The University of Cincinnati (UC) aims to provide urban (primarily African-American) high school students with exposure to computing-related problem-solving activities and undergraduate mentors. The undergraduates will have had have significant co-operative education experience and will undertake mentoring and teaching computing topics as part of their capstone design project. They will be trained to mentor youth and to introduce them to computing topics and activities. The undergraduates will also conduct research in designing, developing, and searching a repository for digital learning objects. The project will include two community partners that serve Cincinnati Public School students: the Cincinnati Youth Collaborative (CYC) and the Cincinnati Arts and Technology Center (CATC). UC students will be trained as mentors and participate in CYCs program for fostering college success; they will build relationships with youth in the program and, guided by the PI and a graduate student, they will extend the CYC college access curriculum to include computing topics, making their lessons available in a web-based repository. UC students will also assist in a summer digital media workshop for CATC at-risk high school students, thereby gaining training in digital art software that can be used to facilitate their lesson plan development and experiencing a successful model for UC outreach activities.
