Deploying Exploring Computer Science Statewide
Helen H. Hu

Cecily Heiner

Jay McCarthy

Westminster College
Salt Lake City, UT 84105

Southern Utah University
Cedar City, UT 84720

University of Massachusetts Lowell
Lowell, MA 01854

hhu@westminstercollege.edu

cecilyheiner@suu.edu

jay.mccarthy@gmail.com

ABSTRACT
Exploring Computer Science (ECS) is a high school introductorycomputer science class designed to increase student interest in CS.
Utah is the first state to offer ECS statewide and use it to meet ahigh school graduation requirement. Over the past four years, 150
teachers have been trained as Utah ECS teachers and over 10,000
Utah students have taken the class. The Utah initiative is unique
because it is the first to deploy ECS in a non-urban environment
and with a modified half-year curriculum that includes noadditional equipment costs. This paper discusses how the Utah
deployment was organized, reports its results and uniquedifficulties, and offers lessons for deployments with similar
characteristics: statewide, rural, and limited resources.

1. INTRODUCTION
Through the Utah Exploring Computer Science (ECS) Initiative,
Utah became the first state to offer ECS statewide, adopting a
proven curriculum and professional development (PD) model. The
original ECS curriculum is based on six units, whereas the Utah
initiative pared the curriculum down to three units to create a halfyear version of ECS. This modification streamlined adoption
because existing Utah graduation requirements include only a halfyear of computing.
Over the past four years, 150 Utah teachers have participated in the
ECS PD workshops, more than tripling the number of CS teachersin Utah. These teachers prepared to teach ECS, developed theirinquiry-based teaching strategies, questioned equity in high school
computer science classes, and strengthened the high school CS
teacher community. Since 2012, over 10,000 Utah students took
ECS in over 100 public and private schools, including urban
schools, rural schools, in-custody schools, online schools, nontraditional schools, and schools on Native American reservations.
In 2015-16, the Utah ECS Initiative encompasses teachers in 27 of
the 41 Utah school districts, including all of the 12 largest Utah
school districts. These 27 districts teach 83% of all Utah students
enrolled in public schools. Many of the districts that are notteaching ECS are tiny, e.g. a single secondary school serving
approximately 100 rural students grades 7-12 simply lacks thestudents and resources for a new course.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work forpersonal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies
are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that
copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights
for components of this work must be honored. of this work owned byothers than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit ispermitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or toredistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.
Request permissions from Permissions@acm.org.
SIGCSE '16, March 02-05, 2016, Memphis, TN, USA
Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to
ACM.

While ECS has been implemented in urban school districts prior to
the Utah ECS Initiative, rolling out ECS statewide in Utah
introduced several challenges not experienced elsewhere. Although
Utah has some large urban high schools with racially diverse
student populations, many Utah schools are predominantly white.
The majority of the Utah teachers are white and from rural or
suburban areas. The ECS PD curriculum is as much about culture
as it is about CS; this created a very different environment for the
ECS PD workshops than occurs elsewhere. For instance, when
external PD facilitators spoke about a racial equity gap in highschool, it was less effective for the local teacher population; butwhen we focused on a local message about the gender gap in CS,
our teachers were more receptive to the equitable teaching practices
that will benefit all minority groups in their classrooms. Section 6
develops these lessons for adaptation by others.

2. PRIOR WORKThe origins of ECS are detailed in [4]. In 2008-2009, seven schools
in Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) implemented thefirst ECS curriculum, which was organized around six modular
curriculum units and three pillars: core computer science concepts,
inquiry, and equity. The original professional development model
lasts two years, starting with a five-day summer workshop,
followed by four Saturday sessions during the school-year andending with a five-day summer workshop. The curriculum aims fora “low floor and high ceiling” so any student can succeed and learnsomething valuable, and students that discover a passion can gomuch deeper and explore more computer science. ECS integrates avariety of introductory CS approaches, including CS Unplugged
and Scratch [1, 6].
The success of ECS in LAUSD spurred its adoption in other areas,
beginning with Santa Clara County in 2010 [5] and Chicago Public
Schools in 2011[11]. Initially most of these projects were fundedby the National Science Foundation, but Code.org has partneredwith over 70 school districts, including all seven of the largest
school districts in the country to dramatically scale-up ECS
adoption [10]. These projects and partnerships have involved
largely urban areas with high populations of minorities traditionally
underrepresented in computer science. Many have shared theirvaluable lessons learned in implementing the course, including how
equity is central to the ECS program and that ECS professional
development is a continual learning process [7, 8]. Project leadersemphasized the importance of partnerships for scalability andsustainability, of engaging and supporting teachers with quality
professional development and a learning community, and ofaligning ECS into existing district priorities [8]. They also noted
the need to look beyond enrollment numbers and to measure
whether all students were being engaged and were learning
computational thinking [7]. While many of these lessons areapplicable to any educational setting, they do not address the
specific challenges of deploying ECS statewide for students in all
settings, including urban, suburban, and especially rural schools.

