Advanced Placement Computer Science: Principles - Summer 2011 Professional Development for UC Berkeley Cluster of High School Teachers

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The University of California Berkeley proposes to build on the work of their pilot of the proposed College Board AP CS Principles course, working with and training an initial group of high school teachers during the summer of 2011. The PIs piloted their course -- called the Beauty and Joy of Computing (BJC)-- at the college level in 2010-2011; with this work, they will adapt it for high school students and provide professional development for their teachers. BJC invokes passion, beauty, and awe by engaging students in a rigorous computing curriculum that promotes creativity and collaboration using Snap's visually rich programming environment, while also provoking thought around current events and how computing relates to people's lives. This summer effort will conduct and evaluate team-based professional development for in-service teachers and it will enhance the development of the Snap software (an extension of Scratch formerly known as "Build your own Blocks (BYOB)"), which combines technical sophistication with an attractive drag-and-drop interface. Specifically the project will (1) develop a core group of mentor teachers in the Berkeley area who will in later years help to scale the professional development around BJC to new locations, (2) conduct and evaluate intensive summer professional development for teachers, and (3) reimplement the Snap programming language and development environment to improve its speed and to create a version that does not require local software installation. This project is designed to continue the momentum developed around the pilot BJC course and establish a firm base for a larger project that has been separately proposed to NSF.