ACM Education Council

FOCES“Other Action Items”

Group

2009-09-25

Mark Guzdial, ChairDan GarciaDepak KumarLisa KaczmarczykAlison YoungCarol SpradlingLillian Israel

Mark GuzdialChair

Guzdial, 2009-09-25, VancouverACM Ed Council : FOCES “Other Action Items” Group

What our charter was… 3. Identify, develop, and centralize resources. 4. Develop mini-grants for teachers (maybe for

curriculum development) so local press has a reason to write about computing and bring positive attention to the school districts.

8. Initiate recognition of pedagogical achievement, such as best paper, best education resources, etc.

9. Gather data about experiences on dual track tenure lines (research and teaching).

10. Survey non-major’s computing courses, get reviews and find exemplars; survey general education schemes for including computing.

Guzdial, 2009-09-25, VancouverACM Ed Council : FOCES “Other Action Items” Group

3 Identify, develop, & centralize resources Ensemble can serve as the infrastructure

The new computing pathway site we are building based on Drupal. This is the place to organize group activities, to put things to be shared, to find out what is happening, etc. This is a new concept for the pathway and we need to get tuned in to it. The Drupal facility allows very flexible control of who has access for writing, for editing, for adding users, etc. There is support of groups of many types of configuration, mail lists, announcements, document storage, shared access, etc. Anything you can imagine a web site supporting is there. This is the resource for providing web support for our task force activities.

THE resource for the CE summit Infrastructure Connect to CSTA resources (done!)

Metadata imported Still not clear who’s going to provide the resources.

Guzdial, 2009-09-25, VancouverACM Ed Council : FOCES “Other Action Items” Group

Recognition of achievement 8. Ensemble is building “rewards

infrastructure” A form of recognition for pedagogical

achievement Building community

Use Facebook?

Guzdial, 2009-09-25, VancouverACM Ed Council : FOCES “Other Action Items” Group

10. Non-majors / GenEd courses survey Identifying Exemplars

UCSD: LisaK has overhauled their CS0 course in Fa09 Non-majors Minimal programming (scratch), not throughout Some Excel scripting (Psych wants that), data modeling

UCB: DanG is teaching a GSC-compliant CS0 pilot “The Beauty and Joy of Computing”

http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs39n/fa09/ Lots of programming in Scratch; pair coding; students

choose their own projects. Big ideas of computing too Our CS0 hopefully feeds into CS1

GT: Mark’s Intro to Media Computation (Python) This fulfills the CS1 requirement

BrynMawr: Computing with Robots (Python) This fulfills the quantitative requirement

Guzdial, 2009-09-25, VancouverACM Ed Council : FOCES “Other Action Items” Group

Non-majors / GenEd courses survey What kinds of items might be on the survey? What is CS0? Non-majors? Remedial for majors? Where do these lie? Great courses outside CS Not non-majors; it’s computing outside CS (majors) Programming (level & spectrum)? No programming? Desired outcome? Recruitment? What minors / concentrations are out there?

Computing + X belongs to cs majors, too – not just outside-cs-majors

What credit? What placement? Non-CS? CS? Elective? Some non-CS depts have computing requirement but don’t

want to teach it themselves, others do want to own it Who guarantees quality of courses taught by non-CS? Who

approves?

Will your school buy into GSC? What are the issues/politics? Credit, placement?

Guzdial, 2009-09-25, VancouverACM Ed Council : FOCES “Other Action Items” Group

Survey Incentives Incentive to participate in survey?

Personalized email helps

May have to ask CS to look across campus Tiered effort: chair first, faculty, plus student chapters

Can buy lists of CS Departments, but act quickly on them (they go stale quickly) Phone (or skype) interviews to sample kinds of schools to frame Questions Regional champions to organize multi-schools Other possibilities : in-depth across campus for some sample? Use student chapters to gather data? Very empowering for students to be part of

this large, important effort

Sharing data afterward is a great incentive Could do some data gathering @ SIGCSE

This is the problem with haves vs have nots. Not all schools go to SIGCSE

ACM-centered vs SIGCSE-centered ACM may be a name to get more response

Could ask for more data but choose questions carefully

Guzdial, 2009-09-25, VancouverACM Ed Council : FOCES “Other Action Items” Group

Resources Fluxus (scheme with processing)

Runs on windows and macs Scratch 2.0 Have to pick questions well

Question: “Did this class change the way you interact with computers?” – mouse/keyboard/display, nope!