Change the future

Developing an Early College IT/CS/Math Program Using Python

Jeffrey Elkner, Isaac Zawolo, Kevin Reed

Audience level:
Novice
Category:
Education

Description

This poster will present a summary of lessons learned and best practices developed for teaching programming and web development suffused with mathematics in a dual enrollment curriculum with non-traditional programming students.

Abstract

For the past three years two high school teachers with Arlington Public Schools, Arlington, Virginia have been working with a professor at Northern Virginia Community College to develop an integrated mathematics and software development curriculum for dual enrolled high school students -- earning high school and community college credit at the same time.

The focus of this program has been on non-traditional programming students - women, minorities, and non-native speakers of English. The poster will outline recruitment, assessment, and retention methods used with this emerging population.

The poster will further describe the project based instruction and competency based evaluation approaches that have been most successful in bringing these students into the software development community.

Finally, the poster will describe the extensive use of Python both as a teaching language and a tool for curriculum development.

Sponsors