We+can+do+Better+than+AP+CS

Leaders: Hatam Anvar (Ramaz) Sean Dagony-Clark (Riverdale Country School)

Attendees: Shai Zacaraev (St. Francis Episcopal School) Isabelle Dionisius (King School) Dave Aronson (Kew-Forest School) Andrew Abate (Riverdale) Katie O'Shaughnessey (Rye Country Day School) Kyle James (Dwight School) Brian Burkhart (The Pingry School)


 * //And wow, amazing notes from Katie. Thank you! -Sean //**

Riverdale's document (click image for PDF)

Riverdale: does not include AP - They have a two tiered path with required abilities.
 * Trying to accomplish progressions from computer science
 * Building from scratch and not pulling
 * Courses in Level I, 2, and 3 with progressions of outcomes and abilities modeled after UBD (Understanding By Design)
 * No matter what you took in CS, what outcomes do we believe are appropriate
 * Included softer skills such as AGILE, self-sufficiency in solving problems and self-direction in learning CS
 * Often start with Scratch to give the concepts more accessibility -> concept is understood, and now you just need syntax
 * Every course must meet these criteria regardless of initial course taken
 * Level 3+:
 * Capstone Developer Project (students building in authentic ways and plenty of space for students to do extended work) - coding at a high level
 * Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Data Mining: Students develop fluency and ability to learn languages

Ramaz School - IB curriculum includes more foundational concepts of the computer, but the AP CSA curriculum is not as deep and well rounded, so Hatam is working to include more principles into this course.

Challenges: STEM/ CS/ Technology all in one bucket


 * Students working with outside experts to build projects
 * IBM developers taught students about Watson and sensors to talk to students
 * Authentic experience of use of computer science in the real world
 * Approach CS as authentically as possible
 * Gender disparities in CS show that a part of the gender disparity is caused by traditional CS approach, which is not as good for girls
 * By making the work more relevant, there is room for tinkering
 * The balance of male to female is increasing due to the shift from the AP
 * Six women wanted to take on robotics and want to participate in the team based component
 * There is more interest in offering a diversity of programs

