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This study compares the characteristics and professional development (PD) experiences between teachers who began teaching Exploring Computer Science before and after the enactment of a CS graduation requirement in the Chicago Public Schools. The post-requirement teachers were less likely to have a CS background, but their experience in the ECS PD and their level of confidence at the end of the PD were equivalent to the early adopters. 

Prior research has shown that students pursuing Exploring Computer Science (ECS) as their first elective course were more likely to pursue another computer science course in high school, as compared to students who took a traditional course as the first course. This study investigated whether the results are consistent when students are pursuing ECS to fulfill the Chicago Public Schools' graduation requirement. ECS is designed to foster deep engagement through equitable inquiry around computer science concepts. It is hypothesized that students who are fulfilling a graduation requirement will pursue additional computer science coursework at rates similar to students who were pursuing ECS as an elective course. 

This paper shows how students can be guided to integrate elementary mathematical analyses with motion planning for typical educational robots. Rather than using calculus as in comprehensive works on motion planning, we show students can achieve interesting results using just simple linear regression tools and trigonometric analyses. Experiments with one robotics platform show that use of these tools can lead to passable navigation through dead reckoning even if students have limited experience with use of sensors, programming, and mathematics. 

This Innovative Practice Work in Progress presents progress in developing exercises for high school students incorporating level-appropriate mathematics into robotics activities. We assume mathematical foundations ranging from algebra to precalculus, whereas most prior work on integrating mathematics into robotics uses only very elementary mathematical reasoning or, at the other extreme, is comprised of technical papers or books using calculus and other advanced mathematics. The exercises suggested are relevant to any differential-drive robot, which is an appropriate model for many different varieties of educational robots. They guide students towards comparing a variety of natural navigational strategies making use of typical movement primitives. The exercises align with Common Core State Standards for Mathematics. 

This paper points students towards ideas they can use towards developing a convenient library for robot navigation, with examples based on Botball primitives, and points educators towards mathematics and programming exercises they can suggest to students, especially advanced high school students. 

A key strategy for broadening CS participation in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) has been the enactment of a high school CS graduation requirement. The Exploring Computer Science (ECS) curriculum and professional development (PD) program serve as a core foundation for supporting enactment of this policy. The CAFECS researcher-practitioner partnership provides support for ECS implementation in CPS. An important part of the sustainability of the ECS PD model in CPS is the development of local workshop facilitators. Potential facilitators have generally been selected based on the CAFECS team's personal familiarity with active ECS teachers. Once selected, teachers engage in a two-year apprenticeship program to become facilitators. However, in the three years since the enactment of the policy, the number of ECS teachers and students has grown significantly. This rapid expansion of the CS teaching force has strained the ability to confidently identify new facilitators from a large pool of teachers and ensure consistency of workshop implementation. As a result, CAFECS is exploring how to supplement the ECS Facilitator Development Model through a proactive recruitment model and explicit support for the mentoring process. 

This study investigated patterns in the development of computational thinking and programming expertise in the context of the Exploring Computer Science (ECS) program, a high school introductory CS course and professional development program designed to foster deep engagement through equitable inquiry around CS concepts. Prior research on programming expertise has identified three general areas of development — program comprehension, program planning, and program generation. The pedagogical practices in ECS are consistent with problem solving approaches that support the development of programming expertise. The study took place in a large urban district during the 2016–17 school year with 28 ECS teachers and 1,931 students. A validated external assessment was used to measure the development of programming expertise. The results indicate that there were medium-sized, statistically significant increases from pretest to posttest, and there were no statistically significant differences by gender or race/ethnicity. After controlling for prior academic achievement, performance in the ECS course correlated with performance on the posttest. With respect to specific programming concepts, the results also provide evidence on the progression of the development of programming expertise. Students seem to develop comprehension and planning expertise prior to expertise in program generation. In addition, students seem to develop expertise with concrete tasks prior to abstract tasks. 

This special session explores the use of magic tricks based on computer science ideas; magic tricks help grab students' attention and can motivate them to invest more deeply in underlying CS concepts. Error detection ideas long used by computer scientists provide a particularly rich basis for working such ``magic'', with a CS Unplugged parity check activity being a notable example. Prior work has shown that one can perform much more sophisticated tricks than the relatively well-known CS Unplugged activity, and these tricks can motivate analyses across a wide variety of computer science concepts and are relevant to learning objectives across grade levels from 2nd grade through graduate school. These tricks have piqued the interest of past audiences and have been performed with the aid of online implementations; this conference session will demonstrate enhanced implementations used to illuminate the underlying concepts rather than just to perform the tricks. The audience will participate in puzzling out how to apply relevant concepts as we work through a scaffolded series of tricks centering on error detection and correction. The implementations also provide a useful model for incorporating greater interaction than is typically found in current innovative online interactive textbooks. In addition, they are samples for possible programming assignments that can motivate students using CS Unplugged activities to actively pursue deep programming experiences.