The Computer Science Frontiers (CSF) project introduces teachers to the topics of artificial intelligence and distributed computing to engage their female students in computing by connecting lessons to relevant cutting edge technologies. Application topics include social media and news articles, as well as climate change, the arts (movies, music, and museum collections), and public health/medicine. CSF educators are prepared in a pedagogy and peer-teaching centered professional development program where they simultaneously learn and teach distributed computing, artificial intelligence, and internet of things lessons to each other. These professional developments allow educators to hone in on their teaching skills of these new topics and gain confidence in their ability to teach new computer science materials before running several activities with their students in the academic year classroom. In this workshop, teachers participating in the CS Frontiers professional development will give testimonials discussing their experiences teaching these topics in a two week summer camp. Attendees will then try out three computing activities, one from each Computer Science Frontiers module. Finally, there will be a question and answer session.
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A Socially Relevant Focused AI Curriculum Designed for Female High School Students
Historically, female students have shown low interest in the field of computer science. Previous computer science curricula have failed to address the lack of female-centered computer science activities, such as socially relevant and real-life applications. Our new summer camp curriculum introduces the topics of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and other real-world subjects to engage high school girls in computing by connecting lessons to relevant and cutting edge technologies. Topics range from social media bots, sentiment of natural language in different media, and the role of AI in criminal justice, and focus on programming activities in the NetsBlox and Python programming languages. Summer camp teachers were prepared in a week-long pedagogy and peer-teaching centered professional development program where they concurrently learned and practiced teaching the curriculum to one another. Then, pairs of teachers led students in learning through hands-on AI and ML activities in a half-day, two-week summer camp. In this paper, we discuss the curriculum development and implementation, as well as survey feedback from both teachers and students.
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- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10408425
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
- Volume:
- 36
- Issue:
- 11
- ISSN:
- 2159-5399
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 12698 to 12705
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Creating pathways that stimulate high school learners’ interest in advanced topics with the goal of building a diverse, gender-balanced, future-ready workforce is crucial. To this end, we present the curriculum of a new, high school computer science course under development called Computer Science Frontiers (CSF). Building on the foundations set by the AP Computer Science Principles course, we seek to dramatically expand access, especially for high school girls, to the most exciting and emerging frontiers of computing, such as distributed computation, the internet of things (IoT), cybersecurity, and machine learning. The modular, open-access, hands-on curriculum provides an engaging introduction to these advanced topics in high school because currently they are accessible only to CS majors in college. It also focuses on other 21st century skills required to productively leverage computational methods and tools in virtually every profession. To address the dire gender disparity in computing, the curriculum was designed to engage female students by focusing on real world application domains, such as climate change and health, by including social applications and by emphasizing collaboration and teamwork. Our paper describes the design of curricular modules on Distributed Computing, IoT/Cybersecurity, and AI/Machine Learning. All project-based activities are designed to be collaborative, situated in contexts that are engaging to high school students, and often involve real-world world data. We piloted these modules in teacher PD workshops with 8 teachers from North Carolina, Tennessee, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and New York who then facilitated virtual summer camps with high school students in 2020 and 2021. Findings from teacher PD workshops as well as student camps indicate high levels of engagement in and enthusiasm for the curricular activities and topics. Post-intervention surveys suggest that these experiences generate student interest exploring these ideas further and connections to areas of interest to students.more » « less
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Computer Science (CS) Frontiers is a 4-module curriculum, 9 weeks each, designed to bring the frontiers of computing to high school girls for exploration and development. Our prior work has showcased the work in developing and piloting our first three modules, Distributed Computing, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the Internet of Things (IoT). During the summer of 2022, we piloted the completed curricula, including the new Software Engineering module, with 56 high school camp attendees. This poster reports on the newly developed software engineering module, the experiences of 7 teachers and 11 students using the module, and our plans for improving this module prior to its release in formal high school classrooms. Initial survey and interview data indicate that teachers became comfortable with facilitating the open-endedness of the final projects and that students appreciated the connections to socially relevant topics and the ability of their projects to help with real-world problems such as flood prevention and wheelchair accessibility. The CS Frontiers curriculum has been added to course offerings in Tennessee and adoption through the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction is currently underway. Teachers from Tennessee, North Carolina, Massachusetts, and New York have piloted the materials. Together with researchers, we are working to package the course and curricula for widespread adoption as additional support to students as they try out computing courses in their high school pathways. Our aim is to increase the interest and career awareness of CS for high school girls so they may have an equitable footing to choose CS as a potential major or career.more » « less
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Background. Software Engineering (SE) is a new and emerging topic in secondary computer science classrooms. However, a review of the recent literature has identified an overall lack of reporting on the development of SE secondary curriculum. Previous studies also report low student engagement when teaching these concepts. Objectives. In this experience report, we discuss the development of a 9-week, project-based learning (PBL) SE curriculum for secondary students. During this curriculum, students create a socially relevant project in groups of two to three. We discuss displays of participant engagement with CS concepts through the PBL pedagogy and the SE curriculum. Method. We examine participant engagement through group artifact interviews about student experiences during a week-long, virtual summer camp that piloted activities from our curriculum. During this camp, students followed a modified SE life cycle created by the authors of the paper. Findings. Participants showed engagement with the curriculum through various aspects of PBL, such as autonomy, creativity, and personal interest in their project topic. Implications. The lessons learned from this experience report suggest that PBL pedagogy can increase student engagement when teaching CS concepts, and this pedagogy provides detail and structure for future secondary SE curriculum implementations to support educators in the classroommore » « less
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v36i11.21546
