The Beginning: The computer science effort began in 2003 when the head of the Georgia Department of Education’s Career, Technical and Agricultural education division reached out to an Assistant Dean at Georgia Tech. This state leader had signed on to the importance of computer science and placed a particular emphasis on growing AP computer science, in part because there was no other AP exam in the Career, Technical and Agricultural area. The AP CS exams were also changing from C++ to Java and the existing AP CS teachers needed help learning Java and object-oriented programming. One strategy for developing new computing teachers was to work with the business teachers in the state, who had previously been teaching computer applications. Computer applications was moving to middle school leaving computer application teachers available to learn something new.

Prior to the state’s interest, Mark Guzdial at Georgia Tech had established a media computation course as an approach to computer science instruction that would appeal to liberal arts students and others and had established a track record of success with both men and women. This course was a foothold for the Georgia Tech and state collaboration. However, Media Computation was a Python course and the state wanted Java. Barbara Ericson was the best person for the job of creating the new Java Media Computation books and became an outreach person for the College of Computing. With state financial support the Georgia computer science effort began to grow.

Summer Camps: Georgia Tech started offering summer camps for high school students in 2004, and while these camps were popular, they lost money. Ericson decided to add camps for middle school students in 2006 and charge more for those camps to at least break-even. Ericson also thought that the camps were a good way to increase student interest in and exposure to computing. In 2009, Ericson added camps for elementary aged students (rising 4th and up) and the camps started to make a profit. The camps also became venues for trying out newly developed instructional materials. Eventually, they developed the camps into a financially viable model that allows them to be self-sustaining. Due to demand from parents who had sent their students to computing summer camps, Georgia Tech also added fee-based weekend workshops for elementary and middle school students during the school year.

Other Student Outreach: The summer camps have helped attract students to computing, but the majority of campers have been male. To attract more females to computing, Ericson started working with the Girl Scouts in 2005. Thousands of girl scouts have had an introduction to computing through Georgia Tech. Georgia Tech has also worked with Cool Girls, YWCA, and Black Girls Code.

Workshops for Teachers: Ericson runs 3-4 weeks of one-week workshops based on the courses in Georgia during the summer. The workshops began with financial support from the state and then with funding from the Toyota Foundation and eventually, around 2006, with funding from the National Science Foundation (Georgia Computes 2006-2011). The workshops target different levels of experience and knowledge, making it clear that there are prerequisites for the various workshops. Ericson checks in with teachers to ensure that the workshop offerings are relevant for their needs and offers Professional Learning Units (PLUs), which are a required part of state recertification. Ericson also provides logistical support for teachers and follows up with informal e-mail communication and one-day workshops throughout the school year.

Competitions: To help prepare students for the AP CS exams, Georgia Tech has offered a practice multiple-choice exam since 2006. To encourage teachers to teach using Scratch and Alice, Georgia Tech has offered competitions in Scratch and Alice since 2010.

Faculty Workshops: In 2006, Georgia Tech received funding from the National Science Foundation for “Georgia Computes” a project that aimed to address the entire computer science pipeline including K-12 and higher education as well as increasing student interest and starting a lending library. The faculty workshops began through the Academic Advisory Committee on the Computing Disciplines – AACCD. At first, there appeared to be a lot of interest with about 25 participants at the first workshop. Then participation dropped. The project evaluator sought to find out why and according to Guzdial, they found that, "in any department only about 20% of the faculty actually care about undergraduate education.” They realized that they had already reached them all and eventually stopped doing the workshops.

Lending Library: As part of Georgia Computes, Ericson created a lending library. The library enables teachers to borrow hardware (e.g. cell phones, robotics kits) that might otherwise be difficult to get or to justify purchasing. It also allows teaches to have enough equipment for an entire class to use, instead of just the few kids who come to an afterschool club. Many schools have purchased their own robotics kits after borrowing from the lending library and one county, Gwinnett, has also established a lending library.

