Tom McKlin

Effective and sustainable computing summer camps

universities. But, it is not enough to offer computing summer camps and hope that students like them. The camps should be effective by some measure, such as broadening participation by underrepresented groups and/or increasing learning. Summer camps should also be financially sustainable, so that institutions can continue to offer them regularly. The summer camps at Georgia Tech have become effective and financially sustainable. This paper presents the rationale for our camps, the evaluation results that demonstrate positive attitude changes and increases in learning, and the business model that makes them financially sustainable. It also reports on the evaluation results from seven other colleges and universities in Georgia that offered computing summer camps during the summer of 2011 with assistance from Georgia Tech.

Georgia Computes! An Intervention in a US State, with Formal and Informal Education in a Policy Context

Georgia Computes! (GaComputes) was a six-year (2006--2012) project to improve computing education across the state of Georgia in the United States, funded by the National Science Foundation. The goal of GaComputes was to broaden participation in computing and especially to engage more members of underrepresented groups which includes women, African Americans, and Hispanics. GaComputes’ interventions were multi-faceted and broad: summer camps and after-school/weekend programs for 4th--12th grade students, professional development for secondary teachers, and professional development for post-secondary instructors faculty. All of the efforts were carefully evaluated by an external team (led by the third and fourth authors), which provides us with an unusually detailed view into a computing education intervention across a region (about 59K square miles, about 9.9 million residents). Our dataset includes evaluations from over 2,000 students who attended after-school or weekend workshops, over 500 secondary school teachers who attended professional development, 120 post-secondary teachers who attended professional development, and over 2,000 students who attended a summer day (non-residential) camp. GaComputes evaluations provide insight into details of interventions and into influences on student motivation and learning. In this article, we describe the results of these evaluations and describe how GaComputes broadened participation in computing in Georgia through both direct interventions and indirect support of other projects.

Engaging underrepresented groups in high school introductory computing through computational remixing with EarSketch

In this paper, we describe a pilot study of EarSketch, a computational remixing approach to introductory computer science, in a formal academic computing course at the high school level. The EarSketch project provides an integrated curriculum, Python API, digital audio workstation (DAW), audio loop library, and social sharing site. The goal for EarSketch is to broaden participation in computing, particularly by traditionally underrepresented groups, through a thickly authentic learning environment that has personal and industry relevance in both computational and artistic domains. The pilot results show statistically significant gains in computing attitudes across multiple constructs, with particularly strong results for female and minority participants.

Saving Face While Geeking Out: Video Game Testing as a Justification for Learning Computer Science.

Why would individuals who are capable of learning opt not to? Learning is important for stability and success. It would seem rational that students in groups that are frequently underrepresented or marginalized would be motivated to learn. However, negotiation of multiple identities and self-beliefs can impact motivations to learn. For example, young African American males frequently adopt a “cool pose” in their approach to education. They maintain that they do not care and will not try to be a part of the existing educational system. To better understand these issues, we studied African American males in the Glitch Game Testers program. High school students in the Glitch program worked as paid game testers and took workshops in computer science. More than 65% of the participants went on to study computing after high school. We found that these students persisted with education and computing because they navigated around motivations to not learn by creating many different faces for their involvement with Glitch. In this article, we explore the use and design implications of face-saving tactics these young men used to “geek out” on computer programming, choose computer science for their career, and maintain their current identities with friends and families.

Tackling engagement in computing with computational music remixing

In this paper, we describe EarSketch, an integrated curriculum, software toolset, and social media website, grounded in constructionist principles, that targets introductory high school computing education. We hypothesize that the use of collaborative computational music composition and remixing may avoid some of the engagement and culture-specific issues that other approaches, both in music and other media, have had. We discuss the design of EarSketch, its use in a pilot summer camp, and the evaluation results from that pilot.

Project rise up 4 CS: increasing the number of black students who pass advanced placement CS A

This paper describes Project Rise Up 4 CS, an attempt to increase the number of Black students in Georgia that pass the Advanced Placement (AP) Computer Science (CS) A exam. In 2012 Black students had the lowest pass rates on the AP CS A exam both in Georgia and nationally. Project Rise Up 4 CS provided Black students with role models, hands-on learning, competitions, a financial incentive, and webinars on AP CS A content. The first cohort started in January of 2013 and finished in May 2013. Of the 27 students who enrolled in the first cohort, 14 met all of the completion requirements, and 9 (69%) of the 13 who took the exam passed. For comparison, in 2012 only 22 (16%) of 137 Black students passed the exam in Georgia. In 2013, 28 (22%) of 129 Black students passed the exam in Georgia. This was the highest number of Black students to pass the AP CS A exam ever in Georgia and a 27% increase from 2012. In addition, students who met the completion requirements for Project Rise Up 4 CS exhibited statistically significant changes in attitudes towards computing and also demonstrated significant learning gains. This paper discusses the motivation for the project, provides project details, presents the evaluation results, and future plans.

Preparing secondary computer science teachers through an iterative development process

An enormous challenge to computing education in secondary schools worldwide is the lack of secondary computer science teachers. The Institute for Computing Education (ICE) has been offering teacher professional development in an attempt to increase the quantity and quality of secondary computing teachers in Georgia in the United States of America since 2004. We have developed our teacher professional development over the last ten years with an iterative cycle of design, development, delivery, and evaluation.

EarSketch: An integrated approach to teaching introductory computer music

EarSketch is an all-in-one approach to supporting a holistic introductory course to computer music as an artistic pursuit and a research practice. Targeted to the high school and undergraduate levels, EarSketch enables students to acquire a strong foundation in electroacoustic composition, computer music research and computer science. It integrates a Python programming environment with a commercial digital audio workstation program (Cockos’ Reaper) to provide a unified environment within which students can use programmatic techniques in tandem with more traditional music production strategies to compose music. In this paper we discuss the context and goals of EarSketch, its design and implementation, and its use in a pilot summer camp for high school students.

EarSketch: A STEAM-Based Approach for Underrepresented Populations in High School Computer Science Education

This article presents EarSketch, a learning environment that combines computer programming with sample-based music production to create a computational remixing environment for learning introductory computing concepts. EarSketch has been employed in both formal and informal settings, yielding significant positive results in student content knowledge and attitudes toward computing as a discipline, especially in ethnic and gender populations that are currently underrepresented in computing fields. This article describes the rationale and components of EarSketch, the evaluation design, and lessons learned to apply to future environment design and development.

EarSketch: A STEAM approach to broadening participation in computer science principles

The EarSketch computer science learning environment and curriculum (http://earsketch.gatech.edu) seeks to increase and broaden participation in computing using a STEAM (STEM + Arts) approach. EarSketch creates an authentic learning environment in that it is both personally meaningful and industry relevant in terms of its STEM component (computing) and its artistic domain (music remixing). Students learn to code in JavaScript or Python, tackling learning objectives in the Computer Science Principles curricular framework as they simultaneously learn core concepts in music technology. They create music through code by uploading their own audio content or remixing loops in popular genres created by music industry veterans. No prior experience in music or computer science is required. EarSketch is entirely browser-based and free.