It is election time for the CSTA Board of Directors. This year, the K-8 representative, two 9-12 representatives, the school district representative, the college faculty representative, and the at-large representative need to be elected. Each member of the Board of Director serves for a two-year term.
We get a lot of queries about the election process at the CSTA. Here is the process we follow…
We get many applications for the various Board of Director positions. Each application is required to include a CV and a 130-word statement to be shared with the membership about the candidate’s vision and/or qualifications. It is amazing how many folks get confused between 130 and 1300 for the length of the statement, and how many applications we receive after the deadline.
Once the valid applications are received, the Nominations Committee, headed by the Vice President, must select the top two candidates for each position. This is a challenging and important task because it involves choosing the people who will provide the vision for and lead the organization in the future. As a result, the committee considers many factors when choosing the candidates, including: educational and volunteer experience, commitment to CSTA’s mission, leadership potential, and vision. The committee also has to look at the entire Board as a working group, with the goal of building a team that will work hard and in harmony but with a sufficient diversity of opinion and experience to ensure that all perspectives are well represented.
In this current election, that meant sorting through nearly 40 valid applications to choose the top 12 candidates (two for each of the Board of Director representatives that are up for election). This was a fairly exhausting meeting, as there were far more highly qualified candidates than we had positions for.
Once the Nominations Committee has made its top-two choices for each position, CSTA mails out an official election ballot to all current CSTA members along with a document that provides all of the candidates’ statements. The completed ballots must be mailed back to CSTA and must be postmarked no later than May 1, 2009.
Then the work begins.
Michelle Hutton
CSTA President

The number of students taking the Advance Placement Computer Science A exam has been increasing since 2005. In 2008 15,014 students nationally took this exam. One might assume that the increase in students since 2005 is nationwide. But, that is not the case. It is especially striking that Maryland has steadily increased the number of students taking the CS AP A exam since 1998. Texas has been increasing since 2003. Both of these states have very strong teacher certification requirements. Some may argue that strong teaching requirements will reduce the number of students who take the AP CS exam, but the experience with Maryland and Texas would suggest otherwise.
The number of students taking the Advanced Placement Computer Science A exam for each state from 1998 to 2008 is available on the CSTA web site at:
http://csta.acm.org/ComputerScienceTeacherCertification/sub/TeacherCertificationRequi.html.
This data was compiled from the summary data for each year on the College Board’s web site at: http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/ap/exgrd_sum/2008.html.
On reviewing the data from 1998-2008, only ten states had their highest number of students taking the CS AP A exam in 2008.
Table 1 shows those states that reported their highest number of students taking the exam in 2008.
Table 1
State Num in 2008
Arkansas 117
Colorado 250
Georgia 585
Illinois 473
Kentucky 168
Maine 68
Maryland 895
Texas 2951
Washington 296
Washington D.C. 51
What is especially striking is that some of the states that one might expect to be strong in high school computing education have not recovered from the dot-com crash of 2001.
Table 2 shows some of the states that have a large difference between the number of students who took the exam in 2008 and the maximum from 1998 to 2008. As you can see from the table New York and California are still well below their maximums.
Table 2
State 2008 – Max (1998-2008)
New York -627
California -529
New Jersey -216
Pennsylvania -212
Massachusetts -160
Ohio -106
It is disappointing to see that 26 states have never had over 100 students take the CS AP A exam.
Table 3
State 2008 Max (1998-2008)
Montana 6
North Dakota 12
South Dakota 18
Kansas 20
Nebraska 27
Alaska 31
Wyoming 35
Idaho 37
West Virginia 38
Oregon 38
Mississippi 40
Louisiana 43
Vermont 45
Washington D.C. 51
New Mexico 53
New Hampshire 57
Nevada 58
Alabama 58
Rhode Island 60
Iowa 62
Delaware 62
Maine 68
Hawaii 77
Arizona 87
This data clearly shows that access to high quality computing education is very limited in most states. Our hope is that stronger teacher certification will broaden access and interest.
If you would like the complete set of state AP CS data, CSTA has made it available for download from this url:
http://csta.acm.org/rss/States-CS-AP-A-98-2008.xls
Barb Ericson
CSTA Director