Disciplinary Commons for Computing Educators (DCCE): While the work at Georgia Tech grew, others established complementary supports. Mark Guzdial, Lijun Ni of Georgia Tech and Allison Elliott Tew established the DCCE, a community focused on building collaboration among CS educators. Brianna Morrison, of Southern Poly participated in the first year and became a leader in subsequent years. This was a group of college and high school teachers who met monthly to collaborate and reflect on their teaching while creating a professional portfolio. Teachers shared resources, reviewed each other’s written work and observed each other’s teaching. When the Georga CSTA chapter started, much of the leadership came from DCCE participants.

Georgia CSTA Chapter: As Georgia Computes was growing, in 2008, Ria Galanos, one of the teachers that Ericson had been working with, helped to establish the Georgia chapter of the CSTA, along with other teachers from the Disciplinary Commons work of Lijun Ni and Briana Morrison. Galanos used the mailing list accumulated from Ericson’s workshops to reach out to teachers interested in collaborating with one another. At the beginning, they met once a month to share ideas and teaching strategies.

State Policy for Computer Science: Having four computer science courses in Georgia makes it possible for a school to hire a teacher who really knows computer science because there are enough courses to support a full time teacher. After the 4 courses in computing were defined (“Computing in the Modern World,” “Beginning Programming,” “Intermediate Programming,” “AP Computer Science A”), the state also developed a teacher endorsement in computer science, in an effort to allow computer science teachers the opportunity to have a credential that indicated they really knew computer science. Three universities/colleges in Georgia now offer the endorsement. However, very few teachers have attempted to obtain the endorsement since it is not required. There was also a push at the state level to make Advanced Placement computer science count toward high school graduation, in part due to the new requirement for all students to take 4 years of math and science by 2012. All students who graduated in 2012 and beyond can count Advanced Placement Computer Science A as a science for high school graduation and as a science or math for entry into Georgia's colleges and universities.

A Core Group of Teachers: At the beginning, Ericson sought out teachers who others had identified as potential collaborators. She asked their opinions of the developing curriculum and whether they thought it would work. She was always communicative, responsive and attentive to her teacher colleagues. This was part of her larger strategy to work with a core group of teachers rather than a single group of schools or district. Now, those teachers are part of Georgia’s computer science leadership.

I’ve worked with a core group of teachers over the years, and that's one of the cool things that's really happened in Georgia …that we've grown the community of teachers…so they are now taking on -- they run a lot of the workshops now, I don't have to run everything, which is great.

Ericson works with these teachers to run summer camps, develop materials, and reach out to others. She advises,

Find the people who do lesson plans, who know how, and do them well, and hire those people to create lesson plans if you can. Also hire those people to go out and visit schools, because no one person…I get so many requests to come visit schools…having people that can go visit schools would be really useful thing to help teachers.”

State Allies: For the first couple of years, the computer science effort had strong advocates at in the Career and Technical Education Department at the Georgia Department of Education. As new leadership has come in, the CS education leaders have had to work to maintain the momentum of the computer science effort.

University Partnerships: From the beginning, Georgia Tech supported the computer science effort. The institution provided financial support at the beginning for summer camps and Ericson’s salary and in general has been supportive of Ericson and Guzdial’s efforts. Georgia Tech continues its support through the lending library and providing space and resources to the on-going teacher PD. Other institutions have been supportive as well. Wayne Summers from Columbus State was the Co-PI on Georgia Computes and was one of the first extenders of the summer camp program and now offers many summer camp opportunities. Also, Columbus State was the first place to offer the teacher computer science endorsement. Summers has been very supportive in trying to develop interest and send high school teachers to the professional development opportunities at Georgia Tech.

Organizational Partnerships: Partnerships with other organizations also played a key role. Ericson’s work with the Girl Scouts helped expose more girls to computing and financial and materials support from Microsoft and others helped fill needed resource gaps. Further, once the CSTA Chapter was underway, they helped address needed content and pedagogical support.

All the workshops I go to are all about pedagogy, all of them. And it's awesome, because we need that -- there are ways to teach CS topics that are terrible, so that's important too but it's really hard to go to a workshop and hear all these great ideas when you don't have a place to put them in your mind because you don't know the material. So to get back to Barb, it never occurred to us to see if we could create a formal partnership. We had an informal partnership, and that's that Barb gave us keys to Georgia Tech and we didn't have to pay and she showed up at our meetings and she supported us and we supported her.

