This CISE EAGER project supports the development of a resource model that allows educators to effectively find and leverage existing curricular materials, particularly computer science and computational thinking curricular materials. While many previous efforts have attempted to build repositories of course materials, these efforts have been hampered by factors such as a lack of efficient search facilities, a dearth of available/stored materials, an inability to find quality materials, or the user perception of commercial interest in the repository. The overall goal is to create a framework to address four critical issues that have hampered the utility of such repositories thus far: a better search interface, easily usable by computing teachers (especially K-12 teachers), a critical mass of materials, a rating mechanism by teachers, and a system that will appeal to teachers. This project seeks to address the shortcomings of existing repositories by providing the appropriate affordances for search and user feedback/ratings. Moreover, by proactively seeking an initial set of content, this project can help to break the lack-of-content/ lack-of-usage cycle that plagues most existing systems. This Eager project proposes to develop a prototype along these lines with enough content to be a proof-of-concept for such a system. Based on initial results and usage profiles, this project can lay a foundation for how to best proceed in making such a system more broadly used by the computing educational community.
The intellectual merits of this project lies in the strong team and vision for improvement in the field of resources for computing educators. This project should provide a model for development of a digital resource system that is valued and used by educators, particularly K-12 educators. This represents a significant contribution as an enhancement over the current situation in computer science where the existing digital libraries are not widely used. By providing an alternative approach towards searching for high quality computing curricular materials, this project plans to allow high quality computing curricular materials to be accessed and used by a much wider segment of computing teachers. The team is strong, including computer science faculty, K-12 computing educators, educational specialists, and researchers with academic and industry experience with the development of searchable resources.
The broader impacts of this project lie in the potential for long-term benefit to the computing community and to computing educators. If this project is successful, the computing disciplines will have a portal that can be comparable in usability to the successful portals in other STEM disciplines. It will provide an effective dissemination vehicle for high quality curricular materials, developed as through funded and non-funded sources. This project has the potential to improve the teaching of a wide variety of computing topics and courses by becoming a single source computing teachers go to when needing to find high quality curricular materials.
It is challenging for K-12 computing teachers to find high-quality curricular materials when searching for materials on the web. Suppose that a high school teacher wanted to find a compelling example to help him teach if statements in Java. Entering "if statement" into Google would lead to sites describing if statements in several computer languages. Entering "if statement java" would lead to information describing if statements in Java, from places such as wikipedia, stackoverflow, and Oracle. Entering "if statement java" "lesson plan" would lead to several commercial sites , most of which would still be inappropriate for what the teacher needs. The problem is that K-12 CS teachers make up a small percentage of Google searchers, so that Google is not optimized for their needs. NSF has funded many digital library projects, designed to be a collection of educational/curricular materials in various disciplines. The computing digital library is computingportal.org. But this digital library suffers from many of the same problems as the other NSF digital library projects: much of the material requires a userid/password to access (so it is inaccessible for a random teacher to ever find), has a fairly complex user interface design (far more complex that Google's home page), and perhaps most significantly, does not curate all of its materials. While human curation (deciding what materials should be part of a collection) would be impossible for a large search (such as by Google), it can work very well for a much more specific collection of materials. A teacher will not go to a site rather than to Google if their initial searches don't return the results they were looking for. In response to these challenges, we created a site, csmart.stanford.edu, as a proof of concept for teachers looking for materials for the AP Computer Science course. The site was open to all, provided a means for anyone to suggest resources, had a human curator who determined which resources were to be added, and allowed teachers to rate and comment on materials. We tested this site out with a small group of computing teachers who taught AP CS. Teachers found this site useful in returning high quality links to their queries. Our system could easily be expanded to add materials for other courses, such as the NSF-funded Exploring Computer Science and the CS Principles courses, as well as being used for teachers at different disciplines and different levels of instruction.
