Thursday, 16 January 2014

National CS Principles Summit for teachers and administrators

National Computer Science Principles Education Summit CS-TA invites teachers and administrators to apply to attend a special summit aimed at broadening understanding and creating capacity for the wide-scale adoption and on-going support of the Computer Science Principles course. This summit (to be held in conjunction with the CS TA 2014 annual conference in St. Charles, IL) will explore the pathways to CS Principles for the entire community (middle school and high school) and provide teachers and administrators with a context and strategies for implementing CS Principles in their high schools. 

This summit, featuring presentations, flash talks, and working groups, is open to teachers interested in teaching the new AP Computer Science Principles Course and administrators at all levels (Principals, District Superintendents) interested in bringing the new AP Computer Science Principles Course to their districts. Funding may be available for accommodation and travel. Attendance is limited to 50 participants and applications will close February 1, 2014.

Deepa Singh
Business Developer
Email Id:-deepa.singh@soarlogic.com
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CAS’ latest SwitchedOn Newsletter includes Media Computation and Pixel Spreadsheet

I wrote up a report on our Summit on Computing Education in South Carolina for Blog@CALM (and here’s the link back to my original post on the summit). It went well, in that we got the kind of attendees we wanted and had the kinds of discussions we wanted. I was particularly pleased with the energy up through the final session. Barbara Eric son did a nice job of collecting a bunch of URL’s to resources for new Computer Science teachers, and then created a PowerPoint tour of them. I've posted these on a new Resources for New CS Teachers page here on the blog.

I learned a lot at the Summit. The issues in South Carolina are different from the ones in Georgia, and they’re different again in Massachusetts and California. That’s what’s making this ECEP Alliance work interesting and complicated. What’s interesting is that we’re starting to see some common themes. I wouldn't call these experimental results, since you can’t easily do experiments comparing states. Instead, these are some observations from our first four case studies. Having a statewide organization is an enormous advantage: We work in California through Debra Richardson who heads up an organization called ACCESS with an Executive Director focused just on CS Ed in the state, Julie Fla pan. ACCESS is about making computing education policy reform happen in California. That’s a huge advantage — a single point of contact to other efforts, a coordinating point for the state.

Deepa Singh
Business Developer
Email Id:-deepa.singh@soarlogic.com
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Wednesday, 18 September 2013

Webinar on new report on Building an Operating System for Computer Science Education

This is related to the report that CSTA blogged on recently. There will be a webinar for those interested in asking questions about it.Join us for a special one-hour webinar presentation about high school computer science education!Expanding computer science education is of vital importance to our nation’s future. If we are going to address the grand challenge of growing computer science education across the country, we need to develop a greater understanding of how to prepare, develop and support computer science teachers of all levels and advocate for expansion and improvement.

Over the last 18 months, The University of Chicago’s Center for Elementary Mathematics and Science Education (CEMSE) and Urban Education Institute (UEI) has carried out national study of the computer science education community—including professional development providers, teachers, administrators and other stakeholders—to inform the growth and spread of high school computer science education in the United States.Join us for a special conversation to learn about the results of that study, ask questions, and share your thoughts about the future of computer science education on Wednesday, September 25th at 3:00 pm (Central Time).

Deepa Singh
Business Developer
Email Id:-deepa.singh@soarlogic.com
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We measure educational productivity wrong: Not numbers-served but learning

The Washington Post series on “The Tuition is Too Damn High” has been fascinating, filled with interesting data, useful insights, and economic theory that I hadn't met previously. The article linked below is about “Baumol’s cost disease” which suggests an explanation for why wages might increase when productivity does not. It’s an explanation that some have used to explain the rise in tuition, which Post blogger Dylan Matthews rejects based on the data (in short: faculty salaries aren't really rising — the increase in tuition is due to other factors). But I actually had a concern about an earlier stage in his argument. It’s absolutely true that our labor intensive methods do not lead to an increase in productivity in terms of number of students, while MOOCs and similar other methods can. However, we can gain productivity in terms of quality of learning and retention. We absolutely have teaching methods, well-supported with research, that lead to better learning and more retention — we can get students to complete more classes with better understanding. In the end, isn't THAT what we should be measuring as productivity of an educational enterprise, not “millions of customers served” (even if they don’t complete and don’t learn)?

Performing a string quartet will always require two violinists, a violist and a cellist. You can’t magically produce the same piece with just two people. Higher education, for at least the past few millennial, has seemed to fall in this category as well. “What just happened in my classroom is not very different from what happened in Plato’s academy,” quips Archibald. We've gotten better at auditorium-building, perhaps, but lecturers generally haven’t gotten more productive.

