ECEP Partner States contributed to many events celebrating computing education as part of the annual Computer Science Education Week, held December 9-15th. This year, the Hour of Code tutorials made participation accessible and engaging. In total, almost five million students from 168 countries took part in the Hour of Code. See http://csedweek.org/events for event listings. A rundown of national happenings by Mark Guzdial is featured on CACM's blog.

Teachers of computer science and information technology in western Massachusetts will soon have their own local network for professional development and community. With the support of the Commonwealth Alliance for Information Technology Education (CAITE), based at UMass Amherst, about 30 computer science educators gathered in Holyoke at the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center on Friday, Aug. 16, 2013 to form a new chapter of the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA).

The Expanding Computing Education Pathways alliance (ECEP) is pleased to announce that it will award six institutions seed money grants to buy equipment to help the institutions start or expand summer computing camps for students. The grants will provide each recipient with approximately $5,000 for computing equipment. Awardees are based in South Carolina, Massachusetts, and California, and became eligible to apply for funds after attending the How to Run a Summer Camp workshops run by ECEP in the fall of 2013. Applications were reviewed based on criteria covering financial sustainability, outreach to under-represented groups in computing, and the use of …

The Expanding Computing Education Pathways (ECEP) alliance encourages underrepresented minorities to pursue computing education and careers.   However, in 2013 only 1,090 out of 29,555  (3.6%) students self-identified as Black on the Advanced Placement Computer Science A exam.  In addition, the pass rate for Black students is lower than any other racial group both nationally (35.6% vs 69% for White) and in Georgia (22% vs 57.5%).  Georgia Tech’s Institute of Computing Education (ICE), with support from the ECEP alliance, created Project Rise Up 4 CS to address this problem.

The Expanding Computing Education Pathways (ECEP) Alliance joined more than 700 computing researchers, educators, and industry professionals at the National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT)'s annual Summit, held in Newport Beach, California in May. Georgia Tech professor and ECEP PI Mark Guzdial presented two workshop sessions on the topic "How to change a state: Making computing education fit into public education."

Barbara Ericson's 2013 analysis of AP CS data has produced a storm of media coverage. Below are links to a variety of outlets who covered the report's findings.

Some didn’t know where to start; others knew the lay of the land in their states. All 25 came to the March 6, 2014 “birds of a feather” (BOF) session at the 45th Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE 2014) in Atlanta to learn how other states are approaching the goal of expanding computer science education.

 

South Carolina is poised to be a national leader in computing education. South Carolina already has a CS requirement for all high school students.  Their students take more AP CS than many comparably-sized states.  They have a significant industry buy-in to improve computing, through the creation of IT-oLogy – a private-sector organization with a goal of improving IT education in South Carolina.

AMHERST, Mass. – Building on its success in drawing more women and under-represented minority students to study computer science at Massachusetts public colleges and universities over the past five years, the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Commonwealth Alliance for Information Technology...

The issues in South Carolina are different from the ones in Georgia, and they’re different again in Massachusetts and California. That’s what’s making this ECEP Alliance work interesting and complicated.

Below are some common themes that have surfaced from ECEP's work so far, based on ...