Computing classes in our schools cost money. We have PCs running Windows. We need programming languages as well as application software for basic functionality such as word processing, presentations, spread sheeting, database management, graphical editing. In good economic times specialized computing classes may be at risk for funding to purchase the latest and the greatest software titles.
Given the weakened economy and the financial crunch anticipated in many schools, should we encourage our schools to consider Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)? Is it time to trade Oracle for MySQL and Microsoft Office for Open Office? Should we consider deploying the Linux operating system?
Can you help those of us considering how our schools should fit into the open source environment by answering a few of these questions?
* Do you currently use and/or teach open source software? Are you satisfied with the software?
* What open source products do you currently use at your school?
* Are there open source titles you recommend to students for use at home? Which titles?
* What open source software would you like to consider for use at your school?
* If you use/suggest open source software, what is your primary motivation for doing so? Is it financial, quality of software, access to the program code, or some other reason?
* What are the impediments to including open source software in your class / at your school?
Anita Verno
CSTA Director

My husband, Dr. Mark Guzdial, and I are at the ACSW 2009 conference in Wellington, New Zealand. Dr. Wayne Mapp, the Minister for Research, Science, and Technology opened the conference and announced that the government of New Zealand is going to spend money to upgrade the country’s access to high speed broadband internet. He said that computing knowledge is essential in today’s economy and that the increases in productivity and efficiency that come from innovations in computing will help pull the global economy out of the current recession.
What I found striking is that I can’t remember any computing conference in the United States that had a politician of similar stature talk about the importance of computing. Most politicians in the United States don’t know what computing is and don’t understand the value of it in our economy. Most of the discussion in the United States on how to get out of the current recession focuses on bailouts, tax cuts, preventing foreclosures, and money for physical infrastructure.
In Mark’s keynote on contextualized computing, he argued that everyone should learn some computing and programming. He also talked about how at Georgia Tech we do make everyone on campus take a course on computing. He talked about former students asking for reference letters to work as a legislative intern and for law school. Perhaps if we do improve the knowledge about computing in the general population, and especially in our politicians, we will generate more support for computing education and research. And, perhaps there will come a time when an American politician will come to a computing conference and talk about the importance of computing.
Barb Ericson
CSTA Director

Does your high school have chapters of any subject-specific honor societies, such as Mu Alpha Theta (math), Science National Honor Society, Tri-M (music), or one or more honor societies for specific foreign languages?
From time to time, CSTA has received inquiries about an honor society for CS students. We’ve done some research into how other subjects’ honor societies operate, and we’ve discussed it at a couple of meetings of the Board of Directors. Our conversations have included discussions about what services that the sponsoring organization might provide (from defining membership standards to producing “official” certificates of membership), as well as any perceived value of such membership (to students, administrators, and colleges). We’ve also looked at the way some of the other subject-specific honor societies are managed, whether by a national organization of teachers of a subject, a university-level organization for a subject, or an organization of professionals in that field.
But we kept coming back to one question: would people (students, administrators, colleges) perceive value in selection for such an honor society? And we realized that the most important information needed to come from you, the teachers in secondary schools. You would be the most likely force for starting chapters of a CS honor society at your schools, as well as the most logical advisors for such chapters. So here are some questions that we would love for you to answer.
1. Would your school administration be likely to find value in hosting a chapter of a CS honor society at your school? Would students perceive value in being selected?
2. Would you be willing to serve as the advisor for a chapter of a CS honor society?
3. How many students would you expect to induct in an average year?
4. In what kinds of activities (in addition to an induction ceremony) would you expect such a chapter to engage?
5. What services would you need the sponsoring organization (CSTA or another group) to provide (as a minimum)? What else would be on your wish list?
Please also tell us at what level (middle or high school) you teach.
We eagerly await your responses. Thanks!
Debbie Carter
CS Teacher, Roxbury High School, NJ
CSTA Board of Directors