Policy Changes: Getting AP CS A to count as a science course has increased the number of schools who want to offer it. But there have been struggles. After having CS accepted as a science, the Georgia Board of Regents mailed descriptions of all science courses to science professors and asked them to judge the merits of the course based on whether the course would help students in their classes. As a result, AP CS A got dropped from the Board of Regents' list of courses that count towards science. Guzdial, Ericson and others went back to the Board of Regents who were willing to reconsider and count AP CS as either science or math. Ultimately, the State wouldn't accept the notion that a course might count toward either mathematics or science, so they stopped accepting it as a math, but still counts it as a science.

Finding Interested Faculty: It has been difficult to find university faculty who actually care about computing education and about becoming better teachers. Faculty care more about graduate education, promotion and tenure. Guzdial suggests that rather than try to change faculty, at the beginning at least, find those that are interested and work with them.

Finding Interested Teachers: Even where there is faculty interest and support, there is insufficient teacher interest. Both Columbus State and at Kennesaw State University offer the endorsement and to date have graduated only one person. As Guzdial said, "We have way more capacity than we have teachers taking up that capacity."

Why should the teachers want to get involved in the professional development, why should they care about learning how to do CS principles. I get that the goal of CS 10K is that when the new CS principles rolls out as an AP, we'll have more than ten thousand teachers available. There’s the challenge: Until it rolls out, is there going to be an incentive for more than ten thousand teachers to learn about CS principles? Will teachers go to PD for a course that might one day be an AP?

Perceptions of CS as Non-Academic: The computer science leaders in Georgia have been fighting a problem of perception on several fronts. At the state level, there is currently a focus on industry that is leading to “low level” IT skills rather than computer science. This has led to an effort to change the learning objectives for the first course to ones that are less rigorous.

Misperceptions also reside at the school level. Both school administrators and teachers fail to recognize CS as a complex discipline and expect that teachers can learn how to teach it with minimal training.

Galanos explains:

I think the biggest challenge right now is that no one is recognizing us as an academic discipline. It's absolutely okay that we're not in the core, I’m not suggesting that CS ever necessarily be in the core, but people really consider us still to be just a frou-frou elective, and not taking us seriously.

Ericson explains:

So there's many issues, people didn't know what computer science is, they think computer literacy is CS, so if you know how to use a keyboard, so keyboarding classes, computer apps are all considered CS often in schools, and so getting them to understand the difference, getting them to understand that CS is more than you can learn in just a week, that's a big issue, that people don't have any idea what CS is, they have an idea that it's a low level programming job, they have no idea all the things you can do with CS, they have no idea how many different things there are to learn.

So one big problem is that principals don't understand that you can't teach someone who knows nothing, enough to teach AP CS in one week. They'll expect us to, and send someone to a one week workshop where we say explicitly, do not take this workshop if you don't have any background in programming. People will say "I'm signed up to teach it, so I have to teach it.

The misperceptions extend to the school counselors as well. Teachers complain that school counselors view the computing courses as “dumping grounds” for students with behavioral problems. Ericson explains, "they think ‘hey it's a computer, they'll get to play with a computer all day, that'll keep them busy, that'll keep them out of trouble.’ So that's another issue that people have faced." She feels that it is a "never ending battle…to get people to see what it is, that it is important, that it is just as important as a science or a math if not more important."

On-going Funding: At the beginning, Ericson had support from the state and the College of Computing to support her salary. Then, computer science was supported by a grant from the Toyota Foundation, and that was followed by funding from the National Science Foundation. The camps are now self-sustaining with computing summer camps going on around the state, reaching about 1000 youth in 2012. But, funding remains uncertain with shifts in the policy environment.

Providing Professional Development for a Range of Teachers: With the direction of the economy and associated reduction in teachers, the leaders have seen teachers who were enthusiastic about teaching CS and who attended PD lose their jobs. More experienced, but uninterested teachers have taken their place. This exacerbates the already difficult challenge of providing PD for teachers who are interested, but have a range of experience.

