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Education
Building a Virtual
Community of Practice
for K– 12 CS Teachers
Bringing educators together and focusing their interests
toward improving computer science education in high schools.
Building a Virtual Community of Practice: A Report from a Working Meeting
in Support of the CS10K Community, is
available from the ACM Digital Library.
This Viewpoint explores some of the
ideas raised in this workshop.
The U.S. National Science Founda-
tion supports local efforts to improve
CS teaching in high school as part of
the CS10K track of its CE21 solicita-
CoPs are events, leadership, connec-
tivity, membership, learning projects,
and artifacts. This idea was extended
to include Legitimate Peripheral Par-
ticipation, showing how newcomers
join, belong, and learn. Brown and
Duguid1 provided lessons and ideas
for successfully creating, organiz-
ing, and growing communities and
the shared social knowledge among
them. Virtual CoPs, or vCoPs, have
been proposed for computer science
as possible teacher/community sup-
port mechanisms at both the college7
and K–125, 6 levels, including as part
of a U.S. effort to place 10,000 quali-
fied computer science teachers into
high schools.
2 This effort has become
known as the CS10K project.
Improving high school education
in computing has the support of many
organizations: the National Science
Foundation, ACM, Apple, Google, Microsoft, the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA), Code.org, and
many higher education institutions.
Teachers will need assistance to intro-
duce computing to learners in K–12:
high-quality curricula, professional
development, local administrative
support, state standards, state certifi-
cations, and other teachers with whom
they can interact. How a vCoP of com-
puting teachers might be successfully
grown was explored by a group of re-
searchers at an NSF-funded workshop
at Stanford University in November,
2013. This workshop’s final report,
DOI: 10.1145/2594456
Participants in a CS10K project workshop at the University of Delaware.
