For nearly a decade, supported with funding from NSF and private and corporate foundations, students in and near Durham have benefited from the workshops, apprenticeships, and internships offered by Shodor, a national resource in computational science education. Funding from CI-TEAM, ITEST and NSDL programs have provided the "AdVenture Capital" for Shodor to try novel outreach efforts to excite and attract students to consider study and careers in science, mathematics, and medicine. The result is Computing MATTERS, a coherent continuum of other than school-time activities from upper elementary grades through college for students to encounter the excitement of discovery, the power of inquiry, and the joy of learning enabled by cyberinfrastructure technologies. Leveraging this tested and proven model that combines training of teachers and near-peer exploration leaders, effective STEM education experiences for students at all levels, advancement of students from diverse backgrounds to positions of leadership, and continuous mentoring, Shodor has developed a partnership with universities, community centers, school districts and Sigma Xi to extend Computing MATTERS first to a wide geographic area reaching the very corners of the Research Triangle, and then to span the state of North Carolina.
In Computing MATTERS, "MATTERS" is itself an acronym and has meaning in its own right: Mentoring Academic Transitions Through Experiences in Research and Service. The program combines the best of Shodor's efforts from workshops, apprenticeships and internships that have developed along the lines of the goals of CI-TEAM from the beginning. We help elementary and middle school students build and sustain an interest in science, mathematics, and technology through their high school years, and help high school students to see themselves being successful and happy pursuing studies in college and careers in STEM areas, while offering internships for college students to serve as developers and mentors in the program. We want to build self-sustaining local infrastructures, adapting the best features of Shodor's local initiatives, while expanding the mentor base to include colleges and universities and members of Sigma Xi living and working in North Carolina.
Intellectual Merit: Computing "matters" because quantitative reasoning, computational thinking, and multiscale modeling are the intellectual "heart and soul" of 21st Century science and therefore are the essential skills of the 21st Century workforce. Computing "matters" because it moves students others have identified as "at risk" to students self-identified as "competent, capable, motivated, and employable." Computing "matters" because we can demonstrate the power of interactive computing to help reach a deeper understanding of math and science, while making the science "minds on" as well as "hands on." This implementation project will test the viability of the Shodor framework for sustainable outreach.
Broader Impact: Computational explorations provide the context-rich experiences that attract otherwise underrepresented groups into STEM areas. We are scaling our work by demonstrating that Computing MATTERS works beyond Shodor, serving as a model for dissemination of successful programs. Our goal is to enable students all over North Carolina, and the nation eventually, to share the same growth from excitement to experience to expertise through research opportunities and service as students in Shodor's hometown. Materials will be vetted through the rigorous Verification, Validation, Accreditation (VVA) process employed by Shodor's Computational Science Education Reference Desk CSERD, a Pathway portal of the National Science Digital Library; research and evaluation results will be featured in the Journal of Computational Science Education.
