The United States continues to face a crisis in the development of highly-skilled workers in science, engineering, and technology. Computing has deeply permeated every aspect of our society, and every field has been transformed by the recent arrival of affordable high-performance computing. Despite this pervasive growth of computation throughout engineering and science, university level computing education is still largely separated from other disciplines. It is crucial to develop a scientific and engineering workforce with a thorough understanding of the fundamental conceptual ideas from computer science and software engineering that pertain to a specific domain and the skills necessary to apply them to their field of expertise. The University of Texas at El Paso proposes a Conceptual and Development Planning (CDP) project that will support the institutional groundwork to develop synergistic multidisciplinary curricula combinations across the departments of Computer Science, Biological Sciences and Economics and Finance that will provide students with substantive content in domains not typically provided by traditional academic degrees. The overarching goal of this project is to support the conceptual design and planning for the creation of a computing-centric, interdisciplinary, and cross-fertilizing model that spans the institution?s academic structures. This proposal addresses these needs by developing a comprehensive approach to developing skills in relevant aspects of computation and algorithm design in students in a wide variety of scientific disciplines. The team will develop a new computational curriculum suitable for students whose careers will overlap. The principal focus is the development of multidisciplinary academic programs, built from collaborative work between the involved constituents, rather than the creation of new academic units. These multidisciplinary academic programs will convey sufficient depth to prepare students to make significant contributions in their respective fields. This project will permit the investigation of the assertion that collaborative work between computer science, and disciplines where the participation of women is more reflective of the population, e.g., biology and social sciences, can help reverse the trend of a small proportion of women graduating with a computing related degree or an engineering degree.
PI: Eric Freudenthal Awardee: University of Texas at El Paso Award number: 0829683 Award expiration: 8/2014 Program officer: Sylvia Spengler The project’s goal was enabling and promotion of multidisciplinary academic studies that include computation at the University of Texas at El Paso. The project’s accomplishments include the creation of viable academic minors at UTEP that include computer science, the establishment of continuing inter-departmental research collaborations examining challenges in STEM education, and the development of a family of inquiry-driven Media-Propelled Computational Thinking (iMPaCT) introductory programming activities that can be embedded within a variety of widely-attended disciplinary STEM "host" courses at the university and regional high schools. When effectively implemented, these activities analytically engage students in the exploration of disciplinary cause-effect relationships central to the host course’s disciplinary learning outcomes. Research contributions (intellectual merit) of this project include Determination that enabling of multidisciplinary studies that include computational thinking requires attention beyond the definition of academic track requirements. Deliberate student coaching and administrative responsiveness detected and addressed nuanced administrative hurdles. An observation that elementary programming activities are easier to integrate into elementary disciplinary STEM courses than advanced disciplinary STEM courses. The simpler phenomena examined by elementary STEM courses is more suitable for the nascent programming skills of a beginner programmers. Observations of dramatic potential impacts by effectively implemented iMPaCT introductory programming activities within high school algebra classes including (1) significant mathematics learning gains among weaker students and (2) the motivation of a substantial fraction of attendees with gender and ethnic distributions representative of an 80% Hispanic student population to subsequently in enroll in computer science courses. A key attribute of iMPaCT activities is their immersive inquiry-driven pedagogy intended to quickly engage students in analytic problem-solving. Determination that effective replication of inquiry-driven programming activities requires a combination of pedagogical expertise in both inquiry-driven learning and programming possessed by a minority of instructors of mathematics courses. This expertise may be impractical to efficiently convey. The activities were implemented multiple times by highly motivated instructors. A range of faculty preparation and support strategies were provided including 1:1 support from an on-campus math coach. Observations of classroom implementations indicate that the more than half of the implementations converted the activities’ intended inquiry-driven pedagogy into teacher-led product-oriented tasks.. Development of an effective replication strategy for iMPaCT’s inquiry-driven activities within broadly attended physics lab courses taught by inexperienced teaching assistants. This included the creation of more than thirty short videos and self-paced activities intended to complement teaching assistants’ procedural proficiencies. This strategy is anticpated to be relevant for supporting future replication of the algebra and physics actvities in high schools. Formative feedback from early implementations of the physics activities enabled refinement of the flipped pedagogy and TA support strategies. As is typical for physics lab design reforms that expose conceptual relationships, in-course assessment of disciplinary knowledge was not significantly affected. Surveys and observations of student engagement indicate that the programming activities improve the preparation of attendees to be analytically engaged by lab exercises and connect them with disciplinary and mathematics concepts. Broader impacts of the project include Institutionalization of multi-disciplinary undergraduate degree tracks that include programming and computational thinking at a predominantly Hispanic serving institution. Exposure of more than three thousand students to programming within a variety of disciplinary high school and university STEM courses. The majority of these students would otherwise be unlikely to have attended a high school or college course that included programming. Institutionalization of programming activities within broadly attended physics courses already attended by more than a thousand students at a predominantly Hispanic serving institution. Establishment of a sustained collaboration among university and high school faculty in computer science, mathematics and physics that examines strategies for eliciting analytic engagement and enabling multi-disciplinary learning, and administration support, both in the university and regional school districts. Development a flipped instructional strategy that enables procedurally-oriented physics lab TAs with little specialized preparation to effectively replicate inquiry-driven programming activities within their largely unmodified classes. It is anticipated a similar strategy may enable the high school Algebra I activities to be efficiently and effectively replicated in high schools. Reseach results and activities have been communicated in more than thirty publications and presentations by university and high school faculty to academic and educational communities and a web portal www.impactstem.org has been establish
