Last week I spent a great day at the University of Alabama at Birmingham talking to computer science faculty and local high school computing teachers and administrators about working together to improve K-12 computer science education (see http://www.cis.uab.edu/programs/hsws/ for more on the workshop).
During what turned out to be a wide ranging discussion, Alabama Teacher of the Year Cameron McKinley asked some interesting questions:
“What if Alabama decided to lead the country in improving K-12 computer science education? Could this happen? What would it mean for the state and its students?”
Our discussions during the day touched on many so called “local issues”. Certification for CS teachers in Alabama is a mess. As Amber Wagner explained, there is no certification for computer science, so computer science teachers have to write the praxis exam in an area that has no computer science content. This is a story I am hearing from CSTA members all across the country.
Jeff Gray of the University of Alabama at Birmingham talked about how student misconceptions about computer science as a discipline and as a career destination are driving students away from computer science at a time when companies cannot find enough qualified workers to fill the jobs available in the computing field.
And we all admitted that computer scientists in general do a terrible job of explaining our field and why it is so exciting. How many student, for example, really understand that the most exciting breakthroughs in the sciences and even in the humanities require computer science expertise? How many students are even aware that computer science makes the gadgets they love possible? Too few!
What would it take for Alabama to address these and other issues and so become a national leader in K-12 computer science education? First it would take vision and committed leadership at the highest political levels. Fortunately Alabama has “an education governor” so that is a good start. Next it would take the commitment of educators on multiple levels. The University of Alabama at Birmingham Computer Science Department is ready. The folks from the Faculties of Education are getting ready. The teachers I met are very ready.
It would take an unwavering long-term commitment to creating a state-wide computer science curriculum and providing the resources to support it. This would require a plan for on-going professional development for all teachers and a campaign to help students understand the opportunities that are available for them in the computing field. These are things that CSTA would be happy to help with.
Business and industry would have to step up, offering financial and other support. Not just the high tech companies, but the industries that hire 80% of the computer science graduates to keep them up and running, such insurance companies, banks, the auto industry, and the health care industry just to name a few.
Of course, something would have to be done to fix the certification mess. And just maybe, teachers would be paid a livable wage.
What kind of place would Alabama be if it did these things? Alabama would be a place where all students have the opportunity to acquire the computing knowledge and skills required to survive and thrive in this new global economy, Alabama’s booming high-tech and medical industry would have access to the skilled workers it needs to drive innovation and economic prosperity. And a world of career opportunities would open up for this and future generations.
Wouldn’t it be a great thing? I believe that it is a possible thing.
Chris Stephenson
Executive Director

In my new role as CSTA’s Publications Committee Chair, I have spent the last week thinking a lot about communication, specifically about what types of communication make an organization work and what types of communication our members might want.
Right now, CSTA communicates with its members (you) in a couple of different ways. This blog is great for letting you know what we are thinking and working on. The CSTA Voice is great for sharing articles, highlighting trends or best practices in CS education, and informing you of new research or upcoming events. Our current focus, however, is finding an effective interactive tool for communicating more immediately and directly with our members and helping our members connect more easily with each other.
My favorite form of communication is face to face. Unfortunately with 4500+ members spread across the globe its kind of hard for all of us to get together in one place at one time. And even then I believe that a formal “program” would be needed to help introduce people, connect people who are interested in the same topics, and start to build a community of our members.
One of our primary tasks when producing a community is interaction. How can those who have questions ask them? How can those who have knowledge share it? How can the leadership of the organization share important membership benefits and receive candid feedback about them? And how can we as a leadership understand what is most important in your little corner of the world?
I am working on some ideas, but I would love to hear yours. Please comment on this post, even if it is just encouragement to say that you are interested in an interactive tool.
Leigh Ann Sudol

