Work In Progress-CS0 Course Implementation in Computer Science

The Computing Alliance of Hispanic Serving Institutions (http://cahsi.fiu.edu), a consortium of 7 institutions focused on the recruitment, retention, and advancement of Hispanics in computing, is implementing and promoting the development of recruitment mechanisms to attract other majors to the field of Computer Science. CS has lost roughly 50% of its majors in the last 5 years. The member institutions have introduced a 3-credit hour course called CS0 that is intended to motivate students, especially those who have a weak background in computing, to continue studies in computing and to prepare students for success in the first CS course. There are two models that are being implemented: one using Alice software and another using Python. CAHSI is creating a repository for support materials for dissemination of each of the implementations and collecting data to determine the success of the approaches. This paper discusses the structure, materials, and implementations, and presents preliminary results.