On January 17th BootUp’s CEO, Lien Diaz, spoke at one of the CSTA’s PD Provider Summits. As part of the PD Provider Summit’s focus on the CSTA Professional Learning Standards' Ethics and Impacts of Computing strand to CS leaders and educators. Lien spoke about the importance of elevating the teaching profession and including educators in efforts made toward equitable computer science education. Lien added on that professional development should go beyond content expertise to support educators in providing equitable computer science education.

BootUp is dedicated to empowering elementary teachers and students through computer science and creating equitable computer science programs in underserved communities. Since 2015, BootUp has worked with over 1,500 elementary schools impacting over 950,000 students, providing in-person professional development, instructional coaching, and on-site support that prepare teachers to facilitate coding projects.

BootUp aims to empower educators to see themselves as change agents in the world of computer science as they and curriculum and PD providers have a lot of power to influence what’s viewed as “normal” in the CS classroom. In service of this, BootUp has pulled together an intersect framework to encapsulate research based perspectives around principled approaches to addressing and removing barriers and challenges when teaching CS.