MyCS: Middle-years Computer Science

PI: M. Erlinger co-PI: Z. Dodds

MyCS seeks to make creating computation a part of as many students' identities as possible.

Partnering Districts

Assessment and summer workshops

Hypothesis and curriculum

URL: www.cs.hmc.edu/~cs5grad/MyCS

The MyCS curriculum leverages resources from the beautiful Exploring Computer Science curriculum such as the computer-disassembly poster (upper left). The teachers who take the workshop find the experience a compelling one, too (left).

MyCS also punctuates outstanding Scratch-based middle-school curricula (e.g., of Lewis, et al.) with computational activities from CS Unplugged and elsewhere (top middle and right, lower left). We hypothesize that students will develop a stronger self-identification with the field through the resulting repeated opportunities for personal engagement with creating computation.

Pilot programs supported by Google's CS4HS effort made it possible to establish partnerships with administrators and teachers across Pomona, CA's and Kauai, HI's school districts. Both have made MyCS a requirement-satisfying elective.

The project hypothesizes that punctuated skill-building (1) will be a more compelling curricular option for teachers and (2) more deeply establish computational creativity as part of students' identities, when compared to a linear, graduated curriculum and a pure breadth-based approach to the same material.

To date our assessment has centered on the summer workshops' outcomes, i.e., how many MyCS classes stem from teachers' participation. More than 30 sections have been offered, reaching almost 1,000 students. This CE project now enables us to assess student outcomes, too.

Our primary partners are the Pomona, CA unified school district, whose students include a large majority of Latino/a students, and Kauai, HI's school district, a plurality of whose students are also underrepresented in post-secondary STEM fields. These districts have tested MyCS; this project enables full deployment.

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