Four the last four months, CSTA has been working in partnership with ACM-W and the American School Counselors Association to create a classroom poster to help promote computer science and information technology, especially for young women and minority students. One of the things we have learned is that sometimes it is more important to do something necessary and good than something everyone agrees upon.
The poster (which can be printed standard paper sized, or as a 2×3 ft. or 3×4 ft.classroom poster) is intended to help students make the connection between their interests and abilities and the many fields of computing that are part of computer science and information technology.
Our work began with a small committee. Bettina Bair and Gloria Townsend (ACM-W), Michelle Hutton (our middle school computing teacher), Brenda Melton (our guidance counselor) and I met with our designer Beth Scandalios to brainstorm our poster message and work through some design options. Beth then created six poster designs (one of which was exactly what we asked for and the other five which were even better). From there, Beth and I got it down to three choices and then the whole committee reviewed and critiqued those choices. People selected the elements they liked best and made new suggestions for further revisions which helped Beth create a final design.
During the design phase, we also asked for advice from folks outside the committee. Leicia Barker from the National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT) provided us with a number of very valuable suggestions that we incorporated into the final poster design. I showed the poster design to a number of colleagues in other associations and to the CSTA Board of Directors and the CSTA Advisory Council. Bettina also took the design to the NCWIT meeting and we received feedback from a number of university folks. And Tracy Camp (who wrote the germinal research paper on the pipeline crisis) gave us great feedback and support all the way from New Zealand where she is working this year.
We also tested the poster design with teachers and students. The test group involved students in four classrooms (two middle schools, two high schools, two independent schools) and an online feedback site that involved both high school and university students.
The response to the poster was overwhelmingly positive, but that is not to say that everyone agreed. In fact, there were differing opinions on just about everything. The teachers who reviewed the poster were really pleased that the young woman was dressed “like our kids dress”, but a couple of the university folks were concerned that some schools would find the tank top inappropriate. One person did not like the “IT is all about me” headline, but Michelle’s response was “If they are in middle school, believe me, it really is all about them and they know it. That is what makes this such a catchy headline.” And you will never believe how much time we spent discussing whether it should be “IT is” or “I.T. is”!
Our goal, however, was to get this poster ready for the upcoming conference season, so that we could get it in the hands (and classrooms!) of real teachers. And to date, conferences across the country have offered to distribute the poster to their attendees. These include the National Educational Computing Conference hosted by ISTE, the American School Counselors Association annual conference, the Grace Murray Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, and a number of other folks who are offering great workshops for computer teachers.
The truth is, we could have spent a lot more time and a lot more money trying to hone our poster so that everyone would love it, but I am not sure we ever would have achieved that goal. Even though every single person who gave us feedback really wanted the poster to be a success, people’s tastes and expectations are very different.
So, you might say that in the end we sacrificed complete consensus for getting something into teachers’ hands right now, because the problem is right now and it is getting worse. We need immediate interventions to overcome students’ beliefs that computing is not the field for them, that it does not welcome them and help them make important contributions to the world.
We really hope that you like the poster. We are proud of it. We hope that people will put it in their classrooms and offices. We hope that students will take notice. We are grateful to everyone who took the time to help us make it better.
Chris Stephenson
Executive Director

From an organization’s point of view, a good survey is a wonderful thing. I don’t just mean surveys that tell you good things are wonderful, but that any survey that gives you solid data can be a useful tool for getting a member’s eye view of how you are doing and what you could be doing better.
In May we finished the first CSTA Member Satisfaction Survey. This survey was designed to provide very detailed information. We asked our members to rate every benefit and service CSTA provides and to tell us what other benefits would be of value to them.
As soon as they were available, I looked at the quantitative results and they were most informative. It has only been in the last week, however, that I have had time to delve into the qualitative results and they are a virtual diamond mine of new insights.
Here are some of the good things that I learned:

• Our members are making surprisingly extensive use of the ACM Model Curriculum. They are using it to build, revise, and evaluate state level, district level, and school level computer science curricula. They are using it to convince administrators and principles about the importance of supporting K-12 computer science programs. They are using it to support their own research. They are using it to evaluate their own teacher certification requirements.
• Our members are very glad that CSTA exists and are making increasing use of the resources we are providing (when they have the time!).
• Educators at all levels of the educational system belong to and support CSTA and K-12 computer science education.
• Far more researchers than we expected are using our research data to either support or inspire their own research efforts.

Here are some of the valuable things we learned about doing better.

• The Welcome to CSTA email we send out to our members to let them know about their benefits is not reaching all members. We suspect that firewalls and filters are to blame, but we need to find a more effective way to get this information to folks.
• We need to provide some kind of facility that lets interested members get breaking information from CSTA and to interact more effectively as a community without filling up people’s spam folders.

These are important issues that the CSTA Board is now looking at thanks to the folks who completed our first Member Satisfaction Survey. Thank you for your input and insight. Thank you for continuing to support CSTA.
Chris Stephenson
Executive Director

