitment, and stealth strategies of one kind or another.
A recurring theme of student reluctance for “signing up” is that many students don’t think they would be good at CS; they lack self-confidence to try something new and out of their realm of experience in spite of the fact that they are exceedingly good with many types of technology. This has been particularly noted coming from girls and other underrepresented groups, exactly the ones we are trying most desperately to attract.
I ran across an interesting entry in the Geek Feminist Blog on just this topic. The premise of the blog entry is that it takes an over abundance of self-confidence to succeed in STEM fields. The rationale is that the road to success is paved with many mislabeled experiences which students call “failures;” in reality these “failures” are the necessary steps of testing solutions and successfully solving problems. Such experiences are transformed in our brains from “necessary steps toward success that show we are competent” to “proof that we are incompetent.” I think many students are highly susceptible to this thought conversion, especially those who have faced real failures, discouragement, and other de-valuing intellectual experiences. And not surprisingly, these are the very student groups we work to recruit.
So what is the solution? I think that all students should know a bit about self-confidence itself to better moderate their self-talk, to more clearly recognize their strengths, and most importantly, to foster their own sense of self-worth. I propose that knowing about the way our mind works and having skills to set the stage for our own success are critical in overcoming the reluctance of many would-be great computer scientists.
* Recognize the imposter syndrome as a common feeling. Many people feel like they’re not qualified to do what they are doing; they feel like imposters and fear they will be found out.
* Be aware of the Dunning-Kruger effect. People who are vaguely incompetent will over-rate their skills and those who are highly competent will under-rate their expertise.
* Build a classroom of cheerleaders. Surrounding students with individuals who support and encourage their hard work is critical for classroom success and a happy classroom. Finding our own cheerleaders is happy-life skill for everyone.
* Enable and encourage students to celebrate their successes. Tooting their own horn about accomplishments and milestones builds self-confidence and breaks up the negative mind games.
* Give everyone permission to be awesome. Working hard to do awesome stuff displaces low self-esteem; displaced low self-esteem allows awesome accomplishments; awesome accomplishments build self-confidence. And so it goes.
Let me know what you think. How have you encouraged self-confidence in your students and taught them to battle the demons that cause us to minimize our skills and talents? Tell us your stories.
Pat Phillips
Editor, CSTA VOICE

By Ron Martorelli
A recent experience brought to us by a school within our local CSTA chapter drives home some of the unusual difficulties we have in developing Computer Science programs in our high schools.
It seems that seventeen students chose to enroll in a Visual Basic course and twelve students enrolled in a C++ course for the 2010-2011 school year. These are elective courses which, in this school, require a minimum enrollment of twenty five students. The department chairperson was advised that neither course would run because there were too few students.
“But wait”, said the chairperson, “how can we cancel these courses when we have twenty nine students interested in programming?” A meeting was arranged with the principal. The chairperson proposed meeting with the students to determine if they would be interested in a combined course, sort of an introduction to programming? The principal agreed to give it a try.
The chairperson sent an email to the guidance office, asking that counselors not reschedule these students until the meeting. “Too late”, replied the guidance office. We were told yesterday that the classes wouldn’t run and we had to reassign the students.
Two student show up to talk to department chair. One is distraught. He wants to study computer science when he gets to college and his high school counselor has switched him to a sports medicine class. Another student with similar interests complains that she was assigned to a photography course instead of the computer science course she chose. So the department head goes back to the principal and explains what happened. “Ok”, says the principal, “if you can get the students to agree we can change the schedules again and run the course”.
Now comes the paperwork. The scheduling administrator requires that each student have a change of schedule form signed by a parent by the end of the week (two days). Do you know how hard it is to get teenagers to bring a form back home and back in a timely manner?
So far, twenty two forms have been returned. No decision has been made about the course yet.
This is just so frustrating and I am wondering just how common it is that our students get denied an opportunity to take computer sciences courses because of this kind of bureaucracy.
Have things like this happened in your school as well?
Ron Martorelli
CSTA Board of Directors

