Designing a Computer Science Course for Girls

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​Building a course from scratch is a ton of work and the process of designing and teaching a computer science course for girls took about a year and a half.  When I started my position as Curriculum Integration Specialist at Saint Mary’s School, an all-girls school, I knew I would primarily be focused on supporting the faculty and staff.  However, I have always tried to keep my hand in teaching in the communities I serve as I feel it gives me the experience and perspective, I need to support faculty.  I also have a genuine passion for innovative teaching and designing this course provided the perfect opportunity.  From a needs analysis, there were no computer science or technology courses being offered at the school and creating a safe, focused space, where girls who are gravely underrepresented in Computer Science, seemed like an important endeavor for me. I also hoped to push the envelope of teaching with this course making it a hybrid project-based learning course utilizing Canvas LMS.  During this time, I was in the process of implementing Canvas schoolwide and having a class that could showcase how to expand classroom teaching with a learning management system was one of my hopes for this class. 
 
I had to go through a course proposal process and then was tasked with figuring out how to best design the course.  I decided to enroll in a 6-month long professional development opportunity offered by Online School for Girls that provided participants an opportunity to design a program that would help girls thrive.  I based my course off of the AP Computer Science Principles Course which was just gaining ground as new course being offered by the College Board.  It was centered around the Five Big Ideas:  Creative Development, Data, Algorithms and Programming, Computer Systems and Networks and the Impact of Computing.   It also used the Computational Thinking Practices:  Computational Thinking Design, Algorithms and Programming, Abstraction in Programming, Code Analysis, Computing Innovations, and Responsible Computing.  It appealed to me because it was more holistic in nature than many CS courses and lent itself to diverse pathways of mastery that allowed for freedom in curriculum design and a real-world project-based focus.
 
Researching and designing the curriculum was the fun part.  There was a plethora of engaging activities and programs that worked well for the course and it was a matter of crafting lessons and curating content that would be of interest to girls and designing projects that required students to wrestle with real world problems.  It was also important for girls to see themselves in Computer Science fields and emphasis was made to highlight successful women in those fields.
 
I had a small yet diverse group of Juniors and Seniors who took the course. I built the course in the Canvas LMS and utilized the rubric capabilities of Canvas to role out the use of this feature at our school as utilizing rubrics was an important school goal.  It was the school's first blended learning course as well.  The students met with me two days a week and then completed work independently in Canvas on the other days. My students learned important computer science principles, the basics of programming with Python, worked with Raspberry Pi’s and built mobile apps.   In addition to creating a digital portfolio with all of their projects that they presented to a panel of computer science and education professionals, students took part in the Technovation Challenge, an all-girls mobile app building competition where students had to design a business plan and mobile app solving a real-world problem.  There is plenty out there that speaks to the passions and interests of girls and it was fun collecting it all in one space and really getting a sense of what works and doesn’t work with girls.