During the summer of 2010, Julie Alano and Nancy Lasley worked on the CS Methods course as part of the CPATH Research Experience for Teachers sponsored by NSF. Julie and Nancy offered their perspective on computer science teaching methods based on their experiences in the high school classroom. Each shared their own experiences in a video interview. They also contributed materials that in-service teachers would find useful. As the summer progressed, they worked to organize the materials and to develop a course syllabus for the CS Methods course to be offered Spring 2011.
While collecting materials and working on the syllabus, they also discovered new material for their own classes. One of the new curriculum additions was Scratch. Julie added Scratch to her introductory computer programming course and plans to continue using it in the future, as well as adding BYOB (Build Your Own Blocks). Julie has also added some activities from Stacey Armstrong's A+ Computer Science Curriculum.
Julie and Nancy capped off the experience at the RET teachers meeting in Arlington, Virginia on February 24-25, 2011. The conference began with a presentation by Mitch Resnick, who created Scratch. They also met with the other RET teachers and discussed computational thinking strategies. On Friday they did a poster presentation at NSF (see below). Julie and Nancy will continue to enhance their math and computer curriculum with computational thinking strategies as they attend the ISTE conference in Philadelphia and the CS & IT Symposium in New York during the summer of 2011.
See also the poster presentation from the RET teachers meeting.