A beautiful sunset my first night in Spokane.

Trip report: Bridging CS for All across western and eastern Washington

If there’s anything I’ve learned over the past couple years of advocacy around K-12 CS education, change is 5% good idea and 95% community. Good ideas are essential — they help inspire people to make change, they help build community, and they’re essential for effective change. But community is what makes the work happen, especially in a democracy. Community is the coalition that speaks loudly to power, it’s the force that implements change, and, more than people realize, it’s what determines whether an idea is any good.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to build community in Washington state around K-12 CS education. Of course, I wasn’t building from nothing. Long before I started putting effort into it, there were communities of teachers, communities of policy makers, communities of teacher educators, and communities of aspiring teachers. The challenges I’ve faced has been bringing communities together, and doing so across vast geographic divides.

One of those divides is between western and eastern Washington state. It’s not just distance that separates us, but also the Cascade mountain range, and in the winter, quite often a very icy mountain range. Flying is feasible but costly, and video chats really only happen when people already know each other. Building community across two sides of a state generally requires someone to drive or fly around the state for face time.

This past week, that someone was me. I used some of the funding from our Exploring Computing Education Pathways (ECEP) mini-grant my CS for All Washington team raised and spent 3 days in Spokane, Cheney, and Pullman Washington, connecting with some of the most passionate CS and STEM educators in the region, trying to create a trusting relationships across the region that empower us to advocate as an entire state, learn from each other, and shape policy that helps everyone in the state, not just those connected to Olympia, our capital.

My itinerary was packed: I flew to Spokane Wednesday afternoon, got a car, checked into my hotel, joined the 6 pm CSTA Spokane chapter meeting at ESD 101, slept, ate breakfast, met with the faculty leading the new CS pre-service teacher education programs at Whitworth University, got on a call about broadening participation in computing with ECEP’s Sarah Dunton, ate lunch, drove to Cheney, Washington to see Adam Smith teach AP CS, drove to Pullman, Washington, ate, slept, met with CS faculty and PhD students Friday morning, ran a workshop with WSU CS and Education faculty Friday afternoon, went to dinner with Chris Hundhausen, slept, ate, drove back to Spokane, returned my car, and flew to San Diego to meet up with my wife and daughter for a brief weekend vacation.

Phew! Below I catalog some of the highlights (people and food) from this trip.

We met in an ESD 101 meeting room.

CSTA Spokane October Meeting

My first stop was attending the monthly meeting of the CSTA Spokane chapter. I immediately felt welcomed, and the energy in the room was wonderful. There were about 12 of us, including K-12 and higher ed teachers from all around Spokane. The diversity was incredible: some were faculty were at small colleges, teaching a few dozen, others were at larger universities, with classes approaching 100, and many of the teachers shared radically different stories about who they were reaching. There were men, there were women, there were people of color, there were young in age and young at heart. Some were newcomers to the chapter, others had been there since the chapter’s founding in 2013.

The agenda at the meeting was wide ranging. The group welcomed me and I talked about things happening across the state. We talked about local grants that were helping prepare teachers. We had an extensive discussion about what K-12 teachers could do to better prepare students for college computer science, and what higher education needs to do to better support students who aren’t quite prepared for college. Jobs were a central theme in all of the topics, both because many of the teachers were CTE instructors, explicitly charged with preparing students for CS jobs, and because CS is such a central source of jobs. We also talked about the many barriers to inclusion in CS classes, including the need for more meaningful programs in CS classes, the challenges of assessment, the structural barriers of math prerequisites, and the dire need for rigorous CS teacher education. Everyone in the room had a lot to say about everything, but not everyone was as vocal. The higher education faculty, including me, took up a lot of space, which I felt bad about. We’re unfortunately trained to have opinions about everything!

After we ended the meeting around 8 pm, I was starving, since I hadn’t eaten dinner yet. I stopped by a wonderfully hipster burger and microbrew place called Impossiburger & Eggs and got a burger and some onion rings.

The burger was really good, and the onion rings were perfect.

