I have been struggling recently with issues of funding at my school for my program. I know all schools are facing funding issues so I am not alone. Currently the textbooks that I am using in computer science have copyright dates of 2002 or older. So, I have been seeking other ways to keep my content and pedagogy current.
In a previous blog post I had written about a grant I received that partially funded digital computer science curriculum. That worked perfectly for my computer science classes not only because I use Moodle to house my curriculum but I could use it for 3 of my 4 classes. I also continue to peruse the A.P. listserv for mentions of teachers offering their successful lessons. If I can’t use their lesson this year, I know I can use their materials next year.
I attended SIGCSE this year. I was able to make some contacts and attend workshops during which some wonderful ideas were presented. This is my first year attending SIGCSE so it was a little overwhelming. I did come away with many ideas. A few of them were: using Google Forms to check for understanding in the computer class, using Pex4Fun from Microsoft Research as a review, and ideas for using Google’s AppInventor.
I also use Twitter to stay current. Through Twitter I have found an add-on to Google Docs for assessment called Flubaroo. (http://www.flubaroo.com/) It was created by a teacher to streamline assessment. I was also introduced to another freeware program, Hot Potatoes (http://hotpot.uvic.ca/ ). It allows me to embed warm-up exercises into my Moodle site in the form of crosswords, short answer, and jumbled sentences.
With shrinking budgets and no funding for professional development, how have you been able to keep your content and pedagogy current? I would welcome more ideas.
Myra Deister
CSTA Board of Directors

Recently I had an opportunity to attend the Tapia Conference and an interesting keynote given by Irving Wladawsky-Berger which provided interesting food for thought about the future of computing research and innovation.
“The digital technologies are to the 21stCentury what steam power was to the industrial revolution.”
Wladsky-Berger compared the current and future level of change to that experienced during the industrial revolution which, with the development of steam power and machines, brought the science and technology to the physical world. Now he says, we are bringing these new technologies to both the physical and virtual worlds.
“Every time we think we’ve seen it all, something new comes along.”
Wladawsky-Berger posits that we evolved from the industrial revolution to the new knowledge/information economy in the mid-90s with the advent of the Internet and the notion of a globally integrated world. As is often the case with these huge economic and social shifts, some of the consequences have been wonderful and some, very scary.
This new economy has resulted in a profound shift in North America from an agricultural and manufacturing economy to a service-oriented economy, with the majority of the economic value being produced in services including management, professional, and technical (35.5%); sales and office work (24.8%); and other services (16.5%).
Wladawsky -Berger noted that as the world’s physical, digital, and financial infrastructures continue to converge, the problems we face in the future will be more complex and more community centered.
These convergences will require more students to think holistically about their education and career choices. They will need to understand not just how to solve complex computing problems, but how to bring the power of computational problem-solving to the mix of disciplines that will need to work together to develop the innovations needed to address these more complex but also more interesting problems.
Chris Stephenson
CSTA Executive Director

I was inspired recently by the keynote speaker at a Computer Using Educators (CUE) conference that I attended near the end of first semester. The speaker discussed Visual Literacy and how its use can help students become more successful. One example that she demonstrated was a cube with 6 pictures about her niece. The demonstration was to show us how pictures can be powerful tools to help remember information.
After viewing that example and the ability to recall several facts about the speaker’s niece, I decided that I should have my students make cubes to help me learn about them and assist me in learning their names. Second semester I had a new group of students in my Visual Basic class so that would be perfect. I searched for a program that was free that I could have my students use. I found cu3ox which does not make a cube but does have some of the same features of a cube. I asked my students to create their “cube” and I demonstrated one that I had created. I have not had an opportunity to have the students show the class their cubes yet because 5 more students have been added to my class, but I do plan to have them show the class their cubes over the next two weeks. I am looking forward to learning more about my students.
I was also inspired by the presenter to use more visuals. She stated that people process pictures 60,000 times faster than words. She recommended that we Velcro the words around the pictures. My Visual Basic class is very diverse with several English Learners and special education students. I will be preparing a presentation today to use as a review for the first unit that will include many pictures and screen shots spread out on many slides with very few words. I will show the presentation to the students over 2 days and the students will have the presentation available through the LMS to study and use as a reference for their review assignment. This is an experiment to see if they will be successful in learning the new vocabulary for the upcoming test.
Where do you find inspiration? What has inspired you lately? Share your inspiration.
Myra Deister
CSTA Board of Directors

