Hi Dave,
Thanks for watching and your question!
Brian's response below touched on tools. To add a more-- because of our focus on engaging females, the AI/ML curriculum underscores projects of social and cutural relevance. Projects related to Sentiment Analysis that explore Song lyrics (and students extended them to NYT articles in their final projects), AI & Environment, AI & Art, AI & Criminal Justice.

This is a good list. NetsBlox is new to me, but I've used all the other tools before.

Another machine learning tool you might find useful is Code.org's AI Lab, an alternative to MachineLearningForKids (ML4K). AI Lab has some built in data visualization capabilities and allows you to upload your own datasets, which ML4K does not do. It also has some good built-in datasets. On the other hand it uses k-NN, so unlike ML4K there is no decision trees that can be displayed. Code.org doesn't make it easy to access AI Lab directly; it's buried inside their AI/ML tutorial. But here's a direct link: https://studio.code.org/s/ai-lab/lessons/1/levels/2/sublevel/5

NetsBlox is a Snap! variant bringing in distributed computing and networking. It provides access to a large set of web APIs and other online data sources and services (including ML related ones). It is also easy to extend with your own data sources. Finally, it can be used to work with hardware devices like robots, phones or even Echo devices. Here is a brief video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq86M0boVLg&amp...

Great question. The class is not specifically designed to lead students to CSA. It is more of an exploratory course to enable students to learn about the concepts underneath these ideas. Python would be a great follow-on. CSA would be great for students who wish to get started on a CS major and/or who wish to focus on learning Java.

Thanks for sharing that video, Akos! Are you planning to incorporate the new IDE into the curriculum? 

We'll probably keep it optional. So, if a teacher wants to stay in the block-based environment throughout the course, they can. Part of the AI/ML module introduces Python, so that is probably the point where we can. And then students are free to choose to use Python or NetsBlox for their final project.

Hi Roxana, thanks for watching and for your question!

Our curriculum draws on literature on engaging females in STEM/computing-- pedagogies such as project-based learning.. with opportunities for collaboration, Interactions with role models and seeing others like them represented in the field, and working on projects that represent meaningful, socially & culturally consequential activity and connect with student identities, real world issues (and often to other subjects).
Our teacher PD ensures an emphasis on these pedagogical elements and draws on resources on expansive framing and culturally relevant computing.
The initial sequence projects that bring the concepts to students are set in issues such as climate change, Covid, music & movies -- all of which allow for student extensions into examining/ interrogating aspects that are of cultural relevance and interest to students. In our summer camp pilots, student responses to the question "what would you do if you had more time to develop/extend the project?" have demonstrated that often these are the kinds of connections students would want to explore with their learning (and the tool).
Also, the tool we use--NetsBlox--has amazing features that allow us to use an enormous range of Web APIs that bring in real data that touch upon many topics of social and cultural relevance. Perhaps most importantly, it allows students to create or bring in student- and community-related/generated datasets (through the "create your own service" feature to interrogate questions of of personal interest to students and their communities. (This is something we include in our teacher PD, but have not been able to explore fully yet in our summer camp pilots, but plan to do in the full implementation of the curriculum - especially for students' final projects.)
For example, in order to understand and explore the issue of historical marginalization of certain groups in STEM, students could create a service that explores data from NSF/NCSES on STEM degree awardees at various levels and explore trends by year to see how (or IF at all) things are changing for women and minoritized communities in STEM. This can be part of or a start of an exploration of racist and bias practices in CS. (We included an example of visualizations created with CS PhD data from NSF/NCSES in our recent paper for the VL/HCC 2021 special issue published by Elsevier's Journal of Computer Languages).

Hope this helps answer your question.

The response above touched mostly on the Distributed Computing module. In the AI/ML module, there are a lot of sessions devoted to discussing issues of bias, ethics and social/criminal justice related to AI/ML. Those elements are a constant thread through that module.

The final Software Engineering module of the course will encourage students to explore a project of their own choosing, which may help somewhat to address cultural relevance.

Thank you, Tiffany! Are they provided with examples or guidance for projects that are aligned with their communities?

The SE Module is still taking shape ahead of its 2022 Summer pilot. We would *WELCOME* pointers to good examples as well as more ways to scaffold thoughtful project conceptualization and guidance on projects aligned with their communities.
Thanks so much, Roxana, for resources you could share, and for your questions that push us to continue to center our work on these important aspects of engaging learners more meaningfully!

Thank you so much, Roxana!

Yes, we are working closely with our teachers every summer. We recruit students for our summer camps primarily via our connections to schools and teachers. In fact, we are enrolling students now, so please spread the word:

2-Week Computer Science High School Summer Camp
Flexible Dates: July 11–15, July 18–22, July 25–29
Full-Day Camp
Plenty of spots still open!
Apply online: go.ncsu.edu/apply2csf

Teachers are provided with 5 days of training directly with the whole PI and development team. 

