This project provides recipients of the NSF?s Division of Undergraduate Education, Office of Cyberinfrastructure and Computer & Information Science & Engineering grants, an opportunity to present their research to a wider community. These presentations are taking place at the annual SIGCSE Symposium. This showcase highlights the old Course, Curriculum & Laboratory Improvement Program (CCLI) grants as well as the program that replaced it, Transforming Undergraduate Education in Science (TUES), the Cyberinfrastructure Training, Education, Advancement, and Mentoring for Our 21st Century Workforce (CI-TEAM) and the CISE Pathways to Revitalized Undergraduate Computing Education (CPATH) projects. In addition, the showcase has a number of opportunities for potential grant writers to speak to NSF program officers about their grant ideas. The PIs of this proposal are organizing and promoting a showcase of NSF projects at the SIGCSE Symposiums for 2011 to 2013. We intend for 20 different PIs presenting at each showcase.
The SIGCSE Symposium is an international conference held annually in the United States, and it is one of the few dedicated solely to issues of undergraduate computing education. The conference attracts over 1000 educators from North America with a growing worldwide participation. The audience that the conference attracts is the same audience that the CCLI/TUES, CI-TEAM and CPATH programs reach out toward. Thus, this showcase allows for the PIs to present their work to an appropriate group of individuals.
Creating a worthy NSF proposal is a difficult task. The goal of the showcase is also to contribute to improve upon the quality of proposals that are currently submitted. It achieves this by allowing showcase attendees to see the existing grants that have been funded, as well as speak to the NSF program officers about their individual funding ideas. This is having the effect of increasing the quality of future proposals.
The purpose of this grant is two-fold. The first purpose is to allow for better dissemination of existing computer science education research. The grant allows for the holding of a showcase, where presenters from 20 different projects are given a platform to present their research. The showcase is at the annual SIGCSE conference held in the spring -- this is the top computer science education conference in the US. The showcase allows the presenters to find collaborators, generate ideas, find adopters of their research, and generally increase both the impact and quality of what they are doing. The second purpose of this grant is to provide a mechanism by which individuals who are interested in applying for NSF funding can increase the quality of their applications. Individuals can speak to the presenters to gain a better idea for what makes a fundable NSF project idea. In addition, NSF program directors meet one-on-one with these individuals to discuss their specific ideas. The result of all of this is to increase the quality of future NSF proposal submission. This grant funded the showcase for three years: 2011 through 2013 (a small amount of remaining funds were applied to the 2014 showcase, which was primarily funded by a different grant). Approximately 20 projects were presented each year. The efficacy of the showcases was determined by a series of surveys given to both the presenters of the projects, as well as the individuals who viewed those projects. The results of those surveys indicated that the presenters gained much from the showcase: in 2013, for example, 83% found potential collaborators, and 100% found potential adopters. Likewise, the individuals felt they found technology to adopt or collaborators to work with.
