We have a great ally in Nextech, our regional Code.org partner. They have amazing connections across the state, and were heavily connected to SalesForce. Also, looking to Code.org's Director of State Government Affairs - Sean Roberts has been really helpful for us to connect outside of K-12.

Rachel thanks for your comment. It will be great to talk to you about this model in person at the NCWIT Summit. Feel free to still post your questions here, or we could post them during the workshop on Thursday. 

We'll look forward to seeing you at the workshop, Rachel. And as Sarah said, please don't hesitate to ask questions here. 

Thanks for taking the time to comment on our video!

Thank you Abby!

One of our next great resources we are finalizing now is a How to Write a Landscape Report. We found this to be critical for our states to identify where they are currently at with Computer Science and how to move forward. It's important to be able to provide talking points and have back-up data to support your claims. 

We already have several states that have completed these: https://ecepalliance.org/resources/landscape-re...

But hope to create some form of template that will make this process easier for states to complete.

Hi, Abby.  Thanks for your great comment!  In North Carolina we have already had one statewide Computing Education Summit and a second summit in the western part of our state.  The first summit was designed to share our landscape report and raise awareness of computing education within a diverse group of stakeholders.  The Western NC Computing Summit was targeted at communities in the western part of the state and was designed to grow local leadership and support them in broadening participation in computing in their communities.  Western NC has many rural communities, which have different opportunities and challenges than the communities near large cities.  We hope to hold a summit in the eastern part of NC next--another region with many rural communities.  We also have a steering committee working on K-12 CS Standards for the state, and have just recently welcomed a new NC Director of Computer Science and Technology Education.

Hi Abby

In Maryland, we had our first state summit in 2013 and later in 2016, we began to have annual state summits. Our summits enabled us to leverage support across the state to establish the Maryland Center for Computing Education and receive sate funding. Now, we are focused on providing professional development for educators at the K-12 level and support for our Institutions of Higher Education to develop plans of how to integrate CS into teacher preparation programs.

Agreed, this seems like a very helpful toolkit and plan that will help bring stakeholders together! One thing I would respectfully recommend when collecting and reporting demographic data on gender is to include the option for non-binary individuals to self-identify outside of the male/female binary. I do, however, know this can be difficult when collecting data from districts or state-wide organizations; however, as someone who identifies as non-binary, it would be much appreciated.

Thank you for identifying the need to include a non-binary option on surveys and in reporting demographics. We can encourage state education agencies to adopt this practice too. The more advocates identify this need and request a change in the system, the more likely we are to achieve this change.

Agreed! Thank you for all that you're doing to advance CS pathways for underrepresented groups!

Our aim was gather what we have learned from helping ECEP states hold broadening participation in computing(BPC)-focused events and create a roadmap that would take the guesswork out of developing strong, goal driven agendas and successful events. 

State teams working to build pathways that will increase the number and diversity of students in CS are often small, functioning with no or limited funding, and have multiple priorities they are focused on. These are big challenges to overcome when trying to build an advocacy movement across an entire state. We hope this Summit Toolkit makes launching a summit less daunting for state leaders.

Summits have catalyzed strategic BPC efforts in many states. It would be great to see more state teams holding events to drive advocacy and policy efforts. 

Great point Regina. As we think about how to broaden participation, we know that we need to find new ways to attract different people  for different reasons to CS. Using meaningful social challenges that can be addressed through computing, with tools like data science or computational social science, can be the reason, beyond an attraction to the technology in and of itself, why students would choose to learn computing. Bootstrap has a new Bootstrap Data Science program that helps teachers learn how to integrate data science into their existing courses and we are bringing that to Texas this summer. 

It is great to hear from you Jake. Deborah Seehorn (NC) points out in her post below that the leadership which is most important or influential varies. For this reason we work with state teams to build broad based leadership networks. Depending on where a state is in their timeline of change efforts there will be different leaders who are actively pursuing a variety of strategies. Strategies could involve work on standards development, professional development for K-12 teachers, funding, or state policy. Having a broad based leadership team from K-12, higher ed, industry, government, non-profits and other community-based organizations allows teams to have the right leaders ready to pull the right levers at the right time.

Often this work is opportunistic. Having a strong strategic plan allows teams to take advantage of opportunities to pursue funding or advocate for state policy changes and stay on target. Teams need to be ready to shift gears, or know when an opportunity is not worth pursuing. A strategic plan will keep everyone on the same page. 

As for work in MA, let's connect offline. There is a core team that is working to rebuild and re-energize the CS eduction advocacy efforts across the state. It would be great to have your voice at the table. 

Hello Stacey, thanks for the questions. We come at the issue of collaboration with other NSF funded projects from a few angles. As a national project we are a connector. We connect ECEP state teams with other NSF-funded projects like STARS Computing Corps, NCWIT, ACCESS Computing, and CSEdResearch. We make sure that those project leads are aware of what is happening in ECEP states and that ECEP state teams are aware of the tools and resources those projects have to offer. (Of course there are too many relevant NSF-funded projects to list.) 

Many of our state leadership teams are either PIs on Research Practice Partnership (RPP) grants, or they have PIs from RPPs in their network. These project leads often share about their projects on the monthly ECEP calls. This dissemination helps us learn about new research, and consider similar projects in other states. 

Of course we also work with you and the RPPforCS leadership team to coordinate projects whenever possible. It was great to plan and co-host the combined ECEP and RPPforCS virtual call last month.  

Finally, we encourage any research team that is developing a proposal for an NSF grant to learn about the landscape of CS education in the state(s) that their project proposes to work with. This encourages early connection to ECEP state teams and bolsters current and potential collaboration.