Letter from Harriet Taylor on NSF CPATH

Just sent to all CPATH Project Investigators:

Dear CPATH PIs

By now many of you have seen the announcement on the CISE web site (www.cise.nsf.gov) about the CPATH program. As it says, we are cancelling the competition for this year and developing a new program.

We am sure that this change impacts many of your plans. We hope that you can continue with the projects that you were planning to submit in April and tailor them to suit many of the other NSF programs.

We want to assure you that CPATH remains an important activity to CISE and NSF. We still have almost 70 active projects that will continue on into 2012.  We will continue to have meetings and develop communities as we make inroads into revitalizing undergraduate computing education.

It is more important than ever that we continue our evaluation efforts and document the impact of the projects and CPATH as a whole. SRI will continue to lead the programmatic efforts. They will be contacting you about submitting data to their data monitoring instrument and about site visits to some of your sites.

CPATH is clearly having an impact – there are many concrete indicators of this. We have been given an opportunity to evolve CPATH as it should have and create mechanisms that can sustain and advance computing education in the future. Please bear with us as we work on developing this new initiative. At this time, there are few details that we can share.

Continue your good work. Plan on an attending an exciting and energetic PI meeting in March.  Tell us about your successes and concerns as well as any ideas about what the needs of the community are for the future.  This is a big change – but there will be new and exciting opportunities on the horizon for which you are well prepared through your CPATH successes.

Thanks from all of us at NSF for your efforts.

Harriet Taylor

For the CPATH Team

Harriet Taylor, Sylvia Spengler, Joan Peckham, Tracy Kimbrel, Kera Johnson