By Gail Chapman
“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?
Gail Chapman
Director, Leadership and Professional Development
CSTA

By Duncan Buell
I write this having just finished grading another set of programs. (Or is it that I am more or less always grading sets of programs, so that no matter when I blog I have always just finished grading?)
An employer survey has just been released by Hart Research Associates about what it is that employers want in their new employees. First of all, more education is desired. High school graduates, holders of associate degrees, and holders of bachelor’s degrees will be de-emphasized in that order and emphasized in the opposite order. The larger the company, the more there is an emphasis on hiring people with at least a bachelor’s degree.
Another conclusion from this survey is that employers want more than just specific knowledge of a skill set; 59% want new employees to be broadly educated.
But perhaps most notable are the top six desiderata (listed in order):
* the ability to communicate effectively;
* critical thinking and analytical reasoning skills;
* the ability to apply knowledge to real-world settings;
* the ability to analyze and solve complex problems;
* the ability to connect choices and actions to ethical decisions;
* teamwork and collaboration skills.
These dovetail almost perfectly with what students ought to be learning from a course in problem solving, algorithmic design, and programming. Certainly, there is nothing so unforgiving of fuzzy thinking than a compiler. We joke about DWIM (do what I mean) programming, but we know it’s a joke, and that the real test of whether a problem has been carefully analyzed is whether one can lay out a program to solve it. And unlike problems in pure mathematics, problems in computing usually come from real-world problems, and real-world problems don’t usually have the fixed set of rules of a mathematics problem. A use-case analysis, for example, is really just an analysis of what might be the best set of rules to apply in the current situation.
Clearly, then, our (good) students should be nailing three of the top six. I would argue that communication and teamwork come just as naturally. A program does “something”, and it doesn’t do “something else” (because it wasn’t written to do that), and it accomplishes the “something” purpose in an operational way by doing specific things. If a student can write that down clearly, and if a student can explain it to the others on the team, then it is not only known to the student but becomes part of the general knowledge that is usable by others.
This brings us to the last of the six topic choices, the one about ethical decisions. When we created our university course in professional issues, I commented to the chair of the philosophy department that the ethics part would be easy to teach. He shot back that ethics was in fact hard to teach. I had to explain that it was not that the ethics per se would be easy, but that in computing perhaps more than any other field, the examples of ethics issues jump off the pages of the newspaper (ok, off the screen of the Kindle), and they are issues that students in fact do care about. Internet censorship, file sharing, intellectual property, data privacy–all this comes to us as case studies on a daily basis, and we can analyze the choices that could be made or could have been made against the choices that were made.
Oh, and what about the “broadly educated” part? Well, Bjarne Stroustrup of C++ fame has just written in CACM his opinion that computer science students need to be urged or required to get some second area in depth. Computing can be done anywhere in any area, and a CS student ought to be learning something else besides the purely technical.
It seems to me, then, that it is easy to make the case for computer science. All the analytical thinking can be learned by trying to solve problems, and there’s no wiggle room in the end game if what has to be created is a computer program. The communication and teamwork skills come from and augment the analytical thinking and the need to explain to others what is done by this invisible thing that is a program. And the ethics questions are everywhere, because software is everywhere.
Duncan Buell
CSTA Board of Directors

By Margot Phillipps
I joked as I left work on Friday that it was “my day of shame”. I am responsible for recruiting students for a government-funded course that offers MCSE (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer) and MCITP (Microsoft Certified IT Professional). The course was scheduled to start March 8 but it has been postponed because we don’t have the minimum number of students.
This is a “heavy duty” course with eight months of real full time study. It is not like a university course where you can just show up for the odd lecture. But anyone who contacts us interested in the course is prepared for the work and realizes the benefit of gaining an internationally recognized certification.
So why did we not get the enrollment we expected for this course? I think that, just as is the case with my programming and database class in high school, we assumed that we did not have to market the course to students. We know that what we’re offering is useful, valid, challenging, interesting, so we assume that the students will too. And of course that’s not the case.
As a Maths teacher, I envied the state of the more established subjects. These teachers do not have to “sell” their subjects. And like most teachers, I am trained to teach, not to sell. So, at the end of the day, most of us rely on our own enthusiasm to do our marketing for us. And these days that just isn’t enough.
As for my current dilemma…well, I need more than enthusiasm. Maybe what I need is a marketing budget!
So what do you do to “sell” your courses?
Margot Phillipps
CSTA International Director