Further discussion
 * <span style="font-family: &#39;Open Sans&#39;; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">How do you recruit and inform the population to create a more diverse force?
 * <span style="font-family: &#39;Open Sans&#39;; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">deans in charge of scheduling students into classes: Those people know the students well and are able to discuss interests with students in their grade and therefore are responsible for helping students were given information
 * <span style="font-family: &#39;Open Sans&#39;; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">When CS chair became a dean, the numbers increased at St. Francis Episcopal School
 * <span style="font-family: &#39;Open Sans&#39;; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">IB coordinators didn’t recruit CS at my school - in student lounge, we made time to present to the kids - this is what this is and this is what is good about it and I made it actively recruiting girls -- last year at my school, I had more girls that wanted to take it than boys due to my efforts
 * <span style="font-family: &#39;Open Sans&#39;; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">Speak to colleges to talk to admissions offices to
 * <span style="font-family: &#39;Open Sans&#39;; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">Are students building an active portfolio for students to send with their transcripts?
 * <span style="font-family: &#39;Open Sans&#39;; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">They are keeping t on the drive so that they can keep it quiet and internalized
 * <span style="font-family: &#39;Open Sans&#39;; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">What about using github?
 * <span style="font-family: &#39;Open Sans&#39;; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">With github - we want them to focus on new ideas and they need time to do
 * <span style="font-family: &#39;Open Sans&#39;; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">Some schools are requiring gitHub in their first year of CS to use it
 * <span style="font-family: &#39;Open Sans&#39;; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">By the time they get to senior year, they are familiar with gitHub and quite familiar
 * <span style="font-family: &#39;Open Sans&#39;; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">Using online ide, gave them ability to share and gave access to the classroom
 * <span style="font-family: &#39;Open Sans&#39;; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;"> Students learning github in year two and three
 * <span style="font-family: &#39;Open Sans&#39;; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">in year one, p5.js and processing are easy to store
 * <span style="font-family: &#39;Open Sans&#39;; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">for web course, they have a serve to hold the data
 * <span style="font-family: &#39;Open Sans&#39;; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">Hard to get this design into the schedule - dual curriculum Jewish Day School makes it quite complicated to put CS into the schedule - we can’t give up anything, so how to change the curriculum? Community has a hard time changing from their principles and their culture - something needs to give
 * <span style="font-family: &#39;Open Sans&#39;; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">AP with WE Service for AP CS A is working well at Rye Country Day School (Katie O’Shaughnessey)
 * <span style="font-family: &#39;Open Sans&#39;; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">students are learning to collaborate and build for a non-profit partner
 * <span style="font-family: &#39;Open Sans&#39;; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">students feel buy-in and are directing their own learning
 * <span style="font-family: &#39;Open Sans&#39;; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">Visual coding was an awesome experience learning the properties of art in processing - merged two together - but there were issues from the art side because they couldn’t teach as much art
 * <span style="font-family: &#39;Open Sans&#39;; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">Brian Burkhart from Pingry School - Paying non-CS teachers to learn CS so that students do advanced CS over the summer, and the faculty have to do a project in their discipline for the summer. Kids directed adult learning and the kids and adults worked together to create projects over the summer using the students curriculum that they designed.
 * <span style="font-family: &#39;Open Sans&#39;; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">Grew very quickly and went from 10 to over 100 taking CS - but he can’t hire enough CS teachers
 * <span style="font-family: &#39;Open Sans&#39;; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">We can only take a few of the freshman
 * <span style="font-family: &#39;Open Sans&#39;; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">Gender balance was 60-40 and now the course is tipping in the wrong direction
 * <span style="font-family: &#39;Open Sans&#39;; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">20% of students are taking computer science
 * <span style="font-family: &#39;Open Sans&#39;; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">Word of mouth and cult of personality - Andrew Abate at Riverdale has a following - he recruits kids and they come now
 * <span style="font-family: &#39;Open Sans&#39;; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">Andrew talks about gender equity in CS in advisory - needs to be in the elementary years in order to overcome the gender equity
 * <span style="font-family: &#39;Open Sans&#39;; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">By the time they get to the US, they already have the priorities set up, which is why Robotics is already
 * <span style="font-family: &#39;Open Sans&#39;; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">We are also building the program in the lower school
 * <span style="font-family: &#39;Open Sans&#39;; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">King School - Isabelle D Working on an interdisciplinary project with directed research - goal of the group is to travel to Europe with a group of 20 students
 * <span style="font-family: &#39;Open Sans&#39;; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">researching role of technology
 * <span style="font-family: &#39;Open Sans&#39;; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">working on an app that we are developing that we want to use while we are traveling
 * <span style="font-family: &#39;Open Sans&#39;; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">Girls and people who are traveling next year have never thought to build a platform
 * <span style="font-family: &#39;Open Sans&#39;; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">There were girls on the first day and they would never be on the AP CS course, but they see their outputs and this is my hope to get those girls be on the CS pathway - do you want to do this in an official AP class
 * <span style="font-family: &#39;Open Sans&#39;; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">80 students are traveling and she has 10 building something - she has some kids that have never coded and wants to engage everybody that they get them into it - these are not the AP comp sci kids, but they want to travel and research and they can do it next year
 * <span style="font-family: &#39;Open Sans&#39;; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">The leader came up with the project and we are traveling under the topic of technology into our mobile so that we can keep it with us.. they are putting it into Swift
 * <span style="font-family: &#39;Open Sans&#39;; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">As for elementary school being the right time to get girls into coding
 * <span style="font-family: &#39;Open Sans&#39;; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;"> [|Accenture “Cracking the Gender Code”] report on how to better recruit girls into CS
 * <span style="font-family: &#39;Open Sans&#39;; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">Run like a girl report - a lot of people don’t notice, I thought I did really bad the whole time, I thought you were doing great when all the other men were getting tapped
 * <span style="font-family: &#39;Open Sans&#39;; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">we have a requirement in the MS, but that is not all of the work - we still need to tell students that they are wanted and should contribute
 * <span style="font-family: &#39;Open Sans&#39;; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">MS project week to give more exposure to students that might be a course
 * <span style="font-family: &#39;Open Sans&#39;; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">head of the MS to increase the amount of CS curriculum into the Riverdale MS
 * <span style="font-family: &#39;Open Sans&#39;; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">Keep other offerings into the curriculum
 * <span style="font-family: &#39;Open Sans&#39;; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;"> Girls in IT: the facts: []
 * <span style="font-family: &#39;Open Sans&#39;; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;"> Why Coding Should Be a Compulsory Subject for Students: []
 * <span style="font-family: &#39;Open Sans&#39;; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">Ramaz - Girls Who Code as a club even for 8th grade, and kids getting
 * <span style="font-family: &#39;Open Sans&#39;; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">Girls not competing with boys for the floor - I can check this out without social fears
 * <span style="font-family: &#39;Open Sans&#39;; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">Top student in the whole school was a girl, but she needed that one opportunity to be told that this is for me
 * <span style="font-family: &#39;Open Sans&#39;; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">Watson rant - about podcast regarding social structures with bots that have women’s voices are helpers and genius bots are men’s voices - discuss that with the boys in your classes too -- they can help with that
 * <span style="font-family: &#39;Open Sans&#39;; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">Video conference with a woman who is a researcher at CERN - speakers coming in are often men, but I try to bring in women and have hired four people all women because if I have an equally qualified man and woman, that is what we need in the industry - the kids see that woman fixing things in IT is a woman and that shifts perspective
 * How might we share professional knowledge with each other to pool ideas and expertise?
 * Riverdale has contacts at IBM, ideo and these other places to pool resources
 * Outside experts have been incredibly valuable to have outside experts - teachers are shocked that we are bringing in experts - CS teachers do get that they are NOT the experts
 * Who have you worked with who is great?
 * Had someone from IBM Watson
 * Had someone share a pitch and took students over the summer
 * Had someone talk about cybersecurity
 * Last year, Hatan brought in expert in AI to campus
 * Alum who was professional programmer came to Ramaz and he came in to talk about 2d arrays
 * In this field it is not possible to learn everything - great model for kids to realize you cannot learn everything - better to show kids that there are people who do better
 * New York Tech Meetups - inspiring to kids - they do all new startups if you want to learn about different themes - kids get direct access to
 * Kids got up to present in auditorium of inventors on their startup
 * Resources would be valuable