Then, teachers teach summer camps with the materials, with support from the team. We have done all the camps virtually. In the past 2 summers, recruiting was through NC State University's outreach program called "The Engineering Place" - they hold a number of summer camps every year.

This year, we are holding the virtual camps ourselves without working with The Engineering Place, to keep the program free and hopefully recruit more girls. However, we still need a lot more! I hope anyone seeing this will extend a *** PERSONAL *** invitation to any high school girl students you know who would be interested. Please encourage them by letting them know you think they will enjoy the camp and that they have what it takes to be successful in computer science. Our camps in IoT and AI/ML this summer will be a lot of fun and introduce them to researchers, students, and professionals in these fields. http://go.ncsu.edu/apply2csf

Thanks so much for watching our video!

Thanks for the information about the summer camp and teacher training. I can appreciate your request to provide personalize invitations and encouragement to students when sharing the opportunity. Students respond better when there's someone telling them this is something they will be able to succeed in.  I will certainly share the opportunity with the group of college students who serve as CAHSI Advocates and request they provide personalized invitations to students they may know.

Thank you!

Hi Jan, it is great to hear from you. Yes, once we have done the full-year pilot, we do want to scale up. The Tennessee Board of Education will vote to accept the course state-wide later this month. We have started the approval process in North Carolina too. We have not made specific plans beyond that, but we are definitely interested in broad dissemination. Once finalized, the curriculum and tools will be freely accessible. And we plan to do more teacher PD as well. 

Thanks Jan! We as a team are really enjoying working on this project.
In addition to what Akos mentioned, we have conducted workshops and sessions at CSTA and SIGCSE these past two years in an effort to build awareness among teachers and provide them a sense for this project. We have had a few inbound subsequent inquiries and have shared our (draft) curriculum folders & materials with interested teachers. The hope is to do more concerted teacher PD and engage in more dissemination/training when the curriculum will formally be available on the website by the end of this summer.

Thanks Jan! We are delighted to be working together on this project with one another and with teachers. We have a team of 8 teachers who have worked with us on this project.

We would love to do more teacher PD, but will likely have to apply for funds to scale it to more teachers. 

Thanks, Adelmo. I have just watched your video. Cool project. We had a similar project a few years ago called C2STEM We primarily targeted physics in high school and later created a marine biology unit for middle school. We used a variant of the NetsBlox tool in that project too.  Adding a science related module to CSF is a great idea!

Thanks Adelmo! I look forward to checking out your video as well (it sounds similar to our STEM+C project 'C2STEM' as Akos mentioned).
We also ran a pilot that focused more on climate science and data science with distributed computing ideas (bringing in NOAA datasets to examine ice cores, climate forcings, and coral data). We had a poster at SIGCSE'22 and also have one at the RESPECT'22 conference that focuses on findings of how this interdisciplinary approach impacted students' (mostly girls of color) perceptions of computing and their views of the use of data and interdisciplinary learning.

Thanks Adelmo. We chose these 4 topics because of the relevance of these topics to the newest emerging tech that is impacting the daily lives of students, from social media, to smartphones, to Alexa/Siri/Google assistants, to smart refrigerators, and health applications, and because of the capabilities and experience of our team.

We haven't yet been able to have large groups of students try all 4 modules, and we are developing modules over the years of the project, so we can't yet do comparisons. We are hoping in the coming year to get some preliminary data from courses, but it is likely to be a small sample size because of the low number of teachers (7 in the initial proposal, and not all are in the classroom anymore, but we will work with 8 teachers this summer), and the challenges of getting a new class offered in each school, and the requirement that students take the CS Principles course before this course. In TN, we may have a year-long course with one teacher. In NC, two of our teachers will be able to offer an "Advanced Topics" independent-study style class, which may not get very large enrollments.

Computational modeling for science is a very interesting topic and I think it would be great to have more modules teachers can choose from for their classes.

I'm excited to hear about the possibility of a yearlong course in TN, as that's where I live!  As someone who promotes engineering for us all (e4usa), this is a perfect complement for it.  I think your strategy of getting an official course on the books in as many states as possible will be important so that schools have a way to offer it.  I hope that you will also reach out to the independent schools, perhaps through NCGS and/or NAIS.

Thanks, Stacy. Once we have the pilot "in the bag" we'll definitely do outreach across Tennessee. This is a CTE course, part of the Applied Computing Special Program of Study. I agree that there are synergies with e4usa and students would benefit from taking both courses.

Thanks for watching and your comment, Shiran!
The workshops sounds great! We'd love to participate in discussions with others working on similar ideas (and likely facing similar challenges) - some of our team may be at the AIED conference so there's a chance we could attend. Many thanks for sharing the link and info.

Thank you, Katherine!