3. DEPLOYING ECS STATEWIDE
Utah schools have adopted ECS quickly in part because ECS was
modified to solve a widely-recognized Utah problem and to fit
within the existing Utah education structure. During Utah
Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) chapter meetings,
high school teachers identified the lack of CS course options forninth and tenth graders. They also shared general dissatisfaction byparents, students, and guidance counselors with an existing
computer literacy course that was required for high school
graduation. Adopting a pre-existing curriculum, the Utah ECS
Initiative ran its first ECS PD in 2012 on Utah State Office of
Education funds, preparing two teachers to pilot ECS in 2012-13,
only one year after ECS was first discussed in a Utah CSTA chapter
meeting. The National Science Foundation provided the funds toroll-out the program statewide, and state-level champions at the
Utah State Office of Education and the State Board of Education
created a permanent ECS course and a new ECS endorsement for
2013-14.
Getting ECS approved as a permanent option for high school
graduation (as an alternative to the computer literacy course)
proved more of a marketing and political project, than a technicalor educational one. One author became a regular participant in thelocal tech industry group’s public policy meetings. This industry
group’s experience with the State School Board and the legislature
were invaluable in getting ECS accepted as a high school
graduation requirement and including ECS teachers in a salary
supplement program. The week before the school board vote,leaders from the tech industry flooded School Board members withmessages supporting the importance of computer scienceeducation, and a few prominent leaders spoke passionately for theissue at the meeting.
Key to making ECS a successful course was staying vigilant about
any state legislation, state and district policy, and implementation
changes that would affect ECS. For example, the State Office of
Education created a task force in 2013 to consider removing thehalf-year computer literacy requirement for high school graduation.
This task force became an opportunity to have ECS officially added
to the graduation requirement. At another point, a large school
district was requiring its students to take the original computer
literacy course despite having completed ECS, thus disgruntling
many parents and students until we reached out to clarify thegraduation requirements. Project members presented regularly atstate-level and district-level conferences for guidance counselors
and high school CS teachers. We also worked with the CSTA state
chapter to publicize the ECS course at regional Hour of Code events
and with local media including the state newspapers and television
news shows. The key lesson is that the success of the Utah ECS
Initiative required regular communications with numerous
stakeholders.

4. A HALF YEAR ECS CURRICULUM
The full Exploring Computer Science curriculum [3] has six units,
which are broken down into 158 days of 55-minute lessons. While
the full-year curriculum is preferable because it demonstrates more
applications of computational thinking, Utah schools adopted ECS
quickly because it could fulfill the existing half-year graduation
requirement. Utah’s half-year version of ECS includes:• All 19 days of Unit 1 (Human Computer Interaction)• All 21 days of Unit 2 (Problem Solving)• All 30 days of Unit 4 (Programming with Scratch)• 0-15 days from the 30 days of Unit 5 (Computing andData Analysis)

Units 3 (Web Design) and 6 (Robotics) were completely cut fromthe curriculum, to avoid duplicating an existing web design
program popular at many Utah schools and to avoid the expense ofproviding robotics hardware to schools statewide. The main
downside of this cut is that the shortened course does not provide
application for and emphasis of other ECS principles, and instead
can only apply them in one environment (Programming with
Scratch.) The Utah State Office of Education has created a second
half-year ECS II course that would allow teachers to cover theremaining units, but thus far no public schools in Utah have adopted
the full year course.