I slept well!

Whitworth University had a cute little campus a few miles from downtown Spokane.

Whitworth’s pre-service program

After a quick bite at the hotel breakfast buffet, and a very tasty latte at Vessel Coffee Roasters during email, I drove north to Whitworth University, to meet some of the pioneering faculty in CS and Education who will be one of the first in the state to launch a pre-service CS teacher education program. Crystal Weddington (directs Educational Certification) and Pete Tucker (CS, Professor, studies data management and security). I came to learn about their plans, including the backstory that led to them, and the challenges they see coming.

I learned of a familiar story of community-driven change. The passionate people in the community worked hard to connect with each other, identifying the need for well prepared teachers. This included reaching out to administrators in K-12 schools, as well as administrators at Whitworth. After a few years, the leadership in Whitworth’s School of Education was championing CS teacher certification, which ultimately led to the proposal to do a pre-service program.

Because the state’s CS endorsement is only an exam, it leaves a lot of flexibility for colleges and universities to prepare teachers however they see fit. Within this flexibility, Whitworth will be encouraging their current education students, undergrad and masters, to take courses in the CS minor for content knowledge, and to take a new CS teaching methods course, which Pete Tucker has already been teaching to interested CS majors. They expect to attract a lot of CS majors to the course, but will work hard with their advisors to encourage their Education majors to take CS courses, and pursue the endorsement.

We discussed several of the challenges with that model, including the difficulty of persuading education students to take CS classes, the issues with the CS endorsement not providing schools with the enhanced funding that comes with CTE endorsement in our state, and the difficulty of finding field placements for pre-service students when there are so few CS teachers ready to mentor new teachers. Despite all of these challenges, Crystal, Pete, and the rest of the faculty involved are pushing forward to see how successful they can make it.

Is Spokane just full of nice people or was I a damsel in distress?

Errands in Spokane

After Whitworth I had a few errands. First, my rental car had low tire pressure, so I had to go find a gas station to refill it. I didn’t have any quarters, or cash, and the gas station didn’t give cash back, so I was stuck with two rear near flats. But a nice older man overheard my plight and ran to his car to give me 4 quarters. But then he was a bit too helpful: he offered to help me fill the air in the tires and he waited around to make sure everything was okay. In my head, I was thinking, is Spokane just full of really nice people or this guy just being creepy? Then I realized: this is how people treat women who have a problem to solve (i.e., as helpless). As a trans woman, I felt affirmed that I’d passed well enough to trigger the kindness of this nice old man, but as a feminist, I felt annoyed that he thought I couldn’t pump air in my tires. And then my mind went wild with what he might do if he knew I was trans, or whether he did know I was trans. Being trans is weird.

Downtown was beautiful, especially under the shimmering, sunny clouds.

I headed downtown, and pulled over on a side street for a quick conference call with ECEP’s Sarah Dunton about broadening participation in computing, We chatted about an idea I’d shared on a previous call about finding ways of curating stories from teachers and students that reveal successes and failures in equity. We had a great brainstorming session, thinking about ways to gather these stories, ways to use them to advocate to politicians and education leaders, and how to leverage CSTA chapters to capture them.

After my call, I finished my drive to downtown, in anticipation of some tasty tacos at Cochinito Taqueria, but it was inexplicably closed. I went around the corner and had some hearty ramen at Nudo instead, perfect for a chilly dry day.

Food in Spokane is good and cheap relative to Seattle prices! That’s a ginger beer, by the way.

Adam Smith’s AP CS A Class

After lunch, I took a short drive to Cheney, WA, a suburb of Spokane, to visit CSTA Spokane chapter president Adam Smith’s AP CS A class. While I’ve taught high school students summer classes, I haven’t taught in a high school, and so I was excited to richly observe Adam, his students, and the computer lab in which he taught. It was more enlightening that I’d dreamed. I met Adam at the front desk 10 minutes before his class, and he was doing what all of America’s overworked teachers do: multitask, madly. He was trying to solve a CTE credit problem between passing periods, he was making photocopies of an activity he was about to run, he was stopping and chatting with staff and teachers to problem solve other issues. We zipped through the maze of the school, made worse by the overwhelming construction in the school, until we finally made it to his classroom 1 minute before class.