Anyone who takes the time to follow this blog knows that one of the most challenging issues we face is the current lack of standardized teacher certification requirements for high school computer science teachers.
The saga of CSTA’s involvement in this issue is long and complex. Suffice to say that all of our early research told us that computer science teacher certification in the U.S. is a complete mess and all of the members who have written to us about this issue (via email, articles in the CSTA Voice, and comments here on the blog) agree with this assessment.
Here is how the current mess breaks down:
* some states have requirements for teaching computer science
* some states have NO requirements for teaching computer science
* half of the teachers in any given state know whether or not there are requirements, the rest do not
* some states with requirements demand that teachers have taken or taught courses that do not exist
* some states classify computer science under business, some under math, some under science, and some under vocational technology
* some people responsible for computer science teaching requirements at the state level do not know what computer science is
* many just don’t care
Before CSTA can make any recommendations on how to improve the situation, we have to have more solid, research-based data. So, for the last months we have been collecting the computer science teacher certification requirements for each state. The biggest challenge has been to find someone who actually admits to being responsible in each state. The second biggest challenge has been trying to explain to whoever is in charge that we are not talking about K-12 technology use standards. We now have data from all but 14 states and we are working hard to get them to respond. Even once we have all the data, though, I wonder what it is we can do to fix this mess.
So here are my questions for you.
1. Do you think we should have a national high school computer science certification requirement that would apply in every state?
2. Would your state actually opt in to such a program?
3. Should computer science be classified as a science, math, technology, or business specialization?
4. Should there be a single national praxis test that could be used to ensure sufficient subject content and teaching mastery to support certification?
I would love to know what you think.
Chris Stephenson
Executive Director

As I was walking past our school library this week, I noticed that this is Latin week. During the school year at Lake Highland Preparatory School we celebrate many events that have to do with different disciplines and I’m sure your school must as well. So, I was thinking that we should do something school-wide to celebrate Computer Science Education.
As a member of the Faculty Advisory Board for Microsoft Corporation, my first thought was to send this group an e-mail and ask them what we should be celebrating and when. Daryll McDade, who manages our group and is in charge of supporting computer science education for Microsoft, suggested a Grace Hopper day celebrating her accomplishments in the computer science field and gave me a link to the Seattle Girls’ School. For the past four years, this school has celebrated Grace Hopper with a luncheon focused on visionary women in math, science, and technology.
After further research, I discovered that in 1994, Dr. Anita Borg and Dr. Telle Whitney organized a conference called The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. This conference, held every two years, celebrates the continuing achievements and contributions of women in computing. The first conference was held in Washington, D.C. and over 450 people attended. Last year, this conference had 900 participants and highlighted the impact and history that women have made, are making, and will continue to make on technology and innovation.
More research led me to a group of woman called the Hoppers which was started by Theresa Stowell and Teri Schiel who were both engineers for Microsoft Corporation and gathered women programmers together to form a group that would give Microsoft women a forum to discuss some of the challenges they confronted in the workplace.
Today, Hoppers has more than 1,600 members across every Microsoft office in the United States and overseas. Any woman who works at the company and supports the Hoppers charter can be a member, regardless of job title or employment status (permanent, contractor, vendor, intern or part-time). Microsoft funds Hoppers and contributes to its scholarship fund.
As computer science teachers, we know of the accomplishments of Grace Hopper and it seems fitting to honor this pioneer on her birthday which is December 9th. Unfortunately, this day falls on a Saturday this year but we could celebrate it on Friday the 8th as Computer Science Education Day.
Student activities could include an essay contest on the life of Grace Hopper or perhaps a contest for posters which could be displayed around school. In any event, Computer Science Education needs to be recognized and I ask that you join me in celebrating Grace Hopper on December 8th 2006.
Brian Scarbeau,
Computer Science Department Head
Lake Highland Preparatory School
Orlando Fl
bscarbeau@lhps.org
http://sws.lhps.org

While it has been great to see the computing media/business media coverage of ACM’s new Job Migration study, I worry about how much of the important information in this report is actually filtering down to students.
The most pervasive misconception about computer science, especially among students and their parents, is that there are no longer any job opportunities in this field. Media coverage about offshoring has played a major role in spreading this misinformation. My hope is that media’s coverage of the Job Migration study may help undo some of the damage that has been done.
Contrary to what many people now believe, employment in IT in the U.S. is at an all-time high. As ACM President Dave Patterson noted in a recent column in Communications of the ACM (February 2006, 49(2), pp. 41-41) it is even higher than it was at the height of the dot-com boom. Contrary to the situation in other industries (think manufacturing!), annual job losses due to offshoring have been no more than 2-3% of the U.S. IT workforce.
As Patterson also indicated, there are also several types of IT work that are not likely to be offshored, including:
* Work that has not been routinized
* Work that is critical to a company’s control over its own operations
* Work involving data security, data privacy, intellectual property, or proprietary information
* Work that relies on a combination of application-domain knowledge and IT knowledge.
Beyond the information about jobs in the IT sector, ACM’s report raises some interesting ideas about curriculum which should be of direct interest to K-12 computer science educators.
Keeping students competitive in this new global IT economy is going to take more than drilling programming concepts into their heads. Our students need to become better problem solvers, to be curious, innovative, and creative. They need to see the connection between what they are doing in the classroom and real problems in the real world.
We also need to think seriously about making the so-called “soft skills” an integral part of our curriculum and our pedagogy. Students need to build team work and communication skills, and also to develop cross-cultural understandings that will allow them to function as citizens of this new world.
Chris Stephenson
Executive Director

