CSTA Golden Crab Winner, 10/2023

"Stephen Sell has been the driving force behind the expansion of our Computer Science program at Northwest High School in Montgomery County.  Since joining NWHS in 2019, he has grown the enrollment of our computer science classes by visiting the middle schools, sponsoring the CS Honor Society, engaging with students, and adding interesting activities to the classes.  He created the Computer Programming 3 class in 2020 which initially had about 3 students and this year has about 25 students.  Interest in the class has grown rapidly due to the interesting, hands-on projects that Stephen has the students complete.  Stephen spends countless extra hours to make computer science engaging and interesting for all students."

-CSTA MD

Tell us about your work in CS education!

I currently teach Honors Computer Programming 1, APCSA, and Adv. Computer Programming 3. We try to diversify the options for our students in our courses by teaching Python and Arduino Boards in Programming 1, Java, of course in APCSA, and a gamut of computer science topics in Adv. Computer Programming 3. The Carnegie Mellon Introduction to Programming curriculum is very engaging and fun for our Programming 1 students and also provides a great array (sorry, pun actually NOT intended) of ways to differentiate instruction for ALL of our students and their learning in the course. We use the CS Awesome curriculum for APCSA but enhance it with teacher created projects in Replit and in Eclipse, as well as using Finch robots and graphically driven Processing projects to reach a variety of learning styles. The foundational curriculum in Adv. Programming 3 is the College Programming and Computer Science Curriculum from Carnegie Melllon but also enhance the course with Raspberry Pi projects, as well as projects on the software development cycle (Agile and Scrum), teacher created Python projects in Replit and Eclipse, and some Cyber Security and AI projects to expand their learning to the world beyond programming.