Galanos explains:

…it's really hard to do when you have veteran teachers and veteran CS teachers in a room with new CS teachers who are not even knowledgeable about CS; that's a ridiculous group of people to put in a room together, it doesn't make any sense.

School Schedule and Departments: Even when schools open their doors to computer science, there are still serious challenges. Some are administrative. For example, the course sequence designed to lead up to AP resides in the “career and tech” department, not mathematics. Thus mathematics teachers have trouble teaching those classes because, as Galanos explained,

there was no principal that lets you teach in two different departments, that's just blasphemous. So they have to get business teachers to do it and they just became a mess.

It’s been their experience that having computer science in the business departments has been a challenge because these teachers have become accustomed to teaching applications, and don’t like to move out of their comfort areas to computer science. Other challenges have to do with finding instructional time in the schedule as computer science competes with other electives or with mathematics and science.

Yet another challenge comes from having teachers teach only single courses. With only one course and one section, teachers don’t have the same kinds of opportunities to improve their instruction as teachers who repeat courses. Similarly, teachers are asked to teach multiple courses, and that increases the planning burden for those teachers. Crystal Furman, another teacher leader, explained she wants the district and administrators

to recognize that if you want to have a successful program, you can't overtax these teachers.

Finally, Galanos feels that there is an emphasis on AP being the only CS class in the school. She feels it’s important to have multiple levels of computer science for the range of students in the school. She recognizes that not all young students are ready for AP, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t ready for computer science.

Need for Instructional Materials: Even with the accomplishments of getting computer science to count for credit and increasing visibility, there is an enormous need for quality materials.

Guzdial explains:

And one of the things that I’ve learned from Georgia Computes is how much things have to be packaged for teachers to be able to pick them up and use them. Most university faculty just don't get that. The way you pass a university course from one person to the other is you hand them your syllabus and your PowerPoint slides. Done. It's not the way it works at the K-12 level.

Engage Teachers and Build Teacher Community: Ericson explains that teachers would rather listen to one another than to someone else. Thus, allowing time for teachers to share and solve problems together helps to build the informal communities and builds leadership capacity for the overall effort. She emphasizes the importance of talking to teachers, visiting them, and learning what is happening in their classrooms. These teachers then become the experts on how to support computer science in their individual contexts.

Customize PD and Make It More Long Term: The Georgia leaders have made the most of their opportunities to provide professional development. They emphasize the importance of exposing teachers to more hours of professional development over a longer period of time; and of the merits of being able to work with teachers with similar skill and experience levels. The teachers they work with concur.

Galanos explains:

I think what's really important is that you address the needs of people in the room. If you're not equipped to handle people with different experience levels in CS, then you shouldn't have a workshop open to that many groups. If you're going to have an AP workshop and you are expecting that the people are already teaching AP CS, don't let anybody in who's not. It's important for us, if we're having workshops, to do as well as to listen, so that's how you really can gauge. Just like in the classroom -- that's the crazy thing about workshops is that teachers get workshops and don't treat the workshop like a classroom, it's the funniest thing ever.

Another leading teacher, Christopher Michaud explained:

If I were in charge, if I were king, the way I would suggest to do PD for teachers would be to do it in situ, instead of pulling all teachers together all the time, sometimes taking five or six weeks and going to the school and teaching with the teacher, that also might be beneficial, because you can be gaining your experience in a four or five hour workshop but getting it to play out in a two or three week unit might be more difficult. So finding ways for teachers to maybe either visit or co-teach with each other or have a body of professionals at the college or even college students as part of their coursework to partner with a high school teacher and teach for a few weeks.

Communicate to Parents: Ericson works to build demand for computer science by reaching out directly to parents. She sends letters from Georgia Tech and targets girls and minorities and encourages them to take AP CS or, if their school doesn’t offer it, to ask for it.

…that's one of the things that’s pushing schools to offer it because parents will push for it. Parents know this stuff is important; they want their kid learning high tech stuff. Schools tend to still have this attitude that you're preparing people for jobs right out of high school, especially in the career and technical, the business department, that's really where their focus is, that's what they think they’re doing. And we can't quite get through their heads that that's not where most of the jobs are, and any job you'd get out of high school is a low level job that you'd be stuck in, would not really be a career.

