Interested in hosting a CS4HS workshop at your own campus? The workshops are energizing and rewarding, but like all good events, they require a bit of organization and a budget. Here we've compiled a list of things to consider during each planning phase, including considerations and tips that we picked up while organizing our own.

At UW, a student (grad or undergrad) is hired to take care of logistical details. Although many of the details will vary from host to host, a general outline of the tasks to be completed for a successful workshop follows:

5 months before

• Choose date
• Open registration
• Create approximate schedule
• Advertise
• Register with ACM-TECS and other relevant teacher organizations
• Register for credits
• Register for clock hours

3 months before

• Reserve classrooms
• Book speakers and instructors
• Reserve housing
• Confirm pending applications
• Send out reading discussion instructions

1 month before

• Book catering
• Send directions and maps to campus, rooms
• Start making information packet contents
• Book parking

1 week before

• Make nametags
• Create information packets; goody bags
• Create sign-in sheets
• Consider janitorial service (will there be some on workshop dates? Otherwise, make sure paper towels, toilet paper, soap, etc are accessible)

After

• Tally exit surveys
• Get slides, list of links from presenters
• Make materials, directory available to attendees

Choosing a date

The most important first step is to choose a date, since without one it is difficult to build anything else. Once the date is fixed and facilities (classrooms + housing) are secure, everything else can happen more or less in parallel. It helps to establish a rough curriculum and sample workshop schedule early on because you'll need it in order to get certified for various accreditations, get affiliated with ACM-TECS, and to get potential participants interested enough to sign up. Before you start publicizing, you'll want both the rough schedule (at least highlights) and you'll also want to be able to highlight whatever credits/hours/stipend you can offer attendees--these are a big draw for teachers.

Considerations to keep in mind:

• How long is your workshop? If you have participants flying into town, then a 4-day format with half-days on the first and last days works well to accomodate travel time. If most participants are local, a 3-full-day format helps to prevent people from flaking on the half-days.
• Weekend or weekday?
• Does the date conflict with other events relevant to potential participants (e.g. AP summer institutes, similar workshops at other universities)?
• Are instructors, housing, and meeting space available?

ACM-TECS

ACM-TECS is an ACM organization dedicated to K-12 education. Affiliating with them means registering as an ACM-TECS workshop (you'll still have full control over your content), which means filling out a one-page form found on their site. You will need to find a high school teacher ``sponsor'' willing to fill out a post-workshop evaluation (which CSTA never sent last year). Benefits to you include increased credibility, the ability to use their registration resources if you choose, and a post-workshop evaluation of participant feedback. It's also good for your institution to keep in touch with CSTA through this relationship. Finally, they send a bunch of swag for distribution at the workshop. The swag has been a hit.
ACM sometimes sends CS textbooks as part of their swag, which we raffled off only to interested parties since most teachers don't teach CS. The raffle signup is here: (.pdf), (.doc)

Registration

There are a few factors to decide before you can set up an online registration:

• Will people register or apply? If your workshop is non-national, consider an application process to allow you to put applicatns who are not from your precise target demographic on a waitlist until you see whether you have room for them.
• Are you charging a registration fee? Doing so can help to solidify registrants' commitment to actually showing up. Asking (accepted) registrants to simply mail a check to a designated workshop organizer has worked well in the past. If you don't want to deter participants with a fee, give them their money back (and possibly a bit more) at the workshop.

Some helpful hints for setting up online registration:

• To facilitate automated mass communications later on, ask for every piece of information in the smallest possible unit. For example, create separate fields for first and last name; for address, city, state, zip code; for day/evening/cell phone numbers.
• Use checkboxes or menu selections instead of freeform responses wherever possible (e.g. when asking for subjects or grade levels taught, experience level, etc.). This makes it easier to automatically aggregate responses into meaningful statistics later on.
• If you are certified as an ACM-TECS workshop, they can handle registration for you (details here). If you want to gather detailed participant information (see below) or want to run an application process, you'll probably want to set up your own online form.
• Don't bother creating an online form from scratch. There are lots of tools to help you. Your department or university probably has software to create online quizzes or surveys, and this works great.

