Speakers from GATech, Bryn Mawr, and a couple of other schools spoke about their efforts to improve intro CS curriculum. The general push is to teach by giving examples rather than explicitly introducing concepts. Instead of teaching, for example, iteration, you teach image manipulation and students discover that iteration is necessary. Everyone reports great success with these ideas and it seems to be helping retention, overall.
The Bryn Mawr idea seemed the most novel. They use a "personal robot"; students starting in CS1 buy a $100 robot that is theirs for the duration of the program. The robot has been (is being?) designed to support the curriculum, not the other way around. The general idea is to give the students tasks that the robot must perform and allow them to "discover" fundamental CS topics such as recursion as opposed to giving them the concepts and asking them to apply them. There wasn't a lot of specific discussion about how well this works and when/if it doesn't work.
GATech also uses Python in CS1 and Java in CS2. They say they were surprised that students often love Java after Python.
There is a lot of talk about pair programming and team learning. One woman reported that she often has students work together on code and then write their solutions on the board. She said this has an interesting side effect that women tend to be more involved because the male students quickly hand over the pens citing poor penmanship.
Maria Klawe gave a keynote and spoke about a lot of the issues that came up at our retreat.
One of the ideas she is most excited about is a "digital pre-med" major that combines techology and medicine. She thinks this is likely to be really important in the future and a good way to recruit new majors.
She mentioned that when she was at UBC they did a couple of things that she found successful. First, she said they tried to make it easy for students to transfer from Bio to CS (I'm not sure how I feel about this). She also said they convinced the deans to recommend students take intro CS in the catalogue. She said that this meant more women in CS since women seemed more likely to read the catalogue and follow its recommendations.
She also talked about the importance of making intro CS exciting and interesting. At Mudd, they have also modified intro CS (though, she didn't say how) and lots of students report it is their favorite class. These are CS and non-CS students since intro CS is generally required at Mudd.
A post-frosh research experience seems to be effective. The idea is to offer students a summer research experience on campus between their freshman and sophomore year. This gives students confidence and helps retention. (The NSF also funds REU Sites that could partially serve this purpose.)
Outreach came up in a number of sessions. There seems to be some agreement that outreach intended to pull students (women) into CS needs to happen in middle school or earlier. There seems to be some push to run camps for parents and teachers rather than students. Maria Klawe said that she thinks it is effective to get invited to talk about something other than CS and then slip in CS-related material as a small part of the talk. Many people report success working with the girl scouts.
Coverage of funding options was disappointing at best. There was a lot of talk of NSF options. With respect to corporate funding, the consensus was that you really have to know someone on the inside. One panelist was an administrator and said that the department budget (at UIUC, I think) included her position.
I talked a bit with Flo Appel from Saint Xavier in Chicago. She told me a bit about their experience developing a new major for students who are interested in tech but don't want to do the full CS major. There are many elements of their experience that don't apply to us. But, I wonder if we would see some of the same outcomes (e.g., increased enrollment).
They originally started the major largely in response to declining enrollments. They wanted to target adult students and the curriculum is targeted toward pretty applied kinds of things (so, they seem more interested in training say sysadmins rather than graphic artists). However, what they found was that the major was attracting lots of traditional (non-adult) students who might otherwise have majored in business or something. She said there are a few students who have chosen the Studies major who really should have chosen the Science major, but indicated that it is largely students who would have otherwise majored in something else.
I talked with a number of students from Virginia Tech who run the women in CS organization there. They said that one of the most popular activities they run is a computer bashing day where people can bring their old hardware and go at it with bats. It might be interesting to organize something similar to increase visibility.