The Shodor Education Foundation, Inc (Dr. Robert Panoff, Director) teams with the Latin American and Caribbean Consortium of Engineering Institutions (LACCEI), and Engineering for the Americas (EftA) (of the Organization of American States) to conduct a planning and development effort in Colombia leading to an expanded international collaboration between the US and Colombia to support teacher training programs promoting inquiry-based learning enhanced by computational thinking tools, techniques, and technologies. Key US and Colombian LACCEI members, and pedagogical experts in the US and Colombia will meet to develop a regional/ national teacher training program targeting STEM teachers and university professors teaching 6th grade through the first two years of undergraduate. The Program Development Workshop consists of two parts. The first is to conduct a Train the Trainers workshop for the participants to acquire knowledge of the technology and pedagogy being implemented through Shodor in conjunction with techniques and technologies being developed by the ONDAS program at COLCIENCIAS (NSF counterpart); pedagogical experts in Colombia from the National Pedagogical University; and the research group EDUCING from ACOFI (the Colombian Engineering Faculty Association- Dr. Eduardo Selva, Executive Director). The second part is on the development of a teacher training program in Colombia in the identified approaches and technologies that can scale regionally or nationally. By conducting this workshop in a Hispanic environment, it is anticipated that Noyce scholars and U.S. researchers will learn about multicultural issues that affect motivation of minorities to participate in STEM; new materials would be available in Spanish and English. The exposure of interaction in situation of multiple languages and multiple cultures sensitizes participants and further globalizes them. The interaction provides collaboration among the U.S. and Colombian teachers trained in the program, providing international collaboration activities within their classroom and affecting the globalization of the students. The materials will also be available and disseminated through Shodor's National Computational Science Institute and its Computational Science Education Reference Desk, a Pathway portal of the National Science Digital Library to all schools implementing the NSF Noyce Teacher Scholarship and Fellowship program. This international project is jointly funded through the Office of International Science and Engineering and the EHR/DUE Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship and Fellowship Program.