Collect Data and Customize: Guzdial is currently leading another NSF-supported project, the Expanding Computing Education Pathways (ECEP) project. In this work, they are using what they learned from the Georgia experience to help others develop computer science education. One of their emerging recommendations is to collect data on what is happening locally, what the local needs are, and local concerns and constraints. Then, with this information in mind, create a customized model for growing computer science. One size will not fit all.

Identify a Full-Time Leader: As with any improvement effort, it’s important to have an individual, like Ericson, who is primarily focused on realizing the goals of the effort. While many dedicated individuals can contribute while still meeting other responsibilities, it is helpful to have a full-time champion who can facilitate coordination, communication and simply “keep things happening.”

Engage Public Policy Stakeholders: As the story of computer science in Georgia reveals, it is very valuable to have good relationships with public policy makers; the effort has to reach all aspects of the system. In this case, having AP CS A count as a science credit increased the number of schools willing to offer it; moving it to be a required course in high school would obviously help even more. Engaging on the policy front can be an enormous challenge on its own, but it is essential for long term impact.

“Don’t take no for an answer”: Galanos articulated this well:

…when it comes to CS education, if I’m talking to someone who knows nothing about our field who's making crazy decisions, I don't give up. I keep at it until we make headway and sometimes you have to be... thoughtful about it and if your school district really responds to parents and will do anything parents ask, which of course is every school district's nightmare, then you have to get the parents on your side. If your school district responds to principals and principals can run their schools any way they want, then you have to get your principal on your side. You can't do it alone, and certainly the excitement in this country about CS right now is higher than it was a year ago, but it doesn't mean the superintendent's changed. But you just can't give up.

More Diversity: Furman was eager to see more diversity in her classroom.

In my district, you put AP on the name of a class, and you've got kids just flocking to your room; because that's what they have been told is important, to take an advanced placement class; I'm also thinking that we will attract more minorities with them, so I'm hoping the diversity with our classes will be better in five years. My diversity is better today than it was five years ago; and it would be a dream to have 50:50 male female. I don't know if that will happen, but even if we got 25:75 that would be a huge improvement.

More Statewide Efforts: Guzdial envisioned more statewide efforts:

We're going to see more states that are going to take computing education seriously, that are going to make it part of their high school graduation requirements, or at least something that counts towards high school graduation. They’re going to create electives; they're going to create licensing. Within ten years CS Principles will exist. I'm going to be that within ten years, we could have CS 10K. I don't predict we're going to see it in five years. I don't think that we're going to get ten thousand new teachers just because the incentive system isn't there right now. I don't think that we're going to get all fifty states bought in. Man, it’s hard to get all fifty states to buy into anything, and the models are so different.

What Computer Science Might Become: Michaud imagined what computer science might become:

CS will no longer be on the screen, and we're just about finished with that era now. We call it robotics, but it's not really a great word for it. Smart devices, connected devices, the internet of things. I say to my own CS students now, that staring at the box on the desk is not the way that CS is going to be in five years. You will write programs and devise systems that people won't be looking at. They might be wearing them, they might be touching them, they might be listening to them, we might build whole buildings with them, but the screen and graphics is not the end. It's only the beginning…

Concrete Goals: Galanos and Ericson focused on concrete goals:

…in five years -- we've gone from 300 people taking AP CS back when I first started, to over 1000 last year; I’d love to see it be 10,000 in four more; 100,000 would be great, that'd be more like the level of calculus. So I’d like to see us where calculus is. When I went to high school, not everybody took AP calculus in high school, now it's almost required if you think you're going into a STEM field, you'd better take AP calculus in high school. Well if you're going to a STEM field in the future, you'd better take CS.

So I really would love if our country sort of... in five years really understood what CS is and what CS education looks like at the pre-university level as well as the university level and what people in CS jobs actually do. And I think if our country knew that, things would change. So I would like to see that for five years from now. I'd like to see it by the summer.

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