Grant focuses on preparing high school computing teachers for the next millenium

Drs. Matthias Felleisen and Robert "Corky" Cartwright have been awarded a $300,000 grant by the Department of Education (DoEd) for their TeachScheme project, "Reinventing Computing in High School." The grant is part of the DoEd's Fund for Improvement of Secondary Education program. The project is also supported by the National Science Foundation and by the Exxon Foundation.

The TeachScheme project introduces high school teachers to an innovative method of teaching programming and computing. The new course teaches a step-by-step program design method that gently guides students from a problem statement to a full solution. It is ideally suited for schools that wish to teach enduring principles of computation to a broad audience (not just CS majors) and that wish to exploit computer science for teaching principles of algebra.

The project will offer teacher training workshops for 20 to 40 teachers over the next three years. Teachers who attended a trial workshop last August enthusiastically praised the program after testing it in their classrooms.