What is the current state of high school computer science professional development? The results of the UChicago Landscape Study

I am at the meeting in Portland of all the awardees from the NSF programs in Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC-A, like ECEP), Computing Education in the 21st Century (CE21, like our CSLearning4U project), and all the funded projects related to CS10K, sponsored by NCWIT.

You may recall that I invited people to participate in the Landscape Study on the capacity of our computing community’s professional development efforts.  The results of that survey are being presented here at this meeting, and a summary is available at the URL below.

I find the results a little depressing.  The folks at UChicago who do the study compare us to professional development in Science or Mathematics, and we don’t much look like that.  We have such a long way to go.

What is the current state of high school computer science professional development?

THIS STRAND OF WORK FOCUSED ON DESCRIBING THE CURRENT PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT OPPORTUNITIES

that are available for high school computer science (CS) teachers. The primary data collection for this strand took place through a survey administered to providers of high school computer science teacher professional development (PD).

via Computer Science – Landscape Study – The Center for Elementary Mathematics and Science Education.

A STEM Modeling Contest (not programming, not games)

I got this from Bill Jordan of the Florida Virtual High School and was intrigued.  It’s a programming contest to make models — and not about speed of programming, not quality of games.  As I’ve mentioned before, we’ve had some good luck with competitions in terms of teacher professional development.  Getting teachers to learn about modeling is even more exciting!

STEM Modeling Challenge (Register by Jan. 31)
Are you interested in Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, or Math? How often have you asked yourself, “When will I ever use this?” Find the answers by participating in the STEM Modeling Challenge^©. FREE registration is now open but the deadline is January 31, 2013. Don’t miss this opportunity to use your problem-solving skills to win cash prizes! For details and contest rules, visit http://smc2013.weebly.com/.

Florida Virtual School (www.flvs.net) is sponsoring the STEM Modeling Challenge (SMC), an academic competition in which high school students explore a STEM related problem with the opportunity to win cash prizes.

The SMC will consist of five rounds lasting approximately 20-25 days each in which students complete a specific task in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and art to come up with a solution to the STEM related problem. During the final round, students will apply their accumulated knowledge from the previous tasks and write a computer program to develop a simple predictive model. This should be of particular interest to students taking introductory and advanced computer science courses.

One of the goals of the STEM Modeling Challenge is to promote awareness and interest in computer science in support of the Common Core Standards and the College Board’s efforts to promote STEM education.

Please help us spread the word about the SMC and share this information!