4.1 A Modified Data Analysis Unit
Initially, we designed a ten-day Unit 5 that was piloted by anexperienced ECS teacher. Based on the piloting teacher’schallenges and the wide range of classroom pacing across the state,
we created three shortened versions of Unit 5: a five-day, ten-day,and 15-day, which are being piloted in multiple classrooms in 20152016.
The five-day option contains only the critical foundations of data
analysis, such as plots, trends, statistics and data subsetting.
Teachers can choose to follow up with either five or ten additionaldays if time permits. The longer option keeps the inquiry focusedgroup project and much of the most applicable and engaging partsof the original data analysis lessons. The shorter option is based on
the longer one, but replaces the group project with a simplified
project analysis.
Although the current ECS curriculum allows teachers to select any
software platform for Unit 5, the curriculum was originally written
for Deducer (a GUI for R) [3], and many teachers found it difficult
to teach with other tools. Our version replaces those lessons withlessons designed for online spreadsheet and mapping tools. The
result is a shorter lesson module that can work without requiring
additional software installation; the new module can be taught byteachers with existing expertise in business technology, a common
expertise for our CS teachers.

5. ECS PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Many Utah teachers learned about ECS through state-maintained email lists. They registered for our program to meet the fiverequirements for a Utah ECS teaching endorsement: (1) completionof Code.org’s 20-hour Code Studio course; (2) a five-day summer
PD workshop; (3) monthly meetings with other first-time ECS
teachers in their district; (4) a one-day workshop on Scratch
programming; and (5) two additional state-level conferences. They
were encouraged but not required to attend another five-day
summer workshop in their second year. Stipends were provided tocompensate them for their time ($1,500 for the first four
requirements of ECS endorsement, and $400 for their second
summer PD).
The five-day summer PD also served as a Teaching Methods course
for CS endorsement (the state requirement for teaching Computer
Programming and CS Principles). Our workshops filled a major gap
in the statewide education system, since no Utah universities in thestate offered CS teaching methods courses. Teachers seeking a CS
endorsement (rather than ECS endorsement) received a $400
stipend for their participation. They immediately recognized that a
successful ECS course would increase the enrollments in their otherCS courses, and many were able to add ECS to their teachingschedules for the upcoming year.

5.1 Five Day Summer PD
Unlike many traditional textbook curricula, ECS is not a course thatcan be fully understood without attending a five-day workshop.
When teachers read the curriculum alone they do not understandwhat teaching practices make ECS distinctive. Our project
benefitted significantly from an invitation to visit Chicago andparticipate in one of their professional development workshops. To
pay it forward, we hosted a teacher from Maryland and sharedmaterials with Massachusetts.
The five-day summer PD designed by Goode and Chapman
inculcates teachers on the three pillars of ECS: (1) computerscience concepts; (2) inquiry-based teaching practices; and (3)equity in the classroom.
Nationwide, workshop facilitators first model a few ECS lessons,which all participants experience as if they were high school
students. These lessons are followed by a reflective session on how
the lesson went and what pedagogical choices were made by the
instructors. Many teachers express surprise at how inquiry-basedteaching practices can transform a classroom. Eight other ECS
lessons are assigned to participants to deliver in groups (preferably
groups of four teachers). Equity issues are introduced whenparticipants read and discuss chapters from Stuck in the Shallow
End [9].
The five-day ECS PD was well-received by Utah CS teachers (4.33
on a 5-point Likert scale by 2014-15 teachers), but could sometimes
overwhelm teachers who were completely new to CS. By the lastyear of the project, we required Utah teachers to complete the 20hour Code Studio before attending the five-day PD. This exposure
to programming helped prepare new-to-CS teachers for the CS
concepts covered in the five-day PD.
In response to negative feedback about how equity was discussed
in the PD, we shifted the emphasis on equity from race toaccessibility, gender, and socio-economic issues in the first half of
the week. Recognizing that some Utah teachers had little diversity
training or experience teaching racially diverse classrooms, we
added short 15-minute sessions to the PD workshop explaining how
equity differed from equality, how culture means more than race,
how implicit bias is present in everyone, and how to react to microaggressions in the classroom. These sessions were designed in
response to feedback that teachers wanted more concretesuggestions on equity. In the last iteration, we included too manyof these sessions; survey responses suggested the teachers may
have been better served by half that many sessions. We discuss thisfeedback in detail in Section 6.1.
Finally, we partnered with NCWIT’s Counselors for Computing(C4C) to share more information about CS pathways and career
opportunities. Teachers were especially excited to receive CSTA
posters to highlight the multiple facets of computer science.

