Communications of the ACM

versation to describe the educational sites they use and like (and why). A useful site created for teachers by a well-meaning community with few teachers using it is a serious concern.

Leverage real-world CoPs for the vCoP. vCoPs are created from connections and interactions in the real world. These should be leveraged. Schools and districts are offering programs such as Exploring Computer Science (ECS) and Computer Science Principles (CSP); see http://www.ex- ploringcs.org/ for more details about ECS, and http://www.csprinciples.org/ for more details about CSP). Workshops, teacher professional development activities and meetings should foster a sense of community at the local level. Relationships forged through in-person interactions between mentors and teachers, as well as among teachers who are peers, must grow and branch out in the vCoP. Interactions with the vCoP should be embedded into face-to-face professional development activities such as curriculum design. Online discussions for additional inputs from the broader community can create spaces for local discussion groups that form and grow online. The vCoP portal should provide a means for local communities to connect to other groups in the vCoP-at-large.

Produce a toolkit to assist teachers. Teachers need a toolkit to help get computing courses created at their schools. Such a toolkit should include materials that target school administrators (principals, superintendents, school boards, IT directors, and so forth), guidance counselors, students (and their parents), and the community. A toolkit can provide information

Scaling interventions
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ultimately worldwide,
is an enormous
undertaking.

gatschool.org.uk/), supported through the British Computer Society, as an example.b Likewise, the Israeli Ministry of Education is working toward these same goals.

There is hope that computer-based support for CoPs will help. In 2012, NSF awarded a grant to the American Institutes for Research (AIR) to create a Web portal to support a vCoP around NSF-funded projects toward building a community of 10,000 teachers (see http://nsf.gov/awardsearch/ showAward?AWD_ID=1256310 for details). AIR’s Web portal (http://cs10k- community.org) has yet to realize its potential, but the experiment continues. A well-designed website can support and nurture a vCoP if the affor-dances of technology are leveraged for interactivity, participation, and learning; the idea is to replace the coffee pot and water cooler as the site of informal but crucial diffusion of knowledge. 1 The Web portal should:

˲facilitate easy sharing, search, and retrieval of relevant knowledge and resources,

˲ help connect people and provide easy-to-use tools for collaboration, especially around curriculum design,

˲ leverage social tools and data visualization techniques to highlight popular content as well as address burning issues and questions; provide members visibility into the relevant activities and projects, and avenues for active participation,

˲ support curation of content and facilitation of the many activities the vCoP supports,

˲ afford low barriers to sign-up and participation, and provide materials to help newcomers to get started, and

˲ incorporate features to allow busy educators to keep up with—and participate in—ongoing discussions and activity on the site.

The Stanford workshop identified a number of needs:

Get more input from the K– 12 teachers. CoPs should not be created top-down, but bottom-up. Of 60 workshop at-tendees, only three were K– 12 teachers. K– 12 teachers may not know what they want, but they must be in the con- b NSFComputing Education for the 21st Century (CE21); http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2012/ nsf12609/ nsf12609.htm.

tion.a NSF has been concerned both about the sustainability of projects after initial funding as well as the cumulative effects of project successes and failures on other CS10K projects. Mentoring and support are needed, especially for newcomers to the job. Many of these issues have been explored by the CSTA through advocacy and setting of standards and by helping teachers create local CSTA chapters (in the U.S. and Canada) and getting computer science to count as an important part of high school education. CSTA’s efforts in North America are mirrored in many other countries attempting to address issues of teacher preparation and support: see the Computing at School project ( http://www.computin- a Simon Humphrey interview in which he describes teacher-support initiatives CAS; see http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=tsRzcAddWyU#6m58s.