Bringing a Rigorous Computer Science Principles Course to the Largest School System in the United States

Education Development Center, Waltham MA

Investigators

Abstract

This project involves a partnership between the Education Development Center, the University of California-Berkeley, the New York City Foundation for Computer Science, and the New York City Department of Education. The project team will develop curricular materials, based on the Beauty and Joy of Computing course developed at University of California-Berkeley, for teaching Computer Science Principles at the high school level using the Snap! programming language. They will run in-person teacher-training programs each summer, and develop an online teacher development course. During the project, 100 high school teachers in New York City will be trained to teach this course, and early participants will also become teacher-trainers who will work with later participants. The teachers involved will become part of a Community of Practice that will continue to provide support for the teacher cohorts. This project is a design and development study. The central research hypothesis is that the explanatory power of a visual programming language can make advanced techniques such as recursion and higher order functions accessible to high school students, including traditionally underrepresented groups. The project team also hopes to show that students completing this Computer Science (CS) Principles course will be motivated and well prepared to succeed in later courses, such as the Advanced Placement (AP) CS A course. They will use the knowledge gained from this experience in New York City (NYC) to improve the course through iterative development and refinement and to increase understanding of the implementation of these ideas in high school contexts more broadly. Formative data will be collected throughout the project and analyzed, and used to inform subsequent revisions to the curriculum materials. They will use qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods analysis approaches. Over the four years of the project, the project team will work with the 100 teachers who will participate in the project, attend professional development activities, and teach the CS Principles course to a total of approximately 2,000 students in NYC. Evaluation instruments will include background surveys, feedback surveys, course assessments, the AP CS Principles exam (currently under development by the College Board), classroom observations, student interest and engagement assessments, student papers, and teacher interviews. All 100 NYC teachers involved will be part of the research study.