He introduced me, I introduced myself some more, and I answered a few questions. Students wondered why I was visiting and I told them about the state legislature, and it’s need for people with on ground experience to share what’s needed in state law and state budget. They wondered about college admissions and whether taking a CS class really matters for getting into a CS program. I said it did.

Eventually, Adam got to his lesson, which covered Java classes, objects, and constructors, using the Greenfoot platform. Adam had taken a chapter from a textbook and translated into a discovery learning worksheet, helping students walk through an example, manipulate it, and try to explain to themselves how it was working. The lesson worked pretty well as designed, but his frozen Windows desktop, the constantly hanging Greenfoot, the inevitable random defects that students introduced, and the constant deviations by some students with significant prior programming knowledge constantly interrupted the lesson. That, and there were at least 15 of the students were silent the whole time, screens out of sync with the lesson, but also out of view of the teacher. Teaching CS is hard folks!

Adam teaching Java constructors. Heavy cropping for anonymization.

The drive to Pullman, Washington

After thanking Adam for the visit, I began my short road trip to Pullman, which was about 70 miles south east of Cheney. The drive was sunny and beautiful. For the beginning of the trip, I was stuck behind a slow school bus, apparently driving some students from Cheney to neighboring towns 20 miles away.

The kids in the back were bored and stared at me tailing the bus while dangerously taking this picture.

I’d occasionally pull over on the side of the road to photograph some natural beauty, or marvel at the massive field robotics scattering the landscape. The urbanist in me felt simultaneously very isolated but rich with agricultural commerce.

I snapped this photo on the side of the road before the dust came.

Eventually I arrived in Pullman, home to the flagship campus of Washington State University. Of course, as soon as I entered city limits, Pullman made sure I knew I was in Cougar country.

This immediately brought back memories of living in my small college town of Corvallis, Oregon, home to the beavers. Go beavs!

After checking in to my hotel, I grabbed a quick pizza at Porch Light Pizza. The place was full of hungry costumed undergrads celebrating Halloween, self-conscious about their fairy wings, simulated blood, and busty tops, and the freezing temperatures they were about to endure outside.

Porch Light Pizza, much like a MOD Pizza.

After my dinner, I raced to the top of the golf course at the top of the hill for a quick photo of sunset overlooking Pullman.

The view up the hill from my hotel was hard to beat. Yes, that’s the football stadium.

The front of the CS department, nestled between other engineering units.

WSU CS

After an early morning walk down the hill for an email, coffee, and pastry session at Roost Coffee & Market, I found my way to the CS department. I wasn’t there for a full all day visit, but a targeted one, hoping to develop CS for All advocates.

I first met with junior colleague Venera Arnaoudova about empirical software engineering, junior faculty life at WSU CS, tenure and promotion advice, and my post tenure pivot to CS education. It turned out that she’d actually been responsible for designing the department’s fascinating software engineering degrees, one of which engages remote students in Everett, just north of Seattle. We talked a lot about software engineering education, it’s strange disconnects from the rest of computer science education, and the odd ideas that CS students get about what constitutes good program design. We talked about all the ways that she might use the privilege of tenure, and I encouraged her to think about broadening participation in CS, which she had already started to do somewhat.

I then had an extended conversation with my long time colleague Chris Hundausen about CS education research, the differences between conferences and journals, the background behind my trip to eastern Washington, and the role he and his collaborator Olusola Adesope could play in helping catalyze CS teacher education at WSU. We talked a lot about how rare it is, at least in CS, to find faculty who really focus aggressively on impact in their research. I shared with him the many wonderful synergies I’ve found by focusing on impact between my research, teaching, and service.