As part of a recent discussion on the Rebooting Computing listserv Rosemary Michelle Simpson made the following comments in response to a discussion about the discovering the beauty of computer science. We thought her comments were particularly profound and well stated, and so, with her permission, we are sharing them with our CSTA community.
My perspective on computer science is perhaps somewhat different from that of many people in computing and the sciences. I believe that problem solving is not the only approach to computing, mathematics, and science.
Much has been said about the social and special domain interests of many women, but less about those women who are solitary explorers and pattern seekers. Their rewards are centered about the joys of seeing relationships emerge, new connections, grouping and classifying them, forming new abstractions and relationships among different levels of abstractions, representations, and their criteria.
I’m an explorer, a naturalist in the 19th century sense – like Darwin on the Beagle, or a naturalist on Mars – not a problem-solver. I’m curious about what I’m seeing, enjoy gathering data, describing it, and watching patterns emerge. I hate hierarchies, as limited structures that have consumed computer science because they are easy to work with – like Nasrudin looking for his lost keys under the lamppost because it was easy to see in the light. I love the power of general bi-directional graphs for modeling complex, dynamic ecologies of ideas.
I couldn’t care less about ‘finding my question’, solving puzzles, playing games, or learning problem-solving techniques except as an adjunct to my primary interests – seeing surprises, patterns emerge. I don’t like competing with anyone, including myself. What drives me is primarily an aesthetic sense of the beauty of multi-dimensional patterns. Soaring abstractions, and their representations and relationships. Connecting things for the sake of seeing connection spaces, as an end in itself.
In College, I started out as an advance-placed chemistry major, but before the end of my freshman year had switched to history with a combined philosophy and english minor. I made the change because history’s timeline provided an organizing structure around which all the various themes I was finding/discovering could play. Along the way I learned about critical thinking, analysis, synthesis, research strategies, and other skills through the vehicle of papers and exams. They helped me to structure my thinking and writing, and to uncover new insights and relationships. A good exam was one where I walked out knowing more than I did when I walked in.
This led me into hypertext: dynamic, emerging, changing relationships and fluid structures to support and model them. For me the process is what counts. In my hypertext development days, links were first-class functional objects, the relationships were foregrounded, not the end-points.
Thus, I’m relationship-centric, not object-centric. I hated/hate the rigidity and object-centricity of the object-oriented paradigm, much preferring a functional approach that foregrounds the relationships, not the objects. In short, I was concerned with fluid, emergent behavior and structures that modeled evolving change in the environment, in which objects and behaviors morph, merge, diverge, and interact with each other in time and space.
Rosemary Michelle Simpson
Brown University

On several mailing lists that I monitor when the issue of gender and/or race is brought up there is a group that responds that any attempt to increase the percentage of women or underrepresented minorities in computing would be disastrous. They typically seem to think that this means “watering down” the content, or forcing people to study something that they aren’t really interested in and don’t have the aptitude for. They also seem to be under the impression that there are no barriers to studying computing.
They couldn’t be more wrong. As Jane Margolis points out in her new book “Stuck in the Shallow End” there are many barriers to computing, especially for under-represented minorities and women. The biggest barrier highlighted in the book is the lack of access to high quality computing courses in most high schools. Often only private schools and high-end public schools offer computing courses that teach problem solving and critical thinking instead of the cut and paste type of learning found in some low end computing courses. Even when a high quality course is offered, access to it is often limited by the misconception that only white and Asian males have an aptitude for computing. Teachers, administrators, and counselors often perpetuate this myth.
One of the stories in the book is about a female student with excellent math grades and an interest in computing who gets placed in a low-end computing course instead of Advanced Placement computer science by her counselor. She isn’t even informed that the AP CS course exists. I have heard of similar problems. A teacher once told me that she had a girl in middle school who was on the robot competition team and excelled at programming, but her high school counselor wouldn’t let her sign up for AP CS. The counselor told her it, “wasn’t for her” and “not something she needed for college.” Her parents had to demand that she be allowed to take it.
One of the saddest parts of the book is that teachers and administrators claim that the students at a majority minority school aren’t interested in computing courses, but interviews with students at the school show that there are many who are interested. I have seen similar attitudes in Georgia. There is a teacher at a majority minority school who has a master’s degree in computer science and who has been teaching an introductory programming class. When I visited his class the students (all under-represented minorities) showed me some amazing animations they had built in Alice, and they were also learning Media Computation in Java. But, when I asked if the teacher would offer AP CS he said his principal wouldn’t let him because the principal said, “these kids aren’t going to college and something like Cisco or A+ would be better for them.”
Women and under-represented minorities often have less experience in computing, but this doesn’t mean that they have less aptitude. When Carnegie Mellon University changed their admission requirements to give less weight to previous programming experience they were able to greatly increase the percentage of women in computing at CMU (see Unlocking the Clubhouse, also from Jane Margolis).
Let’s not blame the victims of our educational system for their lack of access to and experience with computing. Let’s instead try to provide high quality computing courses for all students. And, let’s work to educate everyone that computing isn’t just for white and Asian males.
Barb Ericson
CSTA Board