5.2 District Monthly Meetings
In addition to the five-day summer professional development thatwas designed primarily as a pre-service activity for new ECS
teachers, we ran mandatory monthly meeting groups to provide inservice support for first-time ECS teachers. These groups offeredteachers opportunities to discuss local logistics and receive
additional training after obtaining some experience in teaching
ECS. The monthly meeting groups were generally organized at theend of the workshop. Three to six new ECS teachers were assigned
to a group led by either an ECS facilitator or an experienced ECS
teacher. Groups met for approximately 90 minutes, followed an

established agenda (available at http://www.tinyurl.com/ecsagenda), and shared their progress by posting their minutes to the
CS10K community site.
Our monthly meeting groups were initially organized to limit
driving, with groups being assigned geographically based onresidence. However, several of our teachers lived in one district andtaught in another. As a result, many teachers in our first round of
in-service training were attending mentoring groups with teachers
who taught in different districts. This made scheduling the meetingtimes more challenging, and also made discussions regarding
district wide issues difficult. In 2014, we changed the model so thatteachers were grouped with other teachers who taught in the same
district.
Another unique aspect of our monthly meeting groups is that someteachers in rural areas lived too far from other ECS teachers tomake face-to-face meetings practical. We resolved this problem byoffering online mentoring groups through Google Hangouts.
Because district IT was not always friendly for video conferencing,
we collected a variety of contact methods including phone
numbers. When there were technical connection issues, we wereable to fall back on phone conferencing to patch teachers into themeeting. We intentionally kept the maximum size of online groups
smaller than in-person groups.

5.3 One Day Scratch PD
In place of the third monthly meeting, we held a full-day combined
workshop for new teachers on the Scratch programming unit.
Groups of teachers presented on Scratch similar to the practiceduring the summer. In 2012 and 2013, we did not cover Scratch aspart of the summer workshop, and many of the teachers were notprepared to teach effectively during this follow-up. Teachers thatwere assigned lessons later in the Scratch unit found theirassignments especially challenging. In 2014, the teachers received
more instruction in Scratch as part of the summer workshop, andthey were more prepared to teach Scratch. In 2015, we did evenmore preparation by having teachers complete 20 hours of coding
before attending the summer workshop, and the discussion on
programming was much stronger.

5.4 Creating Leaders from ECS Teachers
We identified a pipeline of ECS mentors and facilitators throughthis process. The second summer of ECS PD was not required, so
teachers who attended a second ECS five-day PD were our morecommitted teachers. Other enthusiastic teachers chose to present at
the state-level conferences about ECS. We also observed teachers’
ECS classrooms if they were within an hour of Salt Lake City. We
invited enthusiastic teachers who demonstrated a goodunderstanding of the inquiry-based teaching practices and equity
issues to serve as mentors and to lead the district monthly meetings.
Mentors were also invited to observe a third ECS workshop, toprepare them to serve as workshop facilitators in their fourthworkshops (following the national ECS model for developing ECS
facilitators). Three Utah teachers are trained and experienced ECS
workshop facilitators. Two of these teachers were new-to-CS
teachers at their first ECS workshop, and two teachers are currently
serving as President and Vice-President of our Utah CSTA Chapter.

6. RESULTS
ECS in Utah has experienced astonishing growth (see Table 1),
beginning with 53 ECS students in 2012-2013, and reaching over
5000 students in 2015-2016. One downside of this rapid growth isthat more than half the ECS schools each year have been new to theprogram, where the first-time ECS teachers have not yet attended
the PD and learned about equity. Thus, the gender breakdown of
Utah ECS students has not reached the high percentages achievedin other districts, but is more than double than for other CS courses
in Utah (28% female in 2014-15, versus 43.7% female in LAUSD
and 13% in other Utah CS courses). On the other hand, because wehave targeted large, diverse urban high schools early in the project,
the 2014-15 racial diversity of ECS students are higher than thosefor the state as a whole: 65% white (76% in Utah), 23% Hispanic(16%), 4% Asian (2%), 3% African American (1%), and 1% Native
American (1%).
Table 1. ECS Adoption in Utah
2012-132013-142014-152015-16

