This CPATH Community Building project develops a unique computing education community within the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. Faculty members from small, teaching-oriented institutions plan to work collaboratively to build The Northwest Distributed Computer Science Department (NW-DSCD). Computing educators plan to share knowledge, resources, and expertise to transform computing education across the region. The NW-DISC creates a means of enabling and fostering innovative educational change, sharing knowledge and resources as innovation takes place, enabling heightened outreach to K-12 schools, integrating computational thinking into a variety of disciplines, and providing a platform for evaluating new educational strategies. The goal is to change the face of computing education in the Pacific Northwest.
The intellectual merit of the project lies in the strong project team and the commitment of the institutions in the region to the important goals of the project. The NW-DCSD offers a means to turn institution-specific successes into regional innovations. The project has the potential for national impact and to provide new models for computing education of the future.
The broader impacts of the project include the development of a distributed educational community to share resources such as new courses and curricula. The community is to be increased significantly each year, thus widening the impact and opening new innovative computing pathways to a diverse student population in a range of academic disciplines.