There is a fair bit of discussion these days about “socially relevant computing” and how connecting computing to current issues might make it more interesting to our students. I have been involved in a project with the League of Women Voters of SC to look at the election data and reconcile the official counts with the counts that are supported by the data collected and stored by the election commission.
We have obtained under the Freedom of Information Act the actual vote image files from several counties, including my own (Note: I think there are some states where this is actually illegal!). We have, as we expected, found some errors, and I am assigning some programs to my second semester students to have them write the code that would find the same errors. The vote image file is an ASCII printer file, so it’s a good exercise in string manipulation just to convert the text strings into usable data. There is also some amusement value that can come from looking at the write-in votes. I am assigning to my students, for example, the question of which duck (Daffy or Donald) got more votes in Richland County last November. (Note: Some of the write-in votes will use NotSafeForWork words. In a college classroom I don’t find this a problem, but you would have to be prepared for this in high school situations.)
I also excerpted three precincts, including my own (although I don’t know that I can recognize my own vote because I don’t know that I remember who got my vote for Soil and Water Commissioner). It turns out to be a really cool use of the Java TreeMap to count votes in one pass. We don’t, for example, have a list of all the candidates and contests—we build that from the data. Rather than put the votes in a spreadsheet and then either sort several times or make several passes, we can use contest and candidate as the key value for a TreeMap. The first time we pull up the value associated to the key, it’s null, and we store the first vote. The rest of the time we add in the vote and store the (key, value) pair back. This lets us count all the votes in one pass over the data and is a good lesson on the value of the right data structure. It’s a good problem of handling variable sized tables inside the data and data that isn’t sorted to begin with. I will get maybe three homework programs out of this as we build to a program that will in fact count all the votes from the data file.
And there is a good message here. I have given the students the data from my own precinct, where the counts are correct. When we get to the assignment that will have them count votes, I will have them cross-check against the official totals on the state website. In the other two precincts there were 1127 total votes that didn’t get included in the certified count for November 2. They may hear about it from press releases (or this blog!) but I don’t intend to tell the students this little item before the assignment is made. I suspect there will be a lesson, when we get to this assignment, about “socially relevant computing”, when they find more votes than got counted. And it will be a nice message to the media that second semester undergraduates are fully capable of writing code that would find problems in the vote counts for the November election.
Note: Donald Duck received the most votes.
Duncan Buell
CSTA Board of Directors

Yep, it’s that time of year. The time where we start to reflect on all the good from last year and all the things we want to accomplish in the new year. Typically in our work environment, this happens in August. But my challenge to you is to think of ONE new thing that you would like your students to try in the new year. Or better yet, have your students give suggestions of what those things could be!
Is there a program that you think is nifty, but you have not had the time to check it out?
How about letting a student tinker with it for extra credit?
Is there a topic you do not quite have a good grasp on how to teach?
Let a student find activities or lesson plans which display a used of the topic as an enrichment exercise.
The possibilities are endless! By implementing just one new idea each semester, your teacher toolbox will be full of great ideas before you know it and you will be well on your way to the new you for the new year!
Mindy Hart
CSTA Board of Directors

Check out Pex for Fun (http://bit.ly/PexLearn) for a challenging and engaging way for students to practice their programming skills. Pex for Fun enables programming in C#, Visual Basic, and F# right within the web browser.
Students can write your own code and immediately check the results in order to:

The Coding Duels add another level of engagement with interactive puzzles in which the task is to implement the Puzzle method to have exactly the same behavior as another secret Puzzle method. There are over 200 of built in puzzles and coding duels, many rated by users.
On the site you will find instructional video tutorial and plenty of teaching resources. There are even a few short “courses” that keep track of student progress as they learn C# and other CS concepts. The course starts with the traditional Hello World program and guides you through the language constructs all the way to Exception Handling.
All and all, a worthwhile browsing, playing, and learning activity for CS students.
Pat Phillips
Editor, CSTA Voice

The 2nd annual Computer Science Education Week (CSEdWeek) wrapped up last week, and thanks to some incredible partner support and engagement from the computing community it was a smashing success. With a new website providing targeted resources and more than 270 CSEdWeek-related events and activities we were able to engage students, parents, teachers and the computing community around the world.
What started out last year as an idea by Professor Joel Adams (Calvin College) has grown into a full fledged community effort supported by the United States Congress. This year’s effort, Chaired by Debra Richardson (one of the authors of this article), was a collaborative effort of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), National Science Foundation (NSF), Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA), National Center for Women & IT (NCWIT), WGBH, Computing Research Association (CRA), Anita Borg Institute for Women in Technology (ABI), Microsoft, Google, SAS, Intel, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). CSEdWeek is also a major awareness building activity of a new coalition called Computing in the Core, a non-partisan advocacy coalition of associations, corporations, scientific societies, and other non-profits that strive to elevate computer science education to a core academic subject in K-12 education.
This year we asked the computing community and our partners to get out in their communities and spread the word about the impact of computing and the dire need for better computer science education. They answered the call. We had a diversity of pledges from around the world to hold events and carry out activities. Here is a small sampling:

