Torres Introduces C-STEM to MUSD. Advocates to District Heads for CS Credentialing for Teachers-Wins both!!

In February of 2021, in the middle of the covid hysteria, I continued to seek out computer science (CS) curricula, in particular, physical computing curricula and training which featured Arduino and other micro controllers compatible with Chromebooks. The district provides Chromebooks for all students. I discovered C-STEM. C-STEM is an integrated CS and mathematics program that consists of an online website which works together with robotics hardware which is purchased through Barobo. The robots (Linkbots) are programmed through the website called Roboblocky.

C-STEM was developed by Dr. Harry Cheng from UC Davis. I went ahead and signed up for their online training at my own expense. The training was great and did offer the physical computing I had hoped for, as well as robotics and a full STEAM + computer science education arsenal of curated learning experiences for students. I shared my discovery with the district science administrator with the hope that he would purchase the program. He quickly rejected my suggestion, but later,  agreed. The program plus additional training were purchased for my CS program and one other intermediate school in our district.

The State of California was offering school districts grants to cover tuition fees for computer science authorization certification to teachers through local universities. I shared this great news with the district science administrator with the hope that he would apply for it and support the certification of our teachers. The suggestion was rejected. After sharing the information with a few other district administrators and getting rejected, I finally sent the information to the correct office – Human Resources. HR quickly jumped at the opportunity to assist teachers in increasing their CS capacity and secured the grant funding. As it turned out, C-STEM (UC Davis) offers classes which satisfied the commission on teacher credentialing’s requirements for the CS Authorization. As a result of my advocacy, my school district now has upwards of 35 teachers who have taken C-STEM classes and have added CS Authorization to their credentials. Before this, I was the only tenured teacher I knew of who possessed CS Authorization attached to my base credential. Pushing back pays off! Here are a few of those new CS Authorized tenured teachers that benefitted from my advocacy.C-STEM uses a block-base version of C. Students can program in block-based or text-based coding to control their Linkbot (robot).