For the past seven years, a small but dedicated and growing group of people within CPS have been advocating for the district to understand the importance of computer science education. As the result of their tireless efforts, CS and IT education grew across the district beginning at the high school level and the impact on those initial students’ lives has been remarkable. CPS first emerged as a national leader when it partnered with the like-minded CS innovators in Los Angeles to adapt its paradigm shifting curriculum Exploring Computer Science.
As our work became an example for others to follow, CPS was approached almost 3 years ago by the newly formed computer science education accelerator, Code.org, to provide help to expand this work. As a result, over 460 new teachers have received professional development and as of school year 2015-16, computer science coursework is available in over 107 schools and counting. Our goal has been to offer a variety of strategies to integrate project- and problem-based modules into our students’ highly-interactive learning environments, beginning as early as kindergarten. By integrating computer science lessons into elementary school, adding computer science to middle school math and science classrooms in a meaningful way, and teaching the introductory Exploring Computer Science curriculum in high schools, we have piloted a scaffolded approach to not only introduce computational education at every level, but to also help our students understand the integrative nature of computational concepts.