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A strategy for collaborative outreach: lessons from the CSbots project

Published: 10 March 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Many efforts are being made to improve computer science education in order to address the retention and motivation of students. These efforts rely on the development of educational tools and environments, tools that, when successful, require many years to integrate into the computer science education community. We introduce a strategy that both speeds uptake in the community and improves the chances of the project creating an educationally successful tool. The strategy hinges on creating an initial community of educators before an educational tool is fully mature but at the point at which it becomes usable by teachers. While this is somewhat analogous to the beta-testing communities in software development, our aim is for the community to drive the underlying design in significant ways. Our context is CSbots, a project to develop a robot, software environment, and associated curricula for introductory computer science education. We detail our collaborative outreach effort, which resulted in the concurrent creation of a community of 30 invested educators and a well aligned educational tool ready for broad dissemination.

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Cooper, S., Dann, W., & Pausch, R. Teaching objects first in introductory computer science. Proceedings of the 34th SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE 2003), Reno, NV
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Blum, L., Cortina, T., Lazowska, E., and Wise, J., "Special Session: The Expansion of CS4HS: An Outreach Program for High School Teachers", SIGCSE 2008, Portland, OR.
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Kelleher, C. and Pausch, R., "Lowering the barriers to programming: A taxonomy of programming environments and languages for novice programmers." ACM Comput. Surv., 37(2), pg 83--137, 2005.
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Lauwers, T., Nourbakhsh, I., and Hamner, E., "CSbots: Design and Deployment of a Robot Designed for the CS1 Classroom", SIGCSE 2009, pg 428--432, Chattanooga, TN
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Cited By

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  • (2018)A Robotics Experience for All the Students in an Elementary SchoolProceedings of the 49th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education10.1145/3159450.3159567(729-734)Online publication date: 21-Feb-2018
  • (2017)Motivating Teachers to Teach Computing in Middle School – A Case Study of a Physical Computing Taster Workshop for K-12 TeachersInternational Journal of Computer Science Education in Schools10.21585/ijcses.v1i4.171:4(35-49)Online publication date: 31-Oct-2017
  • (2016)Robotics for EducationSpringer Handbook of Robotics10.1007/978-3-319-32552-1_79(2115-2134)Online publication date: 27-Jul-2016
  • Show More Cited By

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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGCSE '10: Proceedings of the 41st ACM technical symposium on Computer science education
March 2010
618 pages
ISBN:9781450300063
DOI:10.1145/1734263
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 10 March 2010

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Author Tags

  1. computer programming
  2. csbots
  3. high school
  4. outreach
  5. participatory design
  6. robotics
  7. teacher training
  8. workshop

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Cited By

View all
  • (2018)A Robotics Experience for All the Students in an Elementary SchoolProceedings of the 49th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education10.1145/3159450.3159567(729-734)Online publication date: 21-Feb-2018
  • (2017)Motivating Teachers to Teach Computing in Middle School – A Case Study of a Physical Computing Taster Workshop for K-12 TeachersInternational Journal of Computer Science Education in Schools10.21585/ijcses.v1i4.171:4(35-49)Online publication date: 31-Oct-2017
  • (2016)Robotics for EducationSpringer Handbook of Robotics10.1007/978-3-319-32552-1_79(2115-2134)Online publication date: 27-Jul-2016
  • (2015)Robotic Fish: Design and Characterization of an Interactive iDevice-Controlled Robotic Fish for Informal Science EducationIEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine10.1109/MRA.2014.238136722:1(86-96)Online publication date: Mar-2015
  • (2015)Starting from scratchProceedings of the 2015 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE)10.1109/FIE.2015.7344237(1-8)Online publication date: 21-Oct-2015
  • (2014)Making games a "snap" with StencylProceedings of the 45th ACM technical symposium on Computer science education10.1145/2538862.2538978(169-174)Online publication date: 5-Mar-2014
  • (2013)Exploring the Relationships between Self-Efficacy and Preference for Teacher Authority among Computer Science MajorsJournal of Educational Computing Research10.2190/EC.49.2.d49:2(189-207)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2013
  • (2013)Going mobile with app inventor for androidProceeding of the 44th ACM technical symposium on Computer science education10.1145/2445196.2445324(433-438)Online publication date: 6-Mar-2013
  • (2013)Increasing high school girls awareness of computer science through summer camp2013 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON)10.1109/EduCon.2013.6530111(231-237)Online publication date: Mar-2013
  • (2012)The localization of CS4HS workshop for serving national computing curriculum2012 7th International Conference on Computer Science & Education (ICCSE)10.1109/ICCSE.2012.6295372(1610-1615)Online publication date: Jul-2012
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