The Impact of AP Computer Science Principles: Are You Ready to Change Your Undergraduate Courses?

1.SUMMARY In the last few years, there has been a groundswell of programs to support more and better computer science (CS) education in K-12. A large number of organizations and institutions including ACM, Code.org, CSTA and the National Science Foundation (NSF) have worked to make CS more available and engaging and in this way increase the CS into post-secondary CS programs. NSF's CS10K initiative, for example, aimed to “have rigorous, academic curricula incorporated into computing courses in 10,000 high schools, taught by 10,000 well-trained teachers” [3]. These initiatives have energized the education world and have resulted in sweeping changes in the way that computing is being taught at in K-12. Examples include the College Board’s CS Principles Course [1], the Beauty and Joy of Computing [2,4], UTeach CS Principles [5, 41], and Mobile CSP [6, 7].