The localization of CS4HS workshop for serving national computing curriculum

Most high school students in Saudi Arabia are not aware of computer science concepts and think of them as the competency of using computer applications. This misconception originated from the curriculum taught at high schools, which is more application oriented in nature and does not provide a solid background in computer science concepts. In this paper, we describe a three days localized version of CS4HS workshop dedicated for female high school computer teachers held at King Saud University (KSU) female section. The workshop aims to push the computer teachers towards bridging the educational gap between high school and undergraduate computer science programs, and propose new ideas and guides for improving the current high school computer curriculum. The workshop also focuses on exposing female computer teachers on how to enrich current national curriculum with activities that are interactive, hands-on, and provide tangible skills to students. Initial results after conducting the workshop shows that the content of international CS4HS workshops can be localized to serve the needs of our national computing curriculum. Also post workshop evaluation shows that the experience was successful and achieved its main goals.