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This article describes a unique Israeli-Russian project, in which Israeli high school computer science (CS) teachers promote curricular reform in the Russian region of Penza, based on the Israeli high school CS curriculum. The reform involves local schools, universities, the hi-tech industry and local government officials. It includes changes in courses, textbooks and other teaching materials. The Israeli teachers provided workshops to assist the Russian teachers in the assimilation of the reform. This collaboration may encourage other countries to collaborate and not necessarily re-invent the wheel; for some countries it can serve as a catalyst to assist in bringing computer science education into schools.

This paper presents the "Mind the Gap" initiative that aims to encourage female high school pupils to study computer science (CS) in high school. This is achieved by increasing their awareness to what CS is, and exposing them to the essence of a hi-tech environment and to same gender role models. Female software engineers at Google's Israel R&D Center in collaboration with the Israeli National Center undertook the initiative for computer science teachers. We describe the initiative and its impact on the female pupils' interest in CS. One of our conclusions is that even a short visit to a hi-tech company, in this case - Google, has the potential to change pupils' perception of what CS is and to increase their interest in CS and their desire to study it. One could easily adapt this initiative to other companies and scale it to infl uence a rather large population.

This article suggests a song debugging activity that brings together two key ideas - the analogy between learning and debugging and the pedagogical potential of music in Computer Science Education (CSE). The paper can be viewed as the fourth in a series of papers published in inroads about the course Methods of Teaching Computer Science in the High School, but it can also stand on its own merit, since it discusses issues that are relevant to CSE in general.

This article continues our previous manuscript, published in the December 2003 issue of inroads. Both articles address the "Methods of Teaching Computer Science in the High School" course (hence forth abbreviated MTCS). In this article we present an active learning based teaching model that can support the construction of the prospective computer science teacher's professional perception as a future computer science teacher.

This article focuses on a "Methods of Teaching Computer Science in the High School" course (abbreviated MTCS). It presents the rationale and need for the course, and suggests optional course frameworks and implementations that are not limited to a particular programming language, programming paradigm, level of students, or curriculum.

In this paper, we describe a six years experience of summer seminars for high-school computer-science (CS) leading teachers in Israel. The seminars, called "On the frontier of computer science", featured encounters between CS researchers and teachers, as well as pedagogy discussions and workshops. The result of these innovative seminars is that they helped strengthen the local leading teachers' community above and beyond expectations.

Every teacher would like to have students that are motivated towards autonomous learning with self-enthusiasm. This Tip presentation will offer one method for achieving such a goal.For three consequential years (1998-2000) I was teaching a "computing literacy teaching methods" course for CSE students in the Technion. The focus of the course was on computing teaching methods and learning processes.A major part of the course was devoted to a project the students had to develop. They had to collect data, analyze it, organize and represent it to their colleagues. They had to work in small teams and could choose their own topic as long as they were using different computing tools such as Internet, email, spreadsheet, and others.The projects ranged topics such as: Wine, women in Islam, Michelangelo, UFO, wedding traditions, Greek mythology, and Marathon history.