Workshops

1 workshop

1

2

3

New Teachers

2 teachers

21

49

78

Total Teachers
Trained*2 teachers in 23 in 10
2 districts

72 in 23150 in 27

Schools
Offering ECS*

2 schools in
2 districts

17 in 953 in 22106 in 26

ECS Students
Enrolled

53 students

1205

3461

5375

Total Students

53 students

1258

4719

10,094* teacher and school counts include public, private and charter schools, but
student and district counts only include Utah public school districts

ECS students completed a retrospective pre/post-survey in the lastmonth of the course. On a Likert scale of 1-5 (1=not competent at
all to 5=perfectly competent), 2014-15 students had statisticallysignificant gains in their knowledge and problem solving skills incomputational thinking (31% increase from 2.86 (σ=0.93) to 3.74
(σ=0.94), p<0.05). Similarly, they showed significant gains in theirability to apply abstractions to problems and to write computer
programs (33% increase from 2.86 (σ=1.02) to 3.79 (σ=0.95),
p<0.05), and a slight increase in interest in working in pairs or
teams (41% to 48% prefer learning best with a peer or group).
Students had a significant increase in their likelihood of enrollingin additional CS courses (3.06 (σ=1.25) to 3.71 (σ=1.21), p<0.05)
and an increased interest in studying a CS related major in college(17% to 30% of the class population).

6.1 Lesson 1: The Equity Gap is Not Obvious
To All Teachersclass and I will try to engage them, but is it my job to tell them thatthey should be in those classes when they suggest they are
uninterested? Through manipulative tactics? Shouldn't I respectthat they have different interests than I do?” Another said, “[Equity]
was talked about TOO much. I needed more content information.”
When they were not asking for more technical content, they simply
expressed their emotional exasperation: “I understand theimportance of demystifying computer science and reaching moregroups [girls/Latinos/etc]; however, I see no reason to beat the
subject of Equity ‘to death’ day after day!” Most concerning, someteachers did not understand what they should do about it. One
teacher said, “[I wish we had] more time talking about how we asteachers can address the things that we see in our own schools.”
In hindsight, we did not anticipate this resistance (projects in areas
with more cultural diversity had not experienced these challenges
to this degree), and we did not include enough survey questions toassess change in teachers’ viewpoints. We asked teachers to rate
their “understanding of equity in the classroom” (2.74 (σ=1.03) to
3.95 (σ=0.77), p<0.05) and their “ability to teach for equity” (2.82(σ=0.98) to 4.01 (σ=0.78), p<0.05), but these questions are notnuanced enough and assume that teachers believe equity issues
exist in classrooms. We should have explicitly asked “Do equity
issues exist in your classrooms and schools?” and “What kinds ofequity gaps exist?”.
Over time, we learned to tailor the presentation of equity to local
issues, often starting with the less-threatening socioeconomic status
and then branching into accessibility [12], gender and race. Our
discussions were more effective when teachers could connect theissues to their own experiences.
Racial equity was especially difficult given Utah’s relative racial
homogeneity. Our teachers felt it difficult to extrapolate from thebook’s material to their own experience in their classrooms. One
teacher said, “I felt the book and study itself were bias [sic] and notreflective of the nation as a whole, nor do I think it reflects the Utah
culture. If you could find a study on gender, that would more
appropriately reflect Utah's bias.” Our teachers were more willingto confront inequities related to characteristics such as gender,socioeconomic status, religion, and even, in our reservation
schools, different tribal affiliations. We were initially not prepared
for the strong negative reaction many of our teachers had to the race
issues addressed in Stuck in the Shallow End, and our surveys did
not explore the reasons for these reactions. We hypothesize thatsome of these reactions may be explained by the dynamics of White
Fragility [2].

One of the three pillars of ECS and a motivating factor in the
curriculum design is equity. We repeatedly received negative
comments about this part of the workshop. We used the book Stuckin the Shallow End, which discusses computing, equity, and race inthe LAUSD [9] to seed many of our equity discussions. Many of
the negative comments were targeted at the book, claiming that it
was “outdated” and irrelevant because it was published about LA
over a decade ago. One 2015 teacher wrote, “I did not like thatbook. I understand that my classes need to be equitable without
reading about outdated studies done in LA, which is not at allcomparable to my school.” Another 2015 teacher claimed: “I don't
think things [in Utah] are as bad as depicted in this book.”

