This project provides support for a planning phase to extend and refine the Computing Educator Oral History project. The Computing Educator Oral History project is a multi-year grassroots effort within the computing educator community to create a historical record of computing educators to serve as a source of inspiration and information for the field and to preserve the history of the field's pioneers. This project develops plans for a 3-5 year period which will fully develop both the technical and intellectual components oral history collection as well plans for outreach to a broad user community.
Intellectual Merit: This project will preserve the narratives of pioneers in computing education and create a repository for doing thematic studies of their career pathways. It fills a critical need for a well developed, user-accessible collection that focuses both on the history of computing educators and on the underrepresented groups within that population.
Broader Impact: The Computing Educator Oral History collection may encourage prospective computing students through providing relevant role model stories. It will allow historians to study pathways of early pioneers in computing education. Project such as this one can play a key role in increasing the population of people entering and staying in computing careers, particularly computing education careers.
