Now that the AP Computer Science test is over, my thoughts have turned to the next school year. I had finished my recruiting campaign in February but I had to wait for the data to be entered. I was anxious to get those numbers because I had tried something different this year and was hoping that it was successful.

My California school district administration has expectations of a "reasonable" number of students when offering an elective class. With the budget deficit, that number seems to be increasing each year so I felt I needed to try a different approach to recruiting students. During the Grace Hopper Conference in Portland I had attended a breakout group about recruiting. One of the suggestions was to mail home letters to the parents. I decided to try it even though I would have to find the money to pay for the postage.

I went to work and asked for lists of students from the data tech. I used recruiting letters that other computer science teachers had successfully used to create a letter that would meet my needs. Next, I personalized each letter using mail merge, printed labels, assembled them and mailed them off I did get responses. Students dropped by the computer lab to speak to me about the class and I received phone calls from parents who told me they did not realize that computer science was offered at our school and wanted to know more about the class. I was hopeful that the efforts would pay off. What I learned last week was that my numbers are up in A.P. Computer Science by about 40%. However, because I did not send as many letters to the introductory students my numbers remain about the same.

After I asked about the number of students who registered for computer science, I spoke with the new assistant principal about other types of recruiting activities I could be doing. He suggested that I visit math classes. That is something I had wanted to do but was I was never offered the opportunity by the previous administrator. For next school year that is added to my list. Another surprise, I received is that the principal told me that she also mentioned my computer science class at the PTSA meeting and told the parents that I offer a supportive environment in which to learn computer science. I plan to remind the administration about computer science by sending them examples of student work and invitations to the peer reviews of student projects so that they will continue to help me recruit students.

Another development that could help with recruiting is a recent change to the minimum graduation requirements in California. With permission of the school board, computer science can be substituted in place of the Visual and Performing Arts requirement. I will be investigating how that process works and soliciting the assistance of my administration.

During the summer, I will continue to investigate successful classroom management and delivery strategies for multiple subjects during one class period. I want to improve my students' experience in the classroom which is why I enrolled in an online teacher certification program. I want to use those techniques to improve the learning experience for all of my computer science students.

In June and July, I am looking forward to the professional development opportunities that I can take advantage of. I will be attending a Tapestry Workshop where I will learn more about recruiting and retaining students in computer science and the CS & IT Conference where I am always exposed to more ideas to try out and investigate. Summer is my time to recharge and think deeply about what I want to try out the next school year.

Myra Deister
CSTA Board of Directors

Video games are just plain fun! Your students know it, you know it, but so do administrators and colleagues who sometimes think that if you are teaching something that much fun, it can'tt be truly educational.

To include game design in your CS class you might need a little help in pointing to evidence that not only is game design serious CS, but it is also serious business that involves serious money and seriously worthwhile topics. I've been gathering a few pieces of evidence "for the defense."

It is perhaps fitting to write a blog about teaching programming while I sit here and monitor my students as they write the final exam. I did my other exam yesterday (same class, another lecture section) so the grading is very fresh in my mind.

For the last few years I have been teaching one of the first three courses in our major, and all of these involve programming. I tend these days to make my exams open book, open notes, open anything-printed, but closed to anything electronic. I don't know how long the closed electronic can survive, but I don't know another way to keep the students from getting too much help from outside. I do not mind if they print off piles of paper, but I also try to warn them that they need to have indexed all their material. I have seen too many students frantically searching through a thousand pages of stuff looking for the one relevant paragraph. Given the level of detail, I don't mind that they would have written down good versions of code, provided they know what that code does... (I am thinking here of the question that asks for code to link a node into a linked list, and the thee students yesterday who wrote out the code to unlink a node ... what were they thinking?).

By making all my exams open notes, I can't ask some of the simple questions like definitions. But I can ask them to become good librarians and good at finding the references to the material. If they can properly index and organize the details, they have probably learned the material. And perhaps through sheer repetition, they might come to understand the precise way in which things are said and written. In general, their writing is fuzzy, which I think is because their thinking is fuzzy. But this isn't a discipline where fuzzy thinking is a good idea.

For various reasons, I have been reading a lot of books of late "about" software and about how computing is changing the world. Dreaming in Code, by Scott Rosenberg; Distrust That Particular Flavor, by William Gibson; Programmed Visions, by Wendy Chun. I have also been working with faculty from across campus on digital humanities projects. We live in this strange world in which really great ideas all come down to the issue of SMOP (a Small Matter of Programming). There is a huge amount of work in getting a big software artifact written and tested. There can be major issues in dealing with APIs. All that cool stuff is available for programming iPhones, for example, but it is necessary to understand the classes and methods and how they interrelate. The big issue for me, after a long time teaching, is how to balance the need for "skill" in programming with the need for knowing how to think about putting the small pieces of code together. We still drill students in arithmetic and spelling, probably on the basis that they need to be facile with the basic skills in order to deal with higher concepts. Programming is much the same, except the skills are harder to learn and the higher concepts much harder to understand when they are fuzzy. We can read a bad essay and know that it is bad. It is harder to look at bad code, or to run bad code, and know why we don't like what we see.

Duncan Buell
CSTA University Representative