The cultural challenges of the curriculum were especially clear with
ECS lessons like the cornrow curves assignment and the Martin
Luther King website analysis. Many of our teachers were extremely
uncomfortable with these lessons. Some teachers refused to use thelessons. One teacher was especially candid and explained that they
were “afraid to teach a lesson like that” to a classroom of only white
students, some of whom may have never seen an African-Americanin person. They felt they were inadequately prepared to address thecultural issues that were likely to come up in teaching these lessons.
In a multicultural setting, these lessons would be connecting CS
concepts to pre-existing cultural knowledge for at least some of thestudents. In our less diverse setting, teachers and students had no
relevant pre-existing cultural knowledge, and the curriculum and
PD did not adequately scaffold this knowledge for our teachers.

Many teachers expected that they would spend every day learning
more computer science lesson plans and practicing concrete
technical skills. One teacher wrote, “I do want those students in my

We learned that equity, diversity, and cultural issues have a huge
range of meaning across the States. The issues that were relevant
and natural during ECS’ birth in a racially diverse culture were achallenge to adapt to a middle-America setting with a raciallyhomogeneous population. We needed to think critically about
which issues were necessary to discuss (such as giving all students
opportunity) and which lessons could be taught using lesscontroversial materials (such as using the Pacific Northwest Tree
Octopus website for content analysis). This was an instance where
we needed to spend more time making local adaptations. Future
deployments of ECS should also consider cultural context.

6.2 Lesson 2: The Professional Development
Model of ECS Requires Continual Growth
ECS has its own culture: the foundational pillars are equity, inquiry,
and CS concepts, but there is also a strong focus on continual
professional development for students and teachers alike. Continual
professional development means a continual upward spiral ofprogression. It also means recognizing that teaching may never be
perfect, but it can get better. Even with a fairly specific curriculum,
there are many variations on how a lesson can be taught andadaptations that can be made to improve the lesson for a teacher ora student.
Many questions in ECS lessons from the fundamental “What is acomputer?” to the more abstract “How do culture and computing
relate?” are left deliberately open ended, and often learning is lessabout arriving at a particular “right” answer than it is about learning
how to approach the problem using tools of computation. Many
first-time teachers arrived at the workshop wanting “the answer”.
The lack of direct information dissemination was overwhelming forsome teachers as indicated by the comment “The project
coordinator was more concerned with our comments rather thangiving ideas to us. We had to come up with ideas like our students
do, which sometimes is not enough direction to move forward.”
Another comment indicated “At first it was weird trying to figureout what they meant, but the process of figuring out helped me toreally analyze my teaching.” Teachers’ self reported ratings of theirrole “to think reflectively about my teaching practices” increased(27% from 3.16 to 4.01, p<0.01).
Initially, many returning teachers indicated that they felt that they
had learned what they needed to know and did not have anything
new to learn. One teacher reported “I took this workshop last year
and this [picture activity] was a repeat.” Others were overzealousin their desires to tell new teachers how they had taught ECS andhow to teach ECS; they wanted to give “the right answer” to theteachers who were asking for it. As we discussed the issue withother facilitators including Gail Chapman, our professional
development process for returning teachers evolved. In 2015, we
included a letter and additional debriefing sessions at the beginningand end of the workshop day to help them focus more on their own
development as well as helping the new teachers develop. We
specifically focused on the issue of asking better questions as
opposed to providing better answers. In 2015, the 15 returningteachers rated these debriefing sessions 4.2 on a 5-point Likert
scale.