As I middle school teacher, I think it is my responsibility to expose my students to a variety of topics within my subject area. In just a few short months or years, they will be off to high school where they will need to choose their own classes. If they haven’t been exposed to a topic, then how will they know that they might have an interest in the topic which they may be able to pursue at the high school or even college level?
Computer Science is just one of those topics. By the sixth grade, my students have been exposed to the computer, but not to the topics involving Computer Science. The question then becomes, how do I successfully introduce Computer Science topics to my students to encourage an interest in the field?
Recently, I came across a discussion board posting announcing the launch of Small Basic. The posting touted Small Basic as a “simple, easy to use, and uncomplicated version of Basic.” It sounded good, but would it be something that my inexperienced middle school students would embrace and enjoy? Further research into Small Basic at http://blogs.msdn.com/smallbasic/default.aspx is where I found a link to download the application. This download also provides an easy to follow tutorial that I plan to start using with my new class of students as we begin the next quarter of classes in January.
At this same Web site, users can find a Sample of the Week for exploring what others are doing with Small Basic. One of December’s samples is the Small Basic version of Tetris. Recreating this game is made simple by copying and pasting it into the Small Basis interface. Once this is done, students can start investigating the code to learn how the code affects the behaviors on the screen or students can experiment with code to see how their changes affect the end result.
I have learned through the CSTA organization that when you find something exciting like Small Basic, you need to share the excitement with others. I hope that you will find Small Basic as exciting as I do and will pass on the word to others.
Dave Burkhart
CSTA Board of Directors

