Computer Science Education

STELAR recently caught up with Irene Lee about her work on Project GUTS: Growing Up Thinking Scientifically. Code.org has entered into a partnership with Irene Lee to roll out Project GUTS across the nation as part of their middle school computer science training.

The project is creating and assessing an adaptable scale-up model that enables the participation of underserved audiences in intensive, experiential STEM learning, acquisition of 21st century skills, and increased engineering career awareness.

The COMPUGIRLS Scale-Up project utilizes a culturally relevant technology (CRT) program to prepare girls ages 13-18 from the Phoenix high needs district to enter the STEM workforce. This project builds on the successful NSF-funded COMPUGIRLS award (DRL 08-33773), which uses social justice-based multimedia projects to engage young women in activities that increase knowledge, understanding, and awareness of careers in STEM and information and communications technology (ICT).

The project uses Mobot (a modular robotics platform designed for K-12 education) to prepare teachers to engage students with relevant pedagogy that illustrates abstract math concepts with concrete applications using computing and robotics.

Two successive MESA cohorts totaling 80 local underrepresented high school students take a one-year introductory computer game programming course at the university and at their high school, along with mentoring and other activities.

Embedded in existing computing education and STEM courses, the project-developed curriculum--Scalable Game Design (SGD)--introduces middle school students to computational thinking through game design and advances them to STEM simulation design.

Visual programming in 3D sounds much more appealing than programming in 2D, but what are its benefits? Here, University of Colorado Boulder educators discuss the differences between 2D and 3D regarding three concepts connecting computer graphics to computer science education: ownership, spatial thinking, and syntonicity.

This paper suggests a Cyberlearning tool based on a highly innovative assessment methodology that helps teachers with computer science education. Currently, there is a strong push to integrate aspects of programming and coding into the classroom environment. However, few if any tools exist that enable real-time formative assessment of in-class programming tasks.

In this paper we lay out our strategy of our Scalable Game Design curriculum, which has been funded through a series of NSF (ITEST Strategy, CE21 Type II, and ITEST Scale Up) grants as well as the Google CS4HS program, and list some research questions relevant to bringing Computer Science education to middle schools.

Currently, obesity has become one of the major health concerns in the United States. A way to relieve this problem is creating fitness activities using the technology and tools available at hand. “Punching Pad” is a prototype that utilizes Scratch for Arduino software and the Arduino Board to make this possible. This device is not only considered a viable fitness activity, but also it could help to inspire children to build other gadgets that, in fact, would facilitate the acquisition of programming skills and basic electronics concepts.

Through their focus on integrating computing and robotics into regular STEM classroom with hands-on project-based learning, the C-STEM Center, part of ITEST project Co-Robots for STEM Education in the 21st Century, has developed innovative teaching strategies, textbooks, and courseware.

ITEST project Scaling up an Innovative Approach for Attracting Students to Computing shares its materials and lesson plans developed from its workshop series on its website. Originally used and created as part of a workshop series for middle school and high school teachers to learn how to incorporate Alice into their own lesson plans, the curricula provided are designed for use with middle school and high school students.