6.3 Lesson 3: Local Facilitators Preferred
In our surveys and interactions with our teachers, we repeatedly
heard complaints about any facilitator who was perceived as an
outsider to Utah culture. Unlike a workshop about a new textbook
or a new software tool, the content of an ECS workshop includes
more emotional discussions focused on the social and culturalissues that arise in a classroom. Two of the pillars of ECS, equity
and inquiry, are about these issues. During PD, facilitators seek todemonstrate inquiry-based learning by having lots of tightinteractions with teachers; they seek to expose and confront equity
issues directly by talking about them openly. Many of our teachers

felt that this created a tense and draining environment where they
were being judged by external facilitators for their classroom
practices and their cultural background.
Participants would sometimes even question some of our local
facilitators on how long they have been in the community and theextent to their involvement. Utah has a strong local custom formodest dress and hairstyles, which immediately brands many
visitors and some long-time residents as outsiders. Once weidentified this preference for local facilitators, we were able to planour discussions and approaches differently and create a better
connection with the teachers. One teacher commented after theirsecond summer workshop, “I quickly noticed that having a Utahteam lead the workshop seemed more inviting and supportive thanwith the UCLA presenter who facilitated this workshop lastsummer.” One team member experienced this local preference
from the opposite direction when she facilitated a workshop in
another state and felt the same push-back for being an outsider inthat state.
Teachers’ ratings of facilitation increased when the facilitation was
done by a local team (from 3.91 (σ=0.95) for an external facilitator
to 4.37 (σ=0.69) for local facilitators, p=0.01). Our
recommendation to future efforts is to pay strict heed tounderstanding and adapting the curriculum and PD to the dominantculture of teachers and using as many local facilitators as possible,
especially for the most pressingly emotional and social issues, sothat teachers will buy-in, rather than push-back.

6.4 Lesson 4: Account for Workshop Attrition
Our initial plan was to run a total of eight workshops over four years
and train a total of 105 new ECS teachers, with each workshop
accommodating approximately 10-20 teachers. Within one year of
the project, we realized that we had failed to account for two major
factors in our calculations. First, because we were deploying
statewide and many teachers did not feel a high degree ofaccountability to workshop facilitators, many teachers signed up
for a workshop but did not attend. Second, ECS workshops are
ideally run with 24-32 participants (to allow for 3-4 teachers topresent each of the eight lessons). To fix both of these problems,
we ran fewer workshops in our second year and began overbooking
workshops to account for no-shows. Teachers who provided
administration letters committing to two years of ECS courses were
offered priority registration, whereas other teachers were admitted
on a space-available basis. Our 2014 and 2015 workshops had a 1123% no-show rate. Asking for letters demonstrating administration
support helped reduce the no-show rate, but failed to eliminate it.
Even workshops filled exclusively with teachers with letters fromtheir administration still had over 10% of the teachers drop out.
Our smallest workshop had 22 teachers (28 registered) and wasoffered in a rural area, in part to accommodate teachers from rural
areas who might find cities intimidating. Quality discussions can bedifficult for the smaller groups, with less opportunity for diversityof thought, controversy, debate, or serious discussion. Our largest
workshop had 39 teachers, the result of registering 46 and nothaving as much attrition as we were expecting. Larger groups madeit more difficult to maintain individual accountability in completing
homework and participating in workshop discussions. Individual
teachers were more likely to show up late, disappear to answer
phone calls, and be distracted by their laptops. The quality of the
discussion dragged, and teachers and facilitators alike found itmuch more difficult to emotionally invest in a larger group wheresharing deeply personal feelings and potentially controversial ideas
is more intimidating.

6.5 Lesson 5: Scaling to Statewide Brings a
New Set of Logistical Challenges
Scaling to statewide brought extra logistical challenges. With
teachers in rural areas, we had to be more strategic about supplies,
help arrange hotels and carpools, and make compromises in theevaluation of their teaching since it was impractical to observe theirclassrooms.
Recruiting practices differed in effectiveness for different teacher
populations. Teachers in Northern Utah and teachers in larger
districts were more likely to attend state-level conferences andtherefore easier to recruit. Their guidance counselors were similarly
easier to reach. To reach out to the smaller districts, we contacted
district-level Career and Technical Education (CTE) directors andasked them to help identify appropriate teachers and inform
guidance counselors. However teachers sent by school or district
administrators were more likely to complain about ECS.
Experienced ECS teachers were our best recruiters; many would
convince their colleagues from other schools and districts to attend.
School schedules and class schedules often varied tremendously
within a single workshop, and we often had teachers on traditionalschedules, trimester schedules, A/B day schedules, and projectbased schedules in the same workshop. When we tried to address
scheduling concerns as part of the week long workshop, teachers
complained “good but not practical for different schedules.” Wefound that by moving more of the scheduling logistics to themonthly mentoring meetings and by organizing monthly mentoring
meetings by district, we were able to provide ECS advice andschedule scaffolding that was relevant and tailored to the teachers’
needs.

