Chiara S.

Chiara has been teaching for 17 years. Prior to teaching, she worked as a database developer. After taking time off to have two children, she earned an MAT in Secondary Mathematics from Monmouth University in 2009. When her first math students learned that she used to be a programmer, they begged her to start a CS class, because their school didn't have one. She fell in love with teaching CS, and has been doing it ever since. From 2012-2018, she was at an independent day school, Ranney School, in NJ. There, she grew their CS program from 7 students in 2012 to 84 students in 2018. She served as advisor to their internationally recognized VEX robotics program. She coached a team that came in 2nd place at the CREATE US Open (losing by one point) and another team that won a THINK Award (for programming) at the CREATE US Open for their use of arrays that stored successive heights for a robot to stack a tower. She started a competitive coding club that competed in the annual Widener University High School Programming Contest and a Girls Who Code club. She currently teaches AP CS A, AP CS Principles, and Algebra 2 at Emma Willard, a girl's boarding school, in Troy, NY. She is the advisor of the school's CREATE Club (Coding, Robotics, Engineering, AT Emma). Chiara is passionate about PD and typically spends several weeks each summer learning new skills and ideas. In 2019, she spent the month of July in Australia on a teacher exchange at a girls' boarding school in Brisbane. In June of 2019, she attended the NCGS (National Coalition of Girls' Schools) annual conference in Pasadena, which focused on STEM education. A highlight in recent years has been attending two Grace Hopper Celebrations: in 2018 in Houston and in 2022 in Orlando. And, she went to her first ever CSTA annual conference in Chicago in the summer of 2022. During the 2023-2024 school year she was enrolled in The Coding School's Machine Learning and AI course, part of a teacher cohort learning how to code various AI algorithms. She was a reader for the AP CS Principles CREATE and EXPLORE tasks in 2017 and 2018. She was on the executive committee of the Capital Region's chapter of CSTA (Computer Science Teacher's Association) for two years. Chiara is particularly excited that many of her former female students have gone on to major in computer science and are now working at various technology companies, such as Facebook, Mitre, Apple, and Microsoft.