Hello! Now that I’ve made it through a long month of June, I thought that it would be appropriate to give a quick update of what is happening right now in my work and academic lives…

Purdue K-12 Outreach – Mid-June saw us finish our 20th annual computer science summer camp at Purdue. We had 36 middle schoolers and 6 high schoolers participate in a program focused on designing web applications from the ground up using Flask, Python, HTML, CSS, and Bootstrap all running on Google’s App Engine PaaS. In addition to our efforts to cram all of these various ideas into the kids heads while they worked on superhero-themed projects, we also got them thinking about networks, websites as programs, and the benefits of Linux and the shell.

In July, we’ll have 20 teachers from across Indiana and the Chicago-area join us on campus for a teacher workshop centered around communities of practice and the new AP CS Principles curriculum. Joining us will be Dr. Aman Yadav, Jon Good, and Alex Lishinski of Michigan State University.

Starting in August, students will be able to sign up to take our edX hosted AP Computer Science A course, taught by myself and Dr. Debbie Perouli of Marquette University. This is a free course designed to help students prepare for college computer science. It will run in four 6-week modules, and we will have support from a group of undergraduate teaching assistants at Purdue.

MSU EPET – This week marked the last sessions of our two-week induction of the 2016 hybrid cohort in the EPET Doctoral program. I met eight amazing, passionate scholars from across the country as we completed the on-campus portion of our first two courses in the program. This process has helped me to develop a plan for my upcoming research opportunities, and served as an invaluable start to the process of becoming a researcher and academic. I’m already looking forward to next year’s two week on-campus sessions!