The College of Charleston is offering a unique, computational experience for 40 high school teachers with support from Google Inc.  

The CS4HS (Computer Science For High Schools) is a three-day workshop offered by the Computer Science Department at the College of Charleston.  Supported by Google, the workshop will provide educators with resources and ideas to help them introduce the principles of computer science to young people in a fun and relevant way.

“Our goal is to create an immersive opportunity so that teachers will experience an epiphany with computing and computational thinking. Our national leadership in technology is dependent on getting all high school students to understand what computation is all about, from Facebook to their Android phones. Computational thinking can even have a significant impact in all areas of study and practice in the next generation. Google gets it, and so does the College of Charleston.” says Chris Starr, Computer Science Department Chairman at the College of Charleston.

In recent years, there has been a nationwide declining interest in computer science among high school students. With some experts projecting the addition of 1.5 million computer and information technology jobs to the U.S. workforce by 2012, the results of this trend could prove catastrophic to our nation’s technological leadership and economic infrastructure.

This program addresses this critical decline in interest in computer science at the high school level by working on classroom solutions that will result in a reversal of this trend.

“The good news is that much of students’ lack of interest is due to easily-corrected misconceptions about what computer science really is and what kinds of employment opportunities it can provide,” says Starr.

Forty teachers from across the southeast will participate in this workshop starting June 13, 2010.

More than 20 colleges and universities are hosting CS4HS workshops this year, supported by Google as well as several other companies and organizations. They include College of Charleston, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, RIT, Berkeley, UCLA and UT Austin.