7. CONCLUSIONSIn conclusion, the Utah Exploring Computer Science Initiative has
led the first statewide deployment of ECS. This deployment is
unique due to its geographical breadth, diversity of population
density, and half-year variation of the ECS curriculum.
This paper has described our experiences during the first four yearsof this deployment and our contributions of (section 4) a model for
adapting the standard ECS curriculum into a half-year variation
suitable for credit-hour- and resource-constrained schools; (section5) a multi-year professional development plan that turns someteachers with no CS experience into instructors, mentors, andworkshop facilitators; and (section 6) a set of concrete lessons foradapting ECS to new geographical and cultural settings.
We hope that our results and techniques will be replicated in otherstates and regions so that the computer science education
community can better understand the benefits and challenges of
deploying courses like ECS in areas like rural, middle America.
We have created a sustainable program for introductory computerscience for all Utah students; our next goal is to use ECS to identify
promising teachers who we can train to teach the AP CS Principles
course.

8. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We acknowledge the contributions of our evaluation team from
SmartStart Evaluation and Research, especially Jessica Martone.
We are grateful to Carl Lyman, the State Office of Education, and
our Utah and national ECS community. This work is supported by
the National Science Foundation Grant No. CNS-1240977.

9. REFERENCES[1] Tim Bell, Gwenda Bensemann, and Ian H Witten. 1995.
Computer science unplugged: Capturing the interest of theuninterested. In Proceedings of the 14th New ZealandComputer Conference.
[2] Robin DiAngelo. 2011. White Fragility. International Journalof Critical Pedagogy, 3 (3) (2011), 54-70.
[3] Joanna Goode and Gail Chapman. 2015. Exploring Computer
Science. Version 5.0. Downloaded on August 13, 2015 fromhttp://www.exploringcs.org/curriculum[4] Joanna Goode and Jane Margolis. 2011. Exploring Computer
Science: A Case Study of School Reform. Trans. Comput.
Educ. 11, 2, Article 12 (July 2011), 16 pages.
[5] Daniel W. Lewis, Lisa Kohne, Timothy Mechlinski, andMariana Schmalstig. 2015. The Exploring Computer Science
Course, Attendance and Math Achievement. In Proceedings ofthe 2015 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in
Computer Science Education (ITiCSE '15). ACM, New York,NY, USA, 147-152.
[6] John Maloney, Mitchel Resnick, Natalie Rusk, Brian
Silverman, and Evelyn Eastmond. 2010. The Scratch
Programming Language and Environment. Trans. Comput.
Educ. 10, 4, Article 16 (Nov 2010), 15 pages.
[7] Jane Margolis, Gail Chapman, Joanna Goode, Lucia Dettori,
and Dan Lewis. 2013. A Tale of Three ECS Partnerships and
Why Scalability ≠ Sustainability. Exploring Computer
Science
WorkingPaper#1.
Retrievedfrom
http://www.exploringcs.org/research/ecs-working-papers[8] Jane Margolis, Joanna Goode, and Gail Chapman. 2015. An
Equity Lens for Scaling: A Critical Juncture for Exploring
Computer Science. In ACM Inroads, 6, 3 (Aug 2015), 58-66.
[9] Jane Margolis, Rachel Estrella, Joanna Goode, Jennifer
Jellison Holme and Kim Nao. 2008. Stuck in the Shallow End:
Education, Race, and Computing. The MIT Press.
[10] Hadi Partovi. A Comprehensive Effort to Expand Access andDiversity in Computer Science. In ACM Inroads, 6, 3 (Aug2015), 67-72.
[11] Dale Reed, Brenda Wilkerson, Don Yanek, Lucia Dettori, Jeff
Solin. 2015. How Exploring Computer Science (ECS) came to
Chicago. In ACM Inroads, 6, 3 (Aug 2015), 75-77.
[12] Andreas Stefik and Richard E. Ladner. 2015. Introduction toAccessCS10K and Accessible Tools for Teaching
Programming. In Proceedings of the 46th ACM TechnicalSymposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE '15).
ACM, New York, NY, USA, 518-519.