I started teaching web design to students when the World Wide Web started to explode in 1994. Back then my students used HTML and notepad to create the school’s website. Web design tools have come a long way since then. So I am constantly looking at different ways of teaching web design
I decided some time ago that it is important to introduce programming concepts in this course. Students really have no clue where programming is used on the websites that they view on a daily basis. They just click away without understanding what that button control does. In my Web Design class, they will learn programming concepts in addition to learning how to build web pages and websites.
Here is an outline of what I teach:
HTML
DreamWeaver
Flash
DotNetNuke
I use the online lessons from Maricopa Community College to teach HTML. I don’t have my students do all of the lessons, but they do learn the basics of creating a 3-page site and having text, graphics, and links on the page.
Next, my students learn how to use Dreamweaver from Adobe Software. I use a book called Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 Revealed written by Sherry Bishop. The book has students create several different websites so that they learn how much easier it is to use software to create a website than html.
Learning Flash has also been fun and challenging for my students. Why? Partly because students need to think and Flash requires them to learn about objects, layers, and animation. It is not just point and click! I use a curriculum called Web Game from a company called I Support Learning.
Here is a description of the curriculum:
Students are immediately attracted to and engaged by web games featured on websites. The fast-growing segment of e-commerce and website creation is making this skill valuable and necessary to compete in a global economy. As competition increases and budgets shrink, companies are seeking new and innovative ways to attract and retain customers. From art, design, branding, and the skills necessary to bring it all together, your students will be leading the charge on the latest marketing phenomenon – web video games. These skills are in high demand and offer students immediate access to entrepreneurship opportunities.
To make the curriculum easy to implement, all the necessary knowledge and skills of programming and creating web video games are delivered through totally interactive software. Through text, pictures, animations, and digital videos, students are led through the exciting world of web game design. Due to the highly interactive and self-directed nature of our curriculum, students are allowed to find their own pace. Regardless of the learner’s motivation or learning style, students will find a new level of success with our curriculum.
This curriculum was designed to support state assessments by addressing national math, language, science, art, and technology standards.
What attracted me to this curriculum was this:
Skills for Life
Good life skills are made relevant through situations that have students examine their actions. Through interactions with their boss, co-workers, and customers, students learn what it takes to be successful in the real world. They discover the long-term benefits of making choices that allow them to take pride in what they do.
Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
Employers want people who solve problems. Our projects lead students through analyzing, brainstorming, and creating solutions using the design process.
Students work for a Web Design Company as an intern and are given a task of creating a game in Flash to advertise a new soda pop called Carbonade. Their job is to create a Flash game that can be used on the company website.
Throughout the lessons, students learn how to take instructions from a boss and how to create this game using the actionscript that Flash has as a feature. Students also learn basic programming concepts such as a variables, if statements, and loops.
This link will show you an example of the games that my students have created. http://www.lhps.org/scarbeau/flashstudent/
Once they have mastered Flash, my students learn DotNetNuke. I have been much involved with this product as a speaker, webcast leader, curriculum developer, trainer. I am also the author of the new DotNetNuke 5 published by Wrox Publisher.
DotNetNuke Is Free and
Versatile – DotNetNuke is an open source web application framework ideal for creating, deploying and managing interactive web, intranet and extranet sites.
User-Friendly – DotNetNuke is designed to make it easy for administrators, content editors, developers, and designers to manage all aspects of their web assets. Wizards, content-sensitive help, and a well-researched user interface provide a superior user experience.
Powerful – DotNetNuke can support multiple websites from a single application installation. In dividing administrative options between host level and individual site level, DotNetNuke allows administrators to manage an unlimited number of websites – each with its own unique appearance and content.
Feature-Rich – DotNetNuke comes loaded with a set of built-in features that provide exceptional functionality. Site hosting, web design, content management, security, and membership options are all easily managed and customized through simple, browser-based tools.
Supported – DotNetNuke is managed and supported by DotNetNuke Corporation, a legal entity which provides production Service Level Agreements as well as other professional services for the platform. DotNetNuke is also supported by its Core Team of volunteer developers and a dedicated international community. Through user groups, online forums, resource portals and a network of companies who specialize in DNN, help is always close at hand.
Easily Installed – DotNetNuke can be up-and-running within minutes. Developers can simply download the software, and follow the simple installation instructions. In addition, many web hosting companies offer integrated installation of the DotNetNuke application with their hosting plans, providing a simple mechanism for end users to experience the power of the platform.
The curriculum has students create two portals for CompSci High. The first portal is for the school and they created a portal that includes pages for Faculty, Admissions, Academics etc. They learn how to place modules on the pages and learn how to create their own modules using Visual Web Developer and Visual Basic.NET from Microsoft and SQL Server Express. They also learn how to change the graphics in DotNetNuke which is called skinning. The second portal is a student portal for information about athletics, student government, class information and clubs.
The skills that I teach are real world skills. Needless to say, my students are always busy learning in their Web Design class.
I hope you take advantage of this curriculum and teach your students a little about programming in your Web Design class. Good luck!
Resources:
HTML: http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/tut/tut0.html
Dreamweaver: http://www.adobe.com
I Support Learning: http://www.isupportlearning.com/noflash/Web.html
DotNetNuke: http://www.dotnetnuke.com
Free DotNetNuke curriculum: https://www.academicresourcecenter.net/curriculum/pfv.aspx?ID=7205
Brian Scarbeau
CSTA Board Member

CSTA is a professional organization and so we wear many hats for our membership. Here in our blog we give you updates about the state of the organization, its outreach, and the resources that we put together for you. In addition we like to believe that we also help you become better teachers. I have blogged before about the Doing What Works website maintained by the US Department of Education. They recently added a new resources called How To Organize Your Teaching which I believe can be useful to teachers both new and old.
As a new teacher, feeling a little overwhelmed at times I would imagine, this resource can help you find research based practices for meaningful instruction. Presenting the information to students in such a way that it makes use of their prior knowledge, creating advanced organizers, and many other strategies that can help you with both the day to day planning of your lessons, and also the long term unit planning in your courses. This is especially helpful for computer science teachers as we are often the only teacher in our area within our school and therefore have to do this type of long term planning on our own quite often.
As an experienced teacher I never underestimate the value of looking either at something new or reminding myself of something I learned in a methods class a long time ago. Sometimes with more experience I am better able to understand and integrate a teaching method that seemed abstract or useless for my subject when I first saw it as a novice. I also find that there is ever more research on learning and memory that becomes useful to me in my instructional strategies.
What essential teaching strategy can you experienced teachers share with our membership? If you are a new teacher, what would you like help with? Post a comment here!
Leigh Ann Sudol
CSTA Volunteer