Computer Science High School Outreach Program

Welcome to the Berry College High School Outreach page.

Topic Ideas

• Get students to work with Aibo robotic dogs in a competition where they learn repetitive and selective control structers,subprograms, etc. Also, give students an introduction to machine intelligence in the form of letting them work with Tic Tac Toe games. (Dale Shaffer)


• Run an alternative programming contest in order to introduce talented high school students to computer science. As an alternative, you could also do a one day event that covers alice, gamemaker, finite state automata, software engineering and math problems for juniors and seniors in high school. For details (Mary Anne Egan).


• Create a Workshop devoting 1 to 5 days for topics such as Programming (with Alice), simple databases, installing a small home network. (Joao Paulo Barros)

Suggestions

• Carnegie Mellon University offers material that can be used to show students the breadth of computing beyond just programming. For more information click here (Tim Cortina).


• CMU also offers several outreach programs directed towards women that can be easily adapted such as their TechNights program and Women@SCS programs. For info on the CMU TechNights program click here. For info on the Women@SCS program click here. (Dr. Carol Frieze)


• Girlstart is offering an after-school program for high school girls to get them interested in taking Computer Science. This involves using Scratch and Python in order to eventually get each individual girl to design a game or learning activity, as well as utilizing information about careers in computer programming. You can visit their website at http://www.girlstart.org/itgirl/year-two.html for more information. (Clare Richardson)


• Haverford College works with CS Educators Summer Institute where they set up a week long activity where colleagues from SIGCSE made presentations to K-12 teachers to start discussions about CS topics and get the word out to students. You can check out their website at http://www.cs.haverford.edu/csesi/2007/ (John P. Dougherty)


• Be sure to include high school colleagues in this program as they tend to have a very good understanding of what high school students are like. Their input could prove to be invaluable.


• UBC held a similar event to the program we are suggesting that also invited parents along. As it turns out, parents play a large role in decisions about where and what their children will study at a university. For more info click here. (Paul Carter)


• Ohio State University put on a computer games camp for children 12-14 years of age with the assistance of a local science museum. You can find more about the information they used to construct this event here. Additional information is provided at http://judy.robertson1.googlepages.com/judyrobertsonpublications (Laura Hutchins-Korte) as well as http://db.grinnell.edu/sigcse/iticse2007/Program/tailoredprogram.asp (Dr. Ramnee Peiris). (Howard Francis on behalf of Bettina Bair)


• The University of Dundee, Scotland held an ACM-SIGCSE ITiCSE 12th annual conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education. For more information click here (Dr. Ramanee Peiris)


• Michael Kolling suggests running only single day events where children develop a whole (simple) game that provides only the graphics and sounds. He has directed this type of event before aimed at 14-15 year olds. The event itslef uses Greenfoot as the platform. For more information on Greenfoot go to http://greenfoot.org/.


• Southern Polytechnic State University ran a computer gaming workshop similar to one that her university put on. The 2.5 day workshop concentrated on using Alice to create a new game as well as sessions on what makes a good game, the gaming industry, testing games, etc. (Briana Morrison)


• Briana Morrison suggests pikcing out 3-4 of the CS unplugged items and letting the teachers and students do the examples listed on the site, then showing them "real-life" examples of where/how it is used.


• Satu Alaoutinen suggests checking out The Kids' Club at http://cs.joensuu.fi/~kidsclub/


• Atanas Radenski mentions some instructive negative experience that was reported at SIGCSE '06 during a paper session on Recruitment and Retention http://db.grinnell.edu/sigcse/sigcse2006/Program/viewAcceptedSession.asp?sessionID=263. Zachary Dodds from Harvey Mudd College spoke on the Evolution of a Computational Outreach Program to Secondary Students at the same conference (click here for details). Evidently, the most shocking part of the presentation was that after years of work with high school students, none of them went to Harvey-Mudd to study computer science - or anywhere else for that matter.

Links