After several years teaching and doing research in artificial intelligence, I started looking for more opportunities to get involved with a variety of CS education efforts.  Three years ago, I organized the first of a series of Google-sponsored workshops for high school teachers.  (Check out the website for this year's event, which brought 35 high school teachers to UMBC to learn and share ideas!)  That first workshop led to the foundation of the CSTA-Maryland chapter, an NSF grant called CE21-Maryland that gathered data and started to build a community of practice around CS education in Maryland, and many other outreach activities, focused mostly on high school teacher training and certification.

Over the years, I've talked to many students at UMBC who are interested in teaching CS at the high school level but don't know how to go about it.  We are working on creating a CS certification program here at UMBC, and I thought that bringing together some of the students who would be most interested in participating in such a program would provide some momentum to get the program up and running!  I also look forward to sharing my passion for teaching and computer science with a larger community.

Cheers,

Marie