Bradley Beth

Computer Science Principles Curricula: On-the-ground; adoptable; adaptable; approaches to teaching

1. Summary Previous sessions and presentations at SIGCSE have explained to the community many details about the development, piloting, and exam format of the NSF/College Board Computer Science Principles (CSP) [1-3] project --a project that is intended and designed to be a rigorous, engaging, and broadly appealing Advanced Placement (AP) course taught in high schools, for which students can earn placement and/or credit for a college course. We are now less than two years from the launch of the course as an official Advanced Placement course in 2016-2017. Hundreds of high schools have offered courses designed around the CSP Framework, but these courses differ in many respects – from choice of programming language, to the degree of emphasis on the Internet, to varying focuses on modeling/simulation, and more.

A structured approach to teaching recursion using cargo-bot

Recursion is a notoriously difficult concept to learn. This paper presents a structured approach to teaching recursion that combines classroom lectures and self-paced interaction with Cargo-Bot, a video game in which users solve puzzles using a simple visual programming language. After mapping Cargo-Bot games to a set of learning goals, we devise a lesson plan that uses Cargo-Bot game playing to scaffold key concepts used in writing recursive Java programs. We empirically evaluate our approach using 204 undergraduates enrolled in a CS2 course, and we show strong statistical evidence that our approach improves student learning of recursion over traditional lecture-based instruction alone.

Design Principles for Thriving in Our Digital World A High School Computer Science Course

Thriving in Our Digital World is a technology-enhanced dual enrollment course introducing high school students to computer science through project- and problem-based learning. This article describes the evolution of the course and five lessons learned during the design, development, implementation, and iteration of the course from its first through third year of implementation. The design principles that we describe have guided our design endeavors and may be helpful to instructional designers, learning technologists, and others who are engaged in the design and development of in situ interventions to improve the teaching and learning of computer science.

Training a diverse computer science teacher population

goal of the course was to increase participation of underrepresented groups in CS, it is worth noting its comparative success (Table 1). To date, Thriving in Our Digital World, has enrolled a more diverse group of students than the existing Advanced Placement® (AP®) Computer Science A course. We provide the state of Texas whole population characteristics for comparison. Modular units comprise the course content, each focusing on a particular application of computer science—the global impact of computing, programming, digital representation, digital manipulation of media, Big Data, and artificial intelligence. Students learn about each of these topics by creating end-of-module project artifacts. Throughout the course, we emphasize both computational thinking practices and college readiness behaviors. The dual enrollment model has been particularly useful in informing revisions of the course and in training teachers to teach it. Teacher training begins with a nine-day intensive course model. Such models have been shown to be effective in similar initiatives aiming to improve the skills of computer science teachers, such as those in the United Kingdom described in [10]. Unlike other professional development models, however, we maintain regular contact with teachers over the course of the school year, viewing the course as a partnership. Teachers facilitate classroom instruction The CS10K project has the ambitious goal of dramatically expanding the pool of qualified high school computer science (CS) teachers. We offer three recommendations for accomplishing this goal, basing our recommendations on five years of experience in training teachers to offer a dual enrollment 1 CS Principles course. We recommend: (1) that when selecting and training teachers, focus on teacher strengths rather than weaknesses; (2) that in order to achieve scale and to promote best practices, create a hierarchical support system; and (3) that courses be designed with an explicit focus on the high school classroom environment.

Diverse learners, diverse courses, diverse projects: learning from challenges in new directions

Several changes and reforms in teaching computer science have been proposed and championed as part of the CS10K initiative [1-4]. The CS Principles (CSP) project and the overarching CS10K initiative include a public/private partnership offering curricula, curricular frameworks, professional development, online support, and a community of practice to support individual and systemic reforms at scale. In this special session, we hear from those leading large CSP projects and from the teachers participating in these large projects. The session is designed to inform the education community of these efforts and to situate them in the context of understanding how a diversity of approaches to implementing the CSP framework is necessary to succeed with different and diverse student populations, schools, districts, and teachers. Knowledge of these approaches will help those teaching these students as they move from high school to college, bringing related but diverse experiences because of how each student is learning the material that is based on the same curricular framework. This framework is part of the CS Principles project, but the efforts we report on in this session realize the framework at different scales, in different populations, and with different pedagogical approaches.

Teaching the Global Impact of Computing

Jennifer Rosato College of St. Scholastica 1200 Kenwood Ave. Duluth, MN 55811 +1 218-723-6152 jrosato@css.edu Bradley Beth University of Texas at Austin 1 University Station Austin, TX 78712 +1 802-673-8309 bradleybeth@utexas.edu Nigamanth Sridhar Cleveland State University 2121 Euclid Ave FH 332 Cleveland OH 44115 +1 216-687-5341 n.sridhar1@csuohio.edu Jeff Gray (moderator) University of Alabama Box 870290 Tuscaloosa AL 35487 +1 205-348-2847 gray@cs.ua.edu