Useful information to request on the application:

• Personal basics: First/last name, title, email, snail mail, phone number. Be sure to ask for a way to reach teachers during the summer months, since many don't check school emails during that period.
• School information: School name and address, district name. Does the school offer a computer science class? An AP computer science class? We've found that many local colleges are interested in sending representatives to the workshop in the interest of running their own workshops in the future...it's helpful if you can determine on the application who falls into this camp.
• Teaching information: Grade levels taught, subjects taught, years of teaching experience.
• If your workshop will have parallel tracks, ask the applicants which track they'd prefer--even if you let them change their mind later this will give you an estimate of what numbers to expect.
• Logistical food/housing information: Will they require overnight accomodations? Do they have any dietary constraints? Physical handicaps or constraints?
• Publicity information: How did they hear about your workshop? This can give you valuable information about what works and what doesn't for your next workshop. UW also gave applicants a place to provide contact info for any other teachers that the applicant thinks might be interested in the workshop; a few registrants came to us this way.
• Miscellaneous information: Leave a spot for applicants to write in any extra information. We found that a lot of useful information about people's expectations came through this channel (e.g. "I can't wait to get useful activities for my chemistry classroom's 12 computers!" or "I coach an after-school robotics team and can't wait to learn more about real robotics!")
• Qualifying information: Make sure you get enough information to determine which applicants meet your target demographic. Are they planning to actively teach during the academic year following the workshop? Do they teach the appropriate grade levels and subject(s)?

Advertising

Before you begin publicizing your workshop, you'll want to make sure that the following are all in place:

• Online registration
• Website. This is crucial to have up and running so that interested parties can get whatever information they need. The website should have a workshop summary/schedule, dates, incentives, an email contact, and a link to the online application/registration.

There are a number of concerns to keep in mind when publicizing your workshop:

• Be clear about your target audience. CS teachers? Math/science teachers? National audience, or local? High school, early college, middle school?
• Be clear about the concrete teacher benefits--in particular, if you're offering credit or a stipend, make that loud and clear. Teachers have all kinds of ongoing-learning requirements to fulfill, and your workshop is very attractive if it will help them reach their quota. Some of the benefits you can offer by getting certified through the appropriate entities:
  • Clock hours. Washington state teachers need to earn 150 "clock hours" every 5 years to renew their teaching certificates. You need to certify your workshop for clock hours on a district-by-district basis.
  • University credit. Not only does university credit count as a lot of clock hours, but earning university credits moves teachers up on the pay scale--they'd rather have university credit than clock hours, all else being equal. Usually this will cost more per student than clock hours, however.
  • Stipend. Obviously this is expensive, but if you have the budget for it, offering a stipend to participating teachers is a great draw.

The following resources can be good ways to publicize your workshop:

• Your department's outreach coordinator--or anyone involved in outreach--probably has good leads.
• Incoming freshmen/majors are a source of high school contacts.
• ACM-TECS has contact lists which they will use to advertise your wokshop if you are certified with them.
• AP listservs. You must be a subscriber to post, but someone in the appropriate department of your university will be a member and will probably not mind passing along your ad.

Sample resources:

• 2007 General Publicity Blurb: (.rtf)
• Email for principals: (.rtf) This is what was sent to all of the principals we could find in Washington state.
• Email for referred teachers: (.rtf)

Feedback

Feedback is essential in order to determine what worked (or didn't) about your workshop. This goes for individual curricular elements as well as for the workshop as a whole--its general content and its logistics. Below are the feedback surveys used at UW. Of course you'll want to develop your own surveys reflecting the content of your own workshop, but these are good starting points.

• Survey A: Pre-workshop survey (.pdf), (.doc)
• Survey B: Post-workshop survey about the curriculum (.pdf), (.doc)
• Survey C: Post-workshop survey about the workshop's overall effectiveness. (.pdf), (.doc)

In future years it would be helpful to gather more concrete feedback about what parts of the curriculum are useful/useless and why. How can we actually make a difference in these teachers' attitudes and classrooms?

Budget

In 2007, the budget for about 70 attendees was a little over $40,000. In 2008, for about 50 participants, the cost was around $20,000. The budget depends a lot on the kind of food provided, whether housing is paid for by the workshop and whether guests are flown in from out of town. A very approximate cost estimate follows. It is likely that the cost categories will be similar between workshops, but the specific amounts will vary widely. The estimates assume roughly 50 guests.

Category	Estimate	Notes
Meals	$10,000	An hors d'oeuvres and drinks reception is a great way to encourage mingling and much less expensive than a sit-down dinner.
Clock Hours	$500	Different providers charge wildly different prices for the same service as far as we know
Credits	$2,000	Again, this depends on the provider. It could be much less than this
Amazon Cards	$1,000	To encourage participants to do the reading, we provided them with $20 Amazon gift certificates
Parking	$700
Housing	$5,000	We house in dorms