Thanks for the encouragement!  You bring up an important point, and one which I hope we can point some resources towards for better research.  

We do believe that culturally relevant pedagogy is important for access and content richness, so secondary projects involve creating software of service to local communities. We also spend time in our summer PD workshops on culturally relevant pedagogy. In the future, I hope we can look carefully at how these efforts play out at the student level. 

Thanks for the kind words. The effort is fairly well distributed, with focus on K-8 since there isn't historically much curriculum there compared to 9-12, and college instruction/success. 

The initial criteria is blunt: in K-12, how many students (and what distribution) have access to CS courses. In college, how many students pass CS related courses. In the future as the work progresses, we'll want to know how students progress from course to course, how their attitudes and motivation changes.

I'm asking after some of these details and will get back to you!

Some school districts have approached this by trying to integrate CS with other courses. SF Unified has emphasized stand-alone courses, with the challenge of fitting it into the day, but with the benefit of being able to do a thorough job on CS standards. 

My own experience trying to integrate science and math to cover both Common Core and NGSS is that it's very tough in any lesson to cover both well, so while this kind of integration is very productive and fruitful, if it's stretched over an entire course, it's really tough to do justice to both.

My experience is that there's a lot of interest in CS electives due to its leading to employment in pretty high-status fields. In that situation the challenge is trying to encourage all populations to give CS a fair try (not just those predisposed by background and social pressures).

Hi Eric - you described a big challenge that I know many talk about. What approaches have you tried out in the district to make CS more of an accessible opportunity for the youth who are walking by the door right now?

No magic bullet found yet!

First, the eventual goal is to have CS classes available in every school and exposure for all elementary students. This will expose more students compared to CS as pure electives. 

Second, the K-6 curriculum uses languages like Scratch which are not usually known by students, even those who have access to computers at home, so there is a bit of leveling there. 

Third, the programming tasks through G6 are about making games, something that hopefully is attractive to all students, and then starting in G7, there is a project strand around apps for social impact and giving back to community.

We are eager to learn about other approaches that others are pioneering!

Hi Pablo, thanks for the comments.  I've uploaded a more detailed summary of the CS curriculum from grade to grade. The curriculum follows the K12cs.org Framework for K-12 Computer Science Education and the Computer Science Teacher Association K-12 CS Standards.

http://betterfilecabinet.com/sfcall/SF_CALL_Cur...

I'm not a classroom teacher, so I can't give you a direct report, but yes I hear reported that there are extreme variations in previous computing experience and access, so differentiation is a tough task, as well as trying to keep status differences from detracting from the class. It helps that the curriculum is usually about material that no student has really used before (e.g. Scratch), but basic familiarity and experience with computers is still a big head start.