After meeting with Chris, I met with his PhD student, Carla Marcela De Lira, who is doing some fascinating work on the role of emotions in CS education: their impact, and opportunities for revealing emotions to instructors, to help develop awareness about the inequitable conditions in which students are learning. Carla took me to lunch down the hill at Zoe Coffee & Kitchen, where we talked about scoping research projects, thriving in CS with a marginalized identity, and how to convince CS teachers to try to educational technologies.

A common area between classrooms and meeting rooms.

A CS for All workshop for WSU faculty

After a quick lunch, Carla and I walked up to the state-of-the-art Spark building, which is full of amazingly architected collaborative learning spaces. I was very jealous. WSU staff had reserved a small collaborative room with well-integrated remote meeting equipment for our workshop, with a large screen and a very comfy couch.

The purpose of the meeting was to bring together faculty and PhD students from WSU Pullman, WSU Tri-Cities, and WSU Vancouver together in a single synchronous meeting for 3 hours to discuss how computing is reshaping industry and K-12 education, and how this demands many changes to higher education. The roughly 30 attendees varied wildly, including faculty from across the three campus’s Colleges of Education, faculty from CS departments, and faculty from science and mathematics interested in the relationship between computing and their discipline.

The Pullman group was the smallest.

Our organizing team had prepared a three part 3-hour workshop:

• In the first hour, we engaged the three sites around questions about what computing is, what it’s relationship to other disciplines are. Definitions of computing varied wildly between CS faculty and Education faculty, ranging from general creative thinking and problem solving, to using computers, to more narrow definitions about devising algorithms and data structures to solve problems. While there were many divergent views on computing, there was more agreement that whatever it is, it is changing everything, and K-12 and higher education should rapidly respond.
• In the second hour, we informed, educating the faculty about changes to state law and the impact of these laws on CS teacher education and CS departments. Faculty raised many concerns about new barriers the laws might introduce, and new programs the laws would require.
• In the third and final hour, we engaged the three sites in planning. The first asked faculty to reflect on how computing is changing the careers their students pursue; there was broad agreement that computing might transform the roles of education graduates of all kinds, not just teachers: administrative leaders need computing knowledge and policy makers need computing knowledge. The second brainstorming session asked faculty to brainstorm what would happen if the state was successful in getting all youth to learn about computing; there were utopian visions in which all youth pursue college and find ways of bringing their interest in computing to all disciplines, and dystopian visions in which poor execution in K-12 leads most youth to be disinterested in computing, eroding the role of computing in society. The faculty generated ideas about pre-service programs that would ensure high quality CS teaching. The third session concerned WSU’s university learning objectives, and how computing might connect to them.

While I don’t think any of the attendees left the meeting with pre-service CS teacher education programs as their top priority, I do think that everyone left with a lot to ponder about their role in responding to the massive change K-12 computing could bring to higher education. It’s impossible to predict what long term impact it had, but I’m quite certain that every attendee met new people on their campus and on the other campus.

Chris and Angela took me to Maialina, a wonderful italian restaurant in Moscow, Idaho.

Dinner with Chris

My last event was a dinner with Chris Hundhausen and his wife. It was a great chance to unwind from the whirlwind three days, enjoy a great meal. We talked about PhD recruiting, CS teacher preparation, the new airport runway in Pullman, the subtle differences between Pullman and Moscow, and the challenges of managing peer review processes. I also learned a lot from Angela about civil engineering! It was great to catch up with an old friend, and learn all about his chosen home along the border of Washington and Idaho.

Another beautiful shot of the Spokane sunshine on the way to the airport home.

Morning reflections

My goal for the trip was to connect. And connect I did: I met dozens of people across the region, all of whom have a drive to bring powerful ideas in CS to youth across eastern Washington. I hope that by visiting, they’ll not only be more likely to share their activities with me, but also a bit more likely to respond to emails, more willing to get on a video chat, and more motivated to collaborate with me and our CS for All Washington advocacy team on statewide activities like policy change. While I can’t predict the specific impacts this will have on our efforts, I’m confident that we’ve built a lot trust a bit more community. Thanks to everyone for hosting!