Several ECEP Alliance members will be presenting at the 2018 SIGCSE (Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education) annual global symposium, Feb. 21-24 in Baltimore, Md. The ECEP Alliance, and the work of the alliance states, will be represented through a number of sessions, panels, workshops, papers, posters, and special sessions during the conference, which has a theme of CS For All.

The Expanding Computing Education Pathways (ECEP) Alliance held its Annual Meeting in Atlanta, Ga. January 26-27. The meeting gathered nearly 90 participants from 16 states and Puerto Rico. Attendees held positions in state departments of education, state boards of education, STEM centers, nonprofits, governor’s offices, universities, and schools. The theme was Measuring What Matters: Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC) in the States, and the meeting focused on four strategic areas of BPC work: defining BPC, rethinking measurement systems, setting measurable goals, and building sustainable pathways.

ECEP co-principal investigator Barbara Ericson has released her analysis of the College Board’s Advanced Placement Computer Science exam data for 2017.  The analysis includes both AP CSA and AP CS Principles (CSP). The data show growth in AP CSA and a great start for AP CSP, but more needs to be done to reach underrepresented groups.

Six states were awarded mini-grants from the Expanding Computing Education Pathways (ECEP) Alliance in round six of the grant program: Connecticut, Indiana, Maryland, Nevada, North Carolina, and Utah. The ECEP Alliance includes 17 member states, 12 of which applied for funding in June 2017.

On October 17, at the CSforAll Summit in St. Louis, Mo., ECEP, along with more than 170 organizations representing education, nonprofit, government, and industry, jointly committed to bring computer science to every student in the United States.

Puerto Rico held its first teacher professional development (PD) of the Exploring Computer Science curriculum in Spanish using the translated version of Exploring Computer Science, El Mundo de la Computación. Seventeen teachers and five mentors-in-training attended the event July 19-23 at the Engine-4 co-working space in Bayamón, Puerto Rico. Computer science professor Dale Reed of the University of Illinois at Chicago led the workshop with teachers from across the island. Everyone was impressed with his ability to teach the course in Spanish.

The Expanding Computing Education Pathways (ECEP) Alliance is happy to announce they awarded "seed" funding for equipment to three institutions to help them start or expand computing summer camps for the summer of 2017. The funding was provided by a generous grant from Oracle and from the National Science Foundation. Each institution offered at least two sessions of computing summer camps for elementary and/or middle school students this summer.

Artbotics, a high school program that introduces students to art, computer science, and robotics, has expanded its teacher professional development to Indiana and New Hampshire. Workshops were held in Indianapolis and Concord this summer, hosting 32 educators.

The Expanding Computing Education Pathways (ECEP) Alliance, part of the University of Massachusetts Amherst's College of Information and Computer Sciences, recently gave their website a facelift. The website, ecepalliance.org, extends ECEP’s mission of broadening participation in computing education by offering services and resources to its member states that further the states’ efforts in making state-level systemic change that will result in more, and more diverse, students in the pathway to computing and computing-intensive degrees.

Please join us online May 15-22 for the 2017 STEM for All Video Showcase: Research & Design for Impact, when ECEP, along with more than 170 other projects, will showcase a three-minute video highlighting the innovative work being done in broadening participation and access to STEM. During the week-long online event, principal investigators, practitioners, administrators, researchers, policy makers, industry, and the public at large are encouraged to participate. All participants will be able to view the video presentations, participate in facilitated discussions of each video, and vote for the videos that are most effective in conveying the creative work …