If anyone happened to ask me, I would say that the biggest problem we face in all of computer science education right now is addressing misconceptions many people hold about our discipline, both as an educational endeavor and as a career path. Recently, however, I am beginning to see efforts by respected computer scientists to address this challenge head-on.
In an effort to address the misconception that computer science is programming, Jeannette Wing, the head of the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University has taken on the thorny issue of what computer science is and is not.
In a recent issue of the Communications of the ACM (March 2006, 49(3), pp.33-35), Wing puts forth the opinion that computer science is really the study of computational thinking (what can be computed and how to compute it) and that computational thinking is a fundamental skill, not just for computer scientists, but for everyone because it involves solving problems, designing systems, and understanding human behavior.
Computational thinking, Wing argues, has the following characteristics:
* It is about conceptualizing, not about programming
* It is about how humans solve problems with the aid of computing devices
* It draws on both mathematical and engineering thinking to build systems that function in the real world
* It is about ideas that touch everyone’s lives
* It is everywhere
When we think about computer science in this way, the realm of possibilities for doing interesting and important work is shown to be limitless and the idea that computer science is sitting in a cubicle all day worrying about 1 and 0s is suddenly shown to be, as one student said to me, “so ago”.

If our experience at the recent SIGCSE Conference in Houston is any indication, we are on the verge of a major positive shift in the relations between K-12 computer science educators and our colleagues at the college level.
To be honest, relations between high school and post-secondary computer science educators have always been a little fractious. University folks have bemoaned the fact that students coming into their classes are not adequately prepared for the rigor of the discipline at the college level, and high school teachers have complained that the university folks have no idea of the environment in which K-12 people teach or their desperate need for information and support.
Over the past few years, however, there has been something of a sea change. More and more colleges and universities have established outreach programs to the high schools, providing teachers with much-needed opportunities for professional development and mentoring. The success of CSTA’s JETT program (over 60 workshops held nation-wide) and the booming interest in our TECS workshops are also proof of the willingness of colleges and universities to step in and step up, using their own resources to build bridges and support community.
On March 3, Robb Cutler (CSTA Chair) and I had the opportunity to give the plenary session at ACM’s SIGCSE Conference. Our goal was to provide our post-secondary colleagues with a better understanding of the challenges that K-12 teachers face, and to suggest new and improved ways that we can work together to address the issues confronting computer science education along the pipeline.
The fact that SIGCSE so generously allotted us a major session at this highly respected conference is, in and of itself, indicative of not just a shift of consciousness among post-secondary educators, but a major pledge of support for CSTA’s efforts to promote and support computer science education in K-12.
The response to this session has also opened our eyes to the incredible potential of stronger ties and real partnerships between CSTA and organizations that have long supported post-secondary computer science education. A number of ACM’s SIGs have offered to work more closely with us on key issues. Some pretty important people have also come forward to volunteer their time and expertise.
Our task now is to find ways to harness their incredible abilities in support of our common goals. The issues that we share all along the educational pipeline are complex and challenging, but this growing realization of our common interests and goals and, more importantly, this commitment to working in harmony rather than in isolation, are important and exciting.
Chris Stephenson
Executive Director

We have known for hundreds of years that chemistry provides the building blocks of our world. Pick up the item nearest to you and you will find that it was made with chemistry.
Computer science provides the building blocks of our increasingly technological world. After you put together the silica, etch it with acids, and treat it with other chemicals, you use computer science to make it do cool things. Where would my daily run be without my mp3 player? Where would my friendships across the country be without the wonder of free wireless internet at the local cafe? These were made with computer science.
Introductory chemistry is (fairly) straightforward; as a society we believe chemistry is valuable for students to understand. Of course we don’t expect all our students to become chemists, but we want adults in our society to know about chemistry in order to be competent individuals who can cook, use common household products safely, and make informed voting decisions. It isn’t until the second year in college with organic chem that it becomes an intensely challenging “weed out” course. And it isn’t until medical school that we truly force our students into intensely challenging conditions, in part because “that is the way we have always done it.”
Why is it, then, that computer science has adopted an attitude more like medical school than introductory chemistry? Why don’t we provide an accessible and fun introductory course that gives students the building blocks of the discipline? It seems that we teachers have the attitude that the way we learned computer science was through programming, and it was hard, and that is how we should teach.
I would like to see a new model, one where computer science is accessible to all students, where it is a standard part of the core curriculum, and where it is fun! This is part of why I am so excited about the Level 2 curriculum outline and the whole ACM Model Curriculum for K12 Computer Science. But it will take more than the new curriculum – teachers have to use fun tools and games like Sudoku and role play to engage students. We can make computer science accessible without dumbing it down if we just try.
Michelle Hutton
CSTA Equity Chair
Girls’ Middle School