CS4HS Workshops

Computing Education is essential not only for Computer Science and its many sibling disciplines (Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, Information Systems, etc.) but also for practically all other academic disciplines. Computers are pervasive today and many professionals develop basic programming skills as a way to express ideas, problems and solutions in computational terms within their own disciplines. It is not surprising to find arts (music, graphical design), business (accounting, economics), sciences (biology, chemistry, physics), and social sciences with computational courses in their curriculum. In a way, computing is becoming a requirement of any professional degree. More importantly, examples from these other domains make our discipline more appealing to a wider audience of students.

As important as computing is, we continue to struggle to attract students to study computing in college and to some extent even explore computing in high school. The goal of these summer workshops is to bring together college and high school educators to discuss how to increase the number of students studying computing.

At Virginia Tech, we have been conducting workshops for high school teachers for the last few years. Our goal is to have teachers join us for professional development, idea sharing, and networking. We want to identify innovative approaches to teaching computing, identify priorities, opportunities, difficulties, and resources needed to rethink computing education. In addition, we want to foster the creation of a community of creative and innovative high school educators that can partner with us to explore new ways to teach computing.

Upcoming workshop: November 15-16, 2013

Our plans for a Fall 2013 workshop have been finalized. Once again, we have funding from Google for another CS4HS workshop on November 15-16, 2013 in our Northern Virginia facilities. We have funding to cover hotel for a few participants that want to join us from different locations in the state.

Apply here before October 25th.