By Chris Stephenson
As a professional community, we need better idea of how many computer science teachers are also involved in informal education. I have a sense that there are many of you doing this work with no funding and even less recognition, and we need to change this.
Recently, CSTA sent out an email asking teachers to complete a survey put together by our friend Holly Yanko at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell to help us get a better handle on this. Even once we have this information, we will need to do something to fundamentally change the paradigm we’ve been working under.
Many years ago when one of my friends was looking for her first teaching job, every school that interviewed her asked her the same first question:
“What sport do you coach?”
The possible negative conclusion you could draw from this question is that schools often value sports coaching above teacher qualifications. The more positive spin is that schools believe that extra-curricular activities provide highly valuable learning experience for students.
And if this is true, shouldn’t academic coaching be valued just as much as, if not more than, athletic coaching?
This was exactly the wavelength that Terrel Smith and Don Domes (of the Oregon CSTA chapter) were on when they thought up the eChamp grant program.
Engineering CoacHing And Mentoring Program (eCHAMP) uses a model analogous to high school athletics. Teachers receive stipends in return for serving as coaches of engineering teams. These engineering teams attend a regional or statewide competition to share their results and compete for awards, and benefit from the learning, inspiration, teamwork, scholarships, and rewards that competitive activities provide.
The eCHAMP coaching initiative was successfully piloted during the 2008-2009 school year in five Oregon school districts and leaders are excited to expand the program to more districts. The grants pay half the stipend cost for teachers to serve as engineering coaches as well as costs for first-year materials and equipment to start new programs. There are numerous team programs already in place for schools to adopt, including FIRST LEGO League, FIRST Tech Challenge, FIRST Robotics Competition, Lemelson-MIT InvenTeams, and Oregon Game Project Challenge.
Several schools in Oregon have now received funding under this grant program and the teachers note that this eCHAMP is placing robotics team students on the same platform as other varsity athletes, changing perceptions about what a team sport can look like, and most importantly, retaining the coaches who make it all happen.
I know that it may be unrealistic to expect that academic coaching will ever be as well-supported as sports coaching, but these folks in Oregon have developed a really good model that makes a start at providing much needed support.
Chris Stephenson
CSTA Executive Director
With thanks to Ron Tenison for reminding me about eCHAMP!

By Dave Reed
I don’t know about you, but when I teach I am constantly using analogies to relate computing concepts to real-world experiences the students are familiar with. Some of these are pretty standard and well known among CS teachers.
For example, when I want to make the distinction between classes and objects, I relate the class to a blueprint for a house and objects as particular houses built using that blueprint. Similarly, I relate a class variable to a safety deposit box that all instances of the class have a key to.
Sometimes my analogies border on the bizarre. For example, in my programming languages class this week I compared different memory management schemes to squeezing toothpaste out of a tube. Most people just squeeze the tube in the middle. This is analogous to a garbage collection approach: it is fast and usually produces toothpaste, but occasionally you use up the paste near the top and have to take the time to flatten it out (i.e., perform garbage collection). For the brand of toothpaste I use, there are instructions on the tube (yes, an algorithm for dispensing toothpaste) that tell you to squeeze from the bottom and roll up the tube as you go. This is analogous to a reference count approach: it takes a little longer, but it ensures that toothpaste will come out as long as any is left in the tube.
What analogies do you use when you teach? Which ones work particularly well? Which ones sounded good in theory but flopped in practice? Inquiring minds want to know.
Dave Reed
CSTA Board of Directors

