DOHA • Carnegie Mellon University is organising a three-day training workshop for local school teachers. The professional development workshop on CS4Qatar, a new programme, is to be conducted by the Faculty of Computer Science and it is tailored to reach out to technology, math and computer science teachers in local schools and middle schools.

Faculty members from both Pittsburgh and Qatar will provide resources to teachers that will better allow them to teach computer science principles in a fun and relevant way. This includes helping teachers understand all of the exciting career possibilities that are available to students who go on to study computer science in college.

"We're finding that a lot of teachers don't know what computer science is," says Majd Sakr, professor of computer science. "If we can help teachers understand what the field of computer science encompasses, they will be better equipped to educate their students and enhance computer science programs at their schools."

The workshop is comprised of seminars on three topics. The first session is "computer science unplugged: how to teach and learn computer science without programming." This session will focus on how teachers can convey the concepts of computer science without a computer. It will include discussions and demonstrations of fundamental concepts of computer science that can be taught in the classroom devoid of any programming language or assignments.

The second day will be devoted solely to Alice, an object-based, 3-D graphics authoring environment used to teach computer programming principles to students in middle school and high school. The Alice environment makes it easy for students to get excited about programming by manipulating objects in a 3-D graphical environment and ultimately using those manipulations to tell "stories," a subject many young minds find fascinating.

The workshop will conclude with a day-long seminar on Java, an object-oriented programming language that is widely used in introductory courses in programming and computer science. Java is the delivery language of the College Board's Advanced Placement course in computer science.

CS4Qatar will run from June 1 till June 3. Space is limited to 50 math, technology and computer science teachers from Qatar. To register visit www.qatar.cmu.edu/cs4qatar.