The CS10K project: Mobilizing the community to transform high school computing
The CS10K project is a large-scale, collaborative project bringing together stakeholders from wide-ranging constituencies with the goal of systematically changing the scale, curriculum, and pedagogy of teaching computer science at all levels, but focusing in particular on computer science in U.S. high schools as well as introductory computing at the college level. As part of the systemic changes in teaching computer science the CS10K project aims to have 10,000 teachers in 10,000 high schools teaching a new curriculum by 2015. The CS10K project will require building substantial collaborations between a consortium of partners - including academia at all levels, government agencies, industry, and private foundations - to assist in all aspects of the effort. In this special session, suitable for teachers and educators from all levels, we will report on the goals of the CS10K project, the motivation for the project, its scope, and progress to date of the project. This builds on work reported on in [1][2] and provides an overarching view of the CS10K project with an appeal to the broad computing community to be involved with the project. Computer Science and computing education is our field of endeavor. We all work to ensure that our field is vibrant, growing, and successful. If computing is to be part of both the academic and future workforce leading to innovation, there is no stage in the academic pipeline more crucial than high school. Students do begin to lose interest in computing much earlier, but engagement programs for K-8 will not be effective if students who become engaged before high school lose that engagement and interest during their high school years. Likewise, revitalized computing programs cannot have a significant impact if too few students take our courses and use our methods.