By Mindy Hart
When I was teaching high school, I was the stereotypical teacher who liked to decorate my classroom and have ‘inspirational’ posters and pretty decorations around to motivate my students. And if I’m being real, I think I chose some to motivate me more than my students. When I transitioned to my job at the university, only two of those items made the cut and became office worthy. One is a poster from the 80’s movie, The Breakfast Club. It promotes the classic line In the simplest terms of the most convenient definitions of what we found out: that each of us is a brain, an athlete, a basketcase, a princess, and a criminal. The other is this poem most commonly attributed to a female marine recruiting poster:
Where Is The Girl That Lived In Your Mind Quite Often?
You wanted to be more like her.
She was ponytails to your barrette, and A-minus to your B-plus.
When you threw like a girl, she threw harder.
She went by your name and followed you everywhere.
She had no fear of taking chances, and perhaps, neither do you.
She challenged you; sometimes you took her up on it.
When she couldn’t stand still, neither could you.
She wouldn’t let you go through the motions, she reminded you:
Never Settle.
When she grew older, got tougher, and smarter, so did you.
She could achieve more than you if you let her.
She said your doors would only open if you gave them a serious shove.
Where has she gone, the one inside who pushed you, is she gone forever,
A memory forgotten,
Or is she right here right now,
Looking through your eyes asking once again,
If You Have What It Takes?
So I share these with you not because I think they are excellent motivational items that are going to recruit thousands of female students into computer science and should be in every classroom across the world, but to get you think about the messages we send to our students every day, in ways we may not even know are being communicated. I once had a student ask me if I was advocating criminal behavior by posting The Breakfast Club poster. I suppose if you took the statement to heart, it could be construed that way. However, that was certainly not my intent. On the other hand, I was always amazed at the number of girls in my computing classes who asked if they could get a copy of the second poem, especially because I had put the poem up for myself, not necessarily to motivate them. There was something about the message that struck an internal chord with them.
So I’m asking you, do you have what it takes? What messages are you sending the students in your school about their abilities and interests? What are you hanging your hat on that promotes the excitement of computer science? What’s the latest tool, skill, shortcut, or anecdote you’ve found to share with your students that encourages them to want to move one step higher?
I have kept these two items on my walls for 15 years now. They are my reminders of the potential we each have within us to make an impact on our students. And occasionally, I like to be reminded that there is a little bit of princess in all of us.
Mindy Hart
CSTA Board of Directors

By Ron Martorelli
January poses two challenges for high school computer science programs.
For many high school sophomores and juniors, January can mean scheduling decisions for next year. It does in my school and the schools in my area. Since most computer science courses are electives, we are battling other disciplines for the attention of these students, and are engaged in a sort of ritual dance where we try convince them to sign up for our courses. It reminds me of the peacocks dance with all the fancy feathers. We go up against all sorts of AP and college credit courses, fun courses they would like to take to lighten their academic load, performing arts courses that permit them to continue their after school music ambitions during the school day, and, of course, athletics and sports commitments.
How do we compete? If we emphasize the importance of CS to their future, focus too much on the technology, or point out how it can help them in college and careers, we risk being too geeky and turn off potential suitors. On the other hand, if we go to flashing and sexy, with too much emphasis on video game design or graphics, we risk diluting the importance of the courses, and we risk alienating administrators who think we are teaching students video games.
And, by the way, how do we get girls to enroll?
The second challenge we face is preparing our curriculum needs for next year. Curriculum must be proposed, approved, and designed in detail. Text books, software, and hardware all need to be evaluated and possibly updated. We will need to consider what our freshmen students will have learned in elementary school and middle school (it changes every year) so that our entry level courses can be adjusted to their incoming technology skills. Oh, and there is a little thing called a budget that we have to factor in because software and hardware is expensive.
Please forward your ideas on both challenges to me! I will happily compile suggestions to share.
Ron Martorelli
CSTA Board of Directors