SIGCSE Board Endorses AP Effort
SIGCSE Board Endorses AP Effort
The SIGCSE board encourages SIGCSE members to learn about the new AP
effort at http://csprinciples.org and to explore the details of the
effort and offer their attestation at
http://www.collegeboard.com/html/computerscience/index.html.
Why?
The enrollment of students studying computing today is dramatically
lower than needed to drive our information society. Current
undergraduate computing enrollment is less than 50% of what’s needed to
meet the expected computing jobs in the United States according to the
US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Computing is critical to innovation in
today’s economy as the Rising Above the Gathering Storm report
describes, but we have too few students learning computing to support
innovation. We have an enormous need for more and more diverse students
to meet the growing computing needs of our 21st century economy.
A key part of the problem is the lack of good and broadly accessible computing education at the primary and secondary school level. Research suggests that students emerge from high school without really understanding what computer science is. No wonder that students don’t choose to pursue studies in the discipline! We desperately need good computer science education available in many schools.
The ACM’s Special Interest Group for Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) is fully supportive of the efforts of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the College Board to develop, pilot, and deploy a new Advanced Placement exam, Computer Science: Principles. We agree with the goal to create a new AP exam that attracts a diverse range of students and introduces important computer science concepts, beyond the basic syntactic and semantic structures of a programming language. We are pleased to hear that the development methodology is based on the National Research Council’s framework to avoid the “mile wide and inch deep” problem of classes that have too much content and no real depth. We are confident that the resulting curriculum will meet the desired aims.
Thank you very much.
Renée McCauley
SIGCSE Chair
About SIGCSE
The aim of SIGCSE is to provide an equitable global forum that promotes and advances research, teaching, and practice in computing education at all educational levels across all demographics
Upcoming SIGCSE Events
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ITiCSE 2024
8-10 July 2024 (WG: 5-7 July)
Milan, Italy -
ICER '24
13-15 August 2024
RMIT, Melbourne, Australia -
SIGCSE Virtual 2024
05-07 December 2024
Online -
Technical Symposium 2025
Feb-26 to Mar-01, 2025
Pittsburgh, PA -
RESPECT 2025
To be announced -
CompEd 2025
23-25 October 2025
Gaborone, Botswana -
Many conferences across the world are held in-cooperation with SIGCSE.