Success Stories

• Gary Goodnight of Denver Public Schools
• Naomi Salaman of Boulder High School
• Virginia Lombard of Charlestown High School

Gary Goodnight, Denver Public Schools Computer Magnet Program

I taught middle school for 10 years and the drop off in female enrollments in computer courses from 7th to 8th grade was dramatic. I did not start out as a computer or technology teacher myself. I was a science teacher first. I had a little exposure to computers and databases used to track such things as biological data, for example, but my background was not computer science. Yet I saw, immediately, the power of the PC in education, so I went back to school to work towards a second bachelor's degree in computer science. I took courses in COBOL, Pascal, and BASIC. I guess I was an early adopter because I found any way I could to put computers in my classrooms.

At the Magnet School, we tried to get computers to all the kids in the program, and that is about 700 students. In a sense, we used a "back door method" of bridging the digital divide. Some students did not have computers at home, and so we provided loaner computers. We also provided opportunities for students to earn computers as a form of payment for participation and work completed in our summer program. We found, in all cases, that once a student uses a computer, they are always going to want to use one.

What made our program such a success in the Denver area? Well, in designing of Computer Programming offerings, we were always worried that if we offered Java as an elective, then how could we get students to sign up and stay interested? We knew that we needed to be absolutely sure that we presented things in an exciting manner, not in traditional ways of teaching programming. We had to start with the exciting stuff first. We used LEGO® Mindstorms^TM as a learning tool to get students engaged in programming. Mindstorms^TM can be programmed in PASCAL, Java -in all kinds of languages. It's a huge tool, and it also gave our teachers opportunities to extend their own professional development.

Our program keeps growing. We now offer three different technology strands for students interested in networking and computer troubleshooting, multimedia and the Web, and computer programming. Students at the Magnet School have started their own businesses and technology consultancies. They have also taken advantage of mentoring internships. Now students can produce actual products for real clients. These real-world experiences have made all the difference for our students.

Boulder High School, "A Place for Everyone," was founded in 1875 as the Preparatory School for the University of Colorado. It is now the largest high school in the Boulder Valley School District, with about 1900 students drawn from an area of 500 square miles.

I came to Boulder High School in 1982. My charge was to bring us into the computer age. At the time we had 8 Teletype machines with paper tape. We now have over 500 computers and eight computer labs. Over the past two decades, I have taught Math, BASIC programming, Pascal programming, C++ programming, Java programming, and Advanced Placement Computer Science.

Students enrolled in my Java classes at Boulder High School were recruited from the entire population of Boulder High, but special emphasis was placed on recruiting more women and minorities. I wanted to bring more non-traditional students into my programming classes by getting them excited about learning Java. Yet the traditional way of teaching programming was to progress slowly through the vocabulary of the language while showing students how to make programs using the concepts they had seen. I knew that this was not the best way to engage students -especially students who may not have been interested in a programming course as their first choice.

With my approach to teaching Java, students were shown the immediate power of the language; they were given a chance, right from the beginning of class, to interact with a program. I used BlueJ and a graphics-oriented approach to appeal to the artists in the class. I used music to appeal to the budding musicians, and I used gaming and other action-oriented activities to appeal to almost everyone.

The concepts of object-oriented programming were very easy for the students to grasp. It was particularly helpful if the students had not been exposed to "traditional" programming courses. Handouts were prepared for the students with the idea of appealing to different types of learning styles. Students would comment that my class was the first time all day that they felt they could relax and feel free to create.

Charlestown High School is an urban school with about 90% minority students - 40% African-American, 30% Latino, and 20% Asian. This past year was a challenging year in that the school opted to restructure into "small learning communities." For Charlestown High School this has meant 6 small learning communities with about 200 students in grades 9-12 in each unit. Unfortunately, this has resulted in a rather arbitrary assignment of students to classes.

I have been at Charlestown High School for the past five years. Prior to that I taught at Boston Latin School (a high-achieving exam school) and the Jeremiah Burke High School (another largely minority district school). A teacher can get spoiled in an environment like Boston Latin School, a place where you can hand out books and assignments and know that the students will do everything in their power to meet or exceed your expectations.

This year at Charlestown I began my Java classes with a standard Java text - Java Methods by Litvin and Litvin. After attending a workshop in the fall, however, I decided to try a new approach based on what a group of Computer Instructors at Williams College were pulling together in a text called Java: An Eventful Approach. This new approach was based on the premise that a graphical, object-oriented start to programming was more likely to engage and keep learners interested. Another book from which we drew materials was Objects First with BlueJ. In that text students get to design scenes based on graphics primitives and then manipulate those to form the final picture. Time and time again, the trick seems to be in finding a way to capture student interest and then get down to the discipline of coding once interest is firmly established.

When I conducted an end-of-year survey among my Java students, they almost universally indicated that they enjoyed the graphical projects, particularly games, more than any other aspect of the course. All of the girls - Amy, Tran, Phuong and Gail --indicated that gaming was their favorite activity. One of the boys, Jim, suggested that the course should begin with games and then ultimately drill down to the code that supports them. I might also add that the four girls are all going to good colleges next year - Boston University, Purdue, Regis, and the Mass College of Pharmacy.