This past Saturday, the Puget Sound region Spring CSTA high school programming competition was hosted by Amazon.com – following the Winter competition, hosted at the University of Washington.
Andy Davidson, the computer science instructor at Roosevelt High School, says:
It’s instructive to look at the list of winners this year and see how many of their teachers got their CS pedagogical training from the UW CSE program:
For the past two years, the computer science instructor at Garfield HS was Hélène Martin, a UW CSE Bachelors alumna, now returned to UW CSE as an introductory course instructor and high school outreach coordinator.
Hélène was succeeded at Garfield by Earl Bergquist. Earl participated in our Google-sponsored CS4HS summer workshop for high school teachers, interned under Andy Davidson at Roosevelt HS during the 2010-11 school year, and uses UW introductory course materials for his AP course.
Andy Davidson – the computer science instructor at Roosevelt HS for the past several years – participated in CS4HS, worked closely with Hélène when she was at Garfield, took UW CSE’s introductory courses, and uses UW introductory course materials for his AP course. Andy says:
Having received my CS education back in the last millennium, well before the advent of object-oriented programming, being asked to teach the Java-based AP CS course presented a learning opportunity/necessity. My solution was to take UW’s CSE 142 & 143 courses with Stuart Reges. So I learned nearly everything I know about Java, and teaching Java effectively, from Stuart and his colleagues Marty Stepp and Hélène Martin, and their fleet of excellent teaching assistants. With their continuing support, I have modeled my high school AP Computer Science course directly on their work. I’d just like to acknowledge the incredible contribution that CSE has made to teaching CS in the Seattle Public School district.
At Lakeside School – Seattle’s premier independent school – the computer science instructor is UW CSE Ph.D. alumna Lauren Bricker, a close collaborator of Hélène’s, who also uses UW CSE introductory course materials.
At Issaquah high school, Brett Wortzman is the computer science instructor: Brett has been both a teaching assistant and an instructor in UW CSE’s introductory computer science courses.
Crystal Hess, the computer science instructor at Tahoma high school, is the principal organizer of the CSTA programming competitions.
Congratulations to these superb teachers and their superb students!!
See the results of the spring competition here.