Communications of the ACM

Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications, we’ll publish selected posts or excerpts.

portance of an organization like CSTA to change the world. The work of CSTA addresses core challenges for the future:

˲ How will we ensure all students are prepared to be citizens and workers in a different world than we knew in the past?

˲ How do we retrain adult workers, in this case education workers (teachers), to be ready for a rapidly changing world?

By working collaboratively, we can solve these challenges. Over the past two years, I saw the pathway to addressing these challenges within CSTA come together in a pair of initiatives: The Big IDEA and the PD Pipeline.

What Is the Big IDEA?

Building upon CSTA’s historical inter-
est in equity in CS, we began to change
our language around equity. In 2015,
our equity work focused mainly on a pro-
gram with declining participation called
“faces of computing,” where students
created videos to showcase some of the
diversity within CS. In evaluating the
program and looking at other successful
initiatives, we recognized that focus on
equity alone is insufficient to achieve eq-
uitable outcomes. Thus, we created the
Big IDEA as an umbrella for our current
and future initiatives in this area.

IDEA stands for Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access. While not the first group to utilize this acronym, the Big IDEA fit well within the needs of our community. By focusing almost exclusively in equity, we heard from many teachers that they did not feel included in the conversation because they identified themselves as “teachers of CS” rather than “CS teachers.” That realization uncovered the diversity of perspectives that exist within our membership—which consists of nearly every teaching domain in K–12, and teachers who both come from and work with exceptionally diverse student populations. To achieve CS for All students, we realized the Big IDEA would be a more effective, holistic approach for focusing our efforts and building engagement in our community.

There is still much work to do. Take, for example, the challenges of accessibility in the context of disabilities. People with disabilities represent an estimated 15% of the world population. Designing for this group of learners can be challenging because disability is not a single construct. It can include physical challenges (related to areas such as vision, hearing, and mobility) as well as cognitive impairments (such as challenges related to reading, memory, and attention deficits).

Accessibility has implications for CS in education beyond the important category of children with disabilities. Accessibility challenges exist by race, gender, geography, community urbanization,

Mark R. Nelson CSTA: Computer Science Education, Equity, and the Future Workforce http://bit.ly/2hGMSlt August 8, 2017

In 2015, when considering whether to apply for the position of executive director for the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA), I read the book Stuck in the Shallow End by Jane Mar-golis ( http://bit.ly/2zcEZeP). Computer science (CS) remains one of the least diverse of the STEM disciplines, and Mar-golis’ book opened with a compelling comparison between the racial divide in swimming and the divide we see today in CS. Understanding that teachers are critical to access, and how we teach can influence what field students might pursue, I saw that within CSTA there was opportunity to make a positive difference in the world.

Fast-forward to 2017, and thanks to Stephen Ibaraki, I had the opportunity to participate in the AI for Good Summit held in Geneva, Switzerland (http:// bit.ly/2h494Xi). The Summit crystalized for me the scope, magnitude, and im-