NSF Broadening Participation in Computing ProgramGrant #0634629August 2008 Annual ReportProject “Georgia Computes!”

EDUCATION AND RESEARCH ACTIVITIES

The goal of Project “Georgia Computes!” is to improve the quality of computing education throughout the pipeline and across the state, and in so doing, increase the flow of qualified students in undergraduate and graduate computing programs. The growth of these programs is reflected in Table 1.

Table 1: Participation in Georgia Computes! activities

  Pipeline Years Num

YWCA WorkshopsK-12 2006-2007 30  2007-2008 40

Girl Scouts Computing Workshops K-122005-2006 190

2006-2007 372

2007-2008 1300

HCI Camps 

K-12 2007 10  2008 15

CS AP Teachers 

TeachersK-12 

2003-2004 44

2007-2008 87

Faculty Workshops 

Faculty 

2007 26

2008 14

Summer Workshops (260 unique teachers have taken one or more workshops with us)

Teachers 

2004 40

2005 72

2006 79

2007 82

2008 92Summer Camps at Colleges and Universities Institutions 2006 1

2007 4

2008 6

K-12 We hosted robot activities at all of the Fall 2007 Father and Daughter Jamboree

weekends. We pre-built the robots and had the girls program the robots to go through a course. Each day about 60 girls engaged in the robot activity.

The number of offerings, and the number of Girl Scouts participating, grew enormously during 2007-2008 to over 800 girls (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Number of girls participating in our workshop activities

We continue to work with YWCA afterschool programs, including coaching their teams in robotics competitions (Figure 2).

Figure 2: An All-Female, majority African-American LEGO FIRST team, sponsored by "Georgia Computes!" and a first for the Atlanta YWCA TGI-Tech Program.

In Summer 2007, we taught five weeks of workshops for high school teachers through the Georgia Tech Institute for Computing Education (ICE), with lodging, meals, and parking for distance participants paid through Project “Georgia Computes!” 92 teachers attended.

We held a total of 10 weeks of camp for middle school students for high school students. Activities in the middle school camps include MIT's Scratch, PicoCrickets, CMU's Alice, and LEGO NXT robots. Activities in the high school include CMU's Alice, LEGO NXT robots, and Media Computation in Python.

Undergraduate We conducted two faculty workshops in Atlanta explicitly aimed at University

System of Georgia faculty. At our Media Computation workshop on May 19, 26 faculty attended, 11 of whom were from University System of Georgia institutions. At our First Courses workshop on May 22, all 7 faculty attendeding

were from University System of Georgia schools. Figure 3 lists the institutions that we have now touched with training. (Some schools not marked, like Gainesville State, have already been working with us on new curricula, though they have not participated in workshops.)

We continue to offer assessment and adoption/adaptation assistance to University schools, to help them adapt a teaching method that they wish to adopt and assess its impact. Columbus State University is submitting a poster to SIGCSE 2009 about their new introductory courses, with our help on assessment. Georgia Gwinnett College submitted a SIGCSE 2009 paper about their novel IT curriculum that utilizes some of the curricular approaches we have taught.

We are continuing to work with the central office of the University System of Georgia to gather data on computer science enrollment and success in first courses across the state.

Figure 3: Where faculty have been trained in novel introductory curriculum

Integrative We continue design and implementation work on the on-line space described in

our proposal, where K-12 students might share their computing artifacts, view others’, and meet undergraduate and graduate role models. However, since our proposal, tools such as MySpace and Facebook have become the de facto standard places for sharing and meeting others. Rather than develop our own, we are exploring what we might do in conjunction with these existing spaces. A new Facebook application, Splat!, is being developed by Sarita Yardi and Amy Bruckman as a tool for encouraging sharing of computational artifacts across Facebook.

We provided seed funding to four schools in the University System of Georgia to offer middle school and high school summer camps around the state of Georgia: Kennesaw University, Georgia Southwestern University, Albany State University, and Georgia Tech’s Savannah Campus.

Lijun Ni and Tom McKlin continue to study adopters and non-adopters of new curricular approaches, at both the high school and undergraduate levels. They are working to characterize what support teachers need to be successful in adopting new approaches.

Mike Hewner, who has been developing curricular materials for Barbara Ericson, conducted a study of seniors at Georgia Tech, asking the question, “What impact did computing classes have on students, majors and non-majors, at the time of graduation?”

In Summer 2007, Sarita Yardi taught a six-week Introduction to HCI course to 10 Atlanta junior high public school students, the majority of whom are African American. She surveyed this group as well as an additional 20 African American junior high school students as a control group to learn about students’ attitudes towards computers and the Internet. The goal of this course was to teach students HCI skills and to motivate them to consider careers in computing. They used pre and post-surveys, interviews, video data, and a 6-week technology design project to measure the effects of the course on the students. The results were not resoundingly positive.

A revision of the effort was piloted in Summer 2008, where Jill Dimond asked Girl Scouts at a summer camp to develop chat tools (including a small programming component) for the XO laptop, to enable children in the developing world to chat electronically. Jill utilized much of Sarita’s curricular design and survey instruments.

New EffortsIn 2007-2008, we started new efforts as an outgrowth of current efforts.

We have started a new effort to capitalize on the interest of African-American males in console video games. Betsy diSalvo, working with Amy Bruckman, has started a new effort. They have applied for a BPC Demonstration grant to support that project, in partnership with several video game companies and Morehouse College, an all-male HBCU in Atlanta.

Barbara Ericson has started discussions with Girls, Inc. about expanding our efforts with Girl Scouts and YWCA to their organization.

Based on findings from Tom McKlin’s interviews with high school and undergraduate CS teachers, we have applied for and received CPATH funding to create a Disciplinary Commons in Computing Education (DCCE). Tom found that teachers complain about isolation, about not knowing what happens at the other level (e.g., high school teachers wonder what happens in undergraduate CS, and vice-versa), and about a lack of suitable assessment that would help them understand how well their students are doing. In the DCCE, up to 12 teachers (half high school, half undergraduate) would meet every-other-month for a year, to discuss common issues and embark on joint mini-research projects where they would measure something about their own classes. The effort builds on Lijun Ni’s studies of CS teachers and Allison Tew’s work in developing reliable and valid assessments of CS knowledge.

Mark Guzdial gave a “Innovative First Courses” workshop in July at Amherst, MA, for faculty associated with CAITE. 19 faculty members attended. This represents an initial collaboration between “Georgia Computes!” and CAITE.