The Canadian universities were particularly active, with more than 25 campuses hosting CSEdWeek events ranging from computing camps to public videos and various student competitions to CSUnplugged sessions.
We also saw some major national coverage of CSEdWeek this year. The White House blog featured CSEdWeek as story of the week  and tweeted a celebratory message in binary! The US Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, highlighted CSEdWeek on his blog. And our major corporate partners spread the word with Microsoft’s CTO, Google’s Director of Education, and SAS’s CEO highlighting computer science education week to their employees, customers, and the public at large.
CSEdWeek received almost 1700 pledges of support from 45 states in the US (in addition to DC, Guam and Puerto Rico) and 34 other countries. 45% of the pledges came from Massachusetts and California, while the highest pledging cities included Marlborough and Shrewsbury, Massachusetts and Irvine, California. Over 33% of the support pledges came from K-12 students, 17% from college students, and 15% from K-12 teachers. These statistics indicate that we achieved our goal of engaging students and teachers as well as the computing community around the world.
These were all noteworthy accomplishments for CSEdWeek, which is really still in its infancy, but our work isn’t over. We need the computing communities support and engagement over the next 12 months in building to next year’s celebration to make it even bigger. There a few things you can still do to support CSEdWeek:

• Pledge your support for CSEdWeek;
• Become a supporter and get involved with Computing in the Core, which will do outreach on K-12 issues throughout the year review;
• If you held an event or did an activity for the week tell us your story (and if you held an event or did an activity and didn’t pledge, go ahead and pledge first and then tell us your story);
• Check out the resources we have complied to showcase computer science education; and,
• Review the events held this year and begin planning for what you might do during CSEdWeek 2011.

Thank you to all those involved in this year’s celebration, and we look forward to even bigger and better CSEdWeek in 2011!
Debra Richardson
Chair, Computer Science Education Week 2010
Chair, CSTA Advisory Council
Cameron Wilson
Director of the Office of Public Policy for ACM

I recently attended the 2010 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference. I had gone mainly to attend the K-12 Computing Teachers Workshop, but got a chance on October 1 to see some of the main conference events. It was certainly interesting being one of the 50-100 males among the 2100 conference attendees.
While attending the conference, I remembered my meeting with Commodore Grace Hopper some 25 or so years previously. I was part of a summer program for high school kids in the DC area to intern in the physical sciences in government labs. As part of this program, we had various government speakers presenting once a week. I don’t remember any of the other speakers, though I imagine they were trying to convince us to major in STEM in college and then to go to graduate school and work for the US government. But I’ll never forget the day this elderly lady showed up to speak. She was not more than 4′ 10″ or so, and was wearing all of her military regalia on a completely white uniform. She looked too old to be active military, and I was wondering why the Navy couldn’t have sent a “better” representative to talk about the importance of STEM as it relates to work being done in the Navy, or whatever it was the Navy felt they needed to tell us.
Then Commodore Hopper started talking, to a roomful of mostly white males. (In the 1980s, Chemistry and Physics had many of the problems of gender and racial imbalance that plague computing today.) She told us many of the stories for which she has since become well known, of finding the first computer “bug” to her work with early computers to what a “nano-second” was. (I didn’t remember her story about nano-seconds until seeing interviews much later.) By the time she was done speaking, she had the entire room completely caught up in the excitement and importance of science and of discovery. I knew then that I would do something in STEM career-wise. (Throughout college, I was a physical chemistry major. I graduated with degrees in mathematics and chemistry, not going into CS until graduate school.)
The truth was that at the time, I had no idea how famous Commodore Hopper was. It wasn’t until years later, when I had become a computer scientist, and came across a picture of her next to one of her stories that I realized it was she who had presented to our small group back in high school, and how lucky I was to have had the opportunity to have spent a couple of hours with her. I wish we still had comparable ambassadors for our discipline, to excite today’s youth!
Anyway, it was a great conference (and perhaps worthy of a future blog piece), but I enjoyed the opportunity to reflect on Grace Hopper nearly as much.
Stephen Cooper
CSTA Vice President

Steve Cooper, Mehran Sahami, and Paulo Blickstein at Stanford University have a project about online repositories of computer science educational material and they could use your help.
An online repository is any website that has multiple resources. Educational materials are anything you would use to help you teach: lesson plans, activities, handouts, etc.
Two examples of online repositories of educational materials are:
* the CSTA Source, and
* CS Unplugged.
Please help by responding to this very short online survey, asking what websites you use to get materials for your classes and why you do or do not use online repositories of educational materials.
Thanks!
Michelle Hutton
CSTA President