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Designing and running a pre-college computing course

Enrollments in undergraduate computer science programs have declined steadily over the past few years. Overall, high school computer science curriculum is limited to either basic usage of Microsoft office tools or some advanced placement programming. Student expectations of undergraduate computer science courses for non-majors as well as the scope of computer science literacy in general are moving targets. All these problems have a negative impact on undergraduate recruitment and on promoting computing sciences courses and programs. In this paper we present our experience with a pre-college course in computing for high-school students offered at our College in the summer of 2004. We have learned promising lessons from running this program. These lessons can guide the curriculum design of computing courses for non-majors and motivate prospective students to pursue computer science programs.