Opportunities

We were able to be a part of this because we were using code.org for our AP CSP course.

They provided swag for our students, in the form of stickers, lanyards, etc. Teacher swag too!

We were able to have a virtual meeting with just our class and an Amazon computer engineer, who spent a lot of time talking to us about his career journey. He was encouraging and emphasized the multitude of paths and options available to computer science students.

Lots of virtual field trip and scholarship options.

We tried our first one this year, sponsored by duPont Manual High School's TSA program, headed up by Laura Moore (laura.moore@jefferson.kyschools.us)

• Set up to mimic the state TSA challenges that will happen later this spring

• Accommodated both advanced and absolute noob students

• Held in person, but also had a virtual option

• Such a great way to up the stakes for coding/cybersecurity/engineering students

• Inexpensive ($15/student)

For those in northern Kentucky, the Tech Olympics are a possibility. Our plans fell through to participate this year, but they are the nation's largest youth-run tech event. It's an entire conference as well as a hackathon and looks amazing.

We used a lot of our Perkins grant money to fund a few field trips. Our goal was to help make our CS students more aware of both educational and professional opportunities available for them to pursue that they might not be seeing in our small, rural community.

We first visited the U of L campus. They arranged for a presentation about all of their CS and engineering opportunities, a faculty speaker, and a panel of current students to interact with our students, as well as a tour. Fantastic!

• Contact: Yeimy Piña-Perez Assistant Director of Outreach J.B. Speed School of Engineering yeimy.pina-perez@louisville.edu

We also went to Eastern Kentucky University. We scheduled time in their virtual reality flight lab. They arranged for both students and faculty to talk to us. They have lots of CS options our students enjoyed hearing about. We also worked in a trip to Countdown Games as we drove home through Lexington. All of their experiences are designed, coded, and built in-house. Super impressive, as well as crazy fun.

It is now required to have a CSTO at your school if you have a CTE pathway at your school in order to receive Perkins Grant funding. Career & Technical Student Organizations (CTSOs) are non-profit career-based groups that offer co-curricular resources and opportunities for students in CTE pathways to develop knowledge and skills by participating in activities, events and competitions. Since we opened a computer science pathway, we were required to have a CSTO.

TSA is not the only option, but I believe it's the most popular, and it's the only one we have experience with.

Our Kentucky TSA is really well-managed and has some awesome competitions that are above and beyond what is available at the national level. Our contact for Kentucky TSA is Mark Harrell, who is the state TSA advisor, as well as the Engineering Technology Consultant at the Kentucky Department of Education within the Office of Career and Technical Education. (mark.harrell@education.ky.gov)

There are tons of natural connections between STLP competitions and things our CS students are doing anyway

• Middle school PLTW students already had huge block code projects completed that were exactly what they needed to apply for the STLP Block Code Crew. It just took them a few minutes to make and upload a video explaining how their code worked to apply for that position at State STLP.

• AP Computer Science Principles students were also able to easily convert some of their project code into an application for Block Code Crew--which is an awesome way to get them some props for what they're doing anyway.

• Other categories that easily supported our CS activities:

  • Service Team: Engineers

  • Coding Challenge

  • Quick Tech Recall

  • Web Build Challenge: Design

  • Web Build Challenge: Coding

  • Georgetown College Robot Use

  • Help Desk Support Challenge

  • NKU App Design Challenge

  • Sphero Hero

  • Game Design Challenge