Deepa Singh
Business Developer
Email Id:-deepa.singh@soarlogic.com
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Doctoral Consortium at the Australasian Computing Education Conference

Great to see happening! The SIGCSE Doctoral Consortium is associated with ICER, which was just in San Diego, and then will be in Glasgow, and then will be in Omaha, and then will be in Melbourne. It’s good to have a DC for Australasian doctoral students before then. This is a call for participation in the Doctoral Consortium (DC) (http://elena.aut.ac.nz/homepages/ace2014/doctoral-consortium.html) for the 16th Australasian Computing Education Conference (ACE 2014), a conference on research and innovation in computing education in its various aspects, at all levels and in all contexts(http://elena.ait.ac.nz/homepages/ace2014/). The conference will be held in Auckland, New Zeal and at the Auckland University of Technology in conjunction with Australian Computer Science Week (ACSW) (http://www.aut.ac.nz/study-at-aut/study-areas/computing–mathematical-sciences/beyond-the-classroom/acsw-2014). The Doctoral Consortium with be held on Monday January 20th 2014 (prior to ACE 2014).

The DC will provide an opportunity for a group of PhD students to discuss and explore their research interests and career objectives with a panel of established researchers in computing education research. The DC is sponsored by the Software Engineering Laboratory of Auckland University of Technology and the School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences. The sponsorship covers full registration for the DC for up to 10 attendees, and for those wishing to stay on to attend the full set of ACSW conferences the $NZD165.00 sponsorship can be applied as partial payment of the full $NZD300.00 student registration fee.The DC is open to students who are currently enrolled in any stage of doctoral studies with a focus on computing education research. The number of participants is limited to 10. Senior researchers in the field will provide feedback and suggestions for improvement of the students research. Each applicant should submit an application that includes the following information in one PDF file:

 Curriculum Vita Research summary, including motivation, background and literature to contextualize the research, research questions, methodologies used or planned, and any results obtained to date.Questions related to the research that the applicant would like to discuss and get feedback on at the doctoral consortium The research summary should be 1-3 pages long, depending on the stage of the research. This summary will be made available to other participants of the doctoral consortium to allow them to provide feedback and prepare questions on the research.

Deepa Singh
Business Developer
Email Id:-deepa.singh@soarlogic.com
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Computer Science Education Week is Dec 8–14, 2013

The dates for CSEd Week are good to know, but the “Hour of Code” from Code.orgis an interesting new initiative.What is Computer Science Education Week?Computer Science Education Week (CSEd Week) is the annual awareness program for computer science education. It is organized each year by the Computing in the Core coalition and Code.org. It is a call to action to raise awareness (particularly in the K-12 environment) about the importance of computer science education and its connection to careers in computing and other fields. CSEd Week is held in recognition of the birthday of computing pioneer Admiral Grace Murray Hopper (December 9, 1906).

What is an Hour of Code?It’s a 1 hour intro to computer science and programming, to give beginners a taste and to demystify “code”. For existing CS teachers, it can be anything you want – get creative. For everybody else, we’ll provide self-guided tutorials anybody can do, with just a web-browser or smartphone, or even unplugged, no experience needed. Note: HTML does not count as an Hour of Code.

Deepa Singh
Business Developer
Email Id:-deepa.singh@soarlogic.com
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Eye Movements in Programming Education: Interesting new workshop

Eye Movements in Programming Education: Analyzing the expert’s gaze
Workshop at the 13th KOLI CALLING INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON COMPUTING EDUCATION RESEARCH

Joensuu, Finland, November 13th – November 14th, 2013

Computer Science Education Research and Teaching mainly focus on writing code, while the reading skills are often taken for granted. Reading occurs in debugging, maintenance and the learning of programming languages. It provides the essential basis for comprehension. By analyzing behavioral data such as gaze during code reading processes, we explore this essential part of programming.This first workshop gives participants an opportunity to get insights into code reading with eye movement data. However, as this data only reflects the low level behavioral processes, the challenge to tackle is how to make use of this data to infer higher order comprehension processes. We will take on this challenge by working on a coding scheme to analyze eye movement data of code reading. The links between low and high level behaviors will help computing science educators to design, realize and reflect on the teaching of code reading skills.

Furthermore, we aim to open discussion about the ways of explicit teaching of readership skills in computing education. Therefore we will discuss the role of reading skills in teaching programming, facilitated by position papers of each participant.To participate send a mail to treacherousness@few-Berliner. It is possible to participate independent of attending Kali Calling. Participants will get eye movement data of reading and comprehension processes of expert programmers, and a coding scheme for annotating the process. You will annotate the video, and reflect on the (perceived) intentions behind the visible pattern. Applying and refining the coding scheme on the data gives insight into the higher order comprehension strategies of the reader.

A short individual reflection and position paper of the results and perspectives for teaching programming is required by the participants [max. 2-3 pages]. As a result, participants will jointly prepare a paper with the data and the refined coding scheme.

Deepa Singh
Business Developer
Email Id:-deepa.singh@soarlogic.com
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