The beauty and joy of computing (BJC), AP CS principles, and the CS 10K effort
Daniel D. Garcia · Journal of computing sciences in colleges · 2012
BJC was chosen as one of the initial pilots for a new CS:Principles exam to be introduced in 2015. The purpose of this course is to attract nontraditional computing students (especially women and minorities, but also English majors) to the breadth and depth of ideas in modern computer science. The National Science Foundation wants to prepare 10,000 new high school computer science teachers to teach the new AP course by 2015 (the CS10K effort). Under their CE21 (Computing Education for the 21st Century) initiative, we were funded to provide paid intensive six-week summer workshops for high school teachers, including two weeks of face-to-face training, one before and one after four weeks of our online course. This talk will review the status of all of these projects, the development of Build Your Own Blocks (BYOB), a graphical programming environment based on MIT's Scratch that is used in the curriculum, and how faculty, students and high school teachers can engage with these important efforts.