Computer science principles curricula: On-the-ground, adoptable, adaptable, approaches to teaching
Previous sessions and presentations at SIGCSE have explained to the community many details about the development, piloting, and exam format of the NSF/College Board Computer Science Principles (CSP) [1-3] project-a project that is intended and designed to be a rigorous, engaging, and broadly appealing Advanced Placement (AP) course taught in high schools, for which students can earn placement and/or credit for a college course. We are now less than two years from the launch of the course as an official Advanced Placement course in 2016-2017. Hundreds of high schools have offered courses designed around the CSP Framework, but these courses differ in many respects-from choice of programming language, to the degree of emphasis on the Internet, to varying focuses on modeling/simulation, and more. As schools move to adopt the CSP framework, develop courses, and deliver them, teachers and administrators look to national models for curricula that can be adopted and adapted to suit local needs. In this session, we highlight both NSF-funded projects and private/non-profit-funded projects that have developed, piloted, and made available CSP curricula designed around the same framework [4]. These curricula share the same framework, but differ in important ways. We present a matrix, hosted on the CS10K Community of Practice, that highlights the similarities and differences between the approaches represented here. In the session, each curriculum project will be represented by a very short (five-minute) flash talk describing the curriculum. Brief synopses or elevator pitches of the curricula aimed separately at teachers and administrators will also be included in the session as written documents. The matrix and associated documents will be available online and as resources accessible during the session. There will be ample time to engage the audience in questions about the approaches.
