Award Abstract # 1346922
Type I: Collaborative Research: FRABJOUS CS - Framing a Rigorous Approach to Beauty and Joy for Outreach to Underrepresented Students in Computing at Scale

NSF Org: CNS
Division Of Computer and Network Systems
Recipient: NORTH CAROLINA STATE UNIVERSITY
Initial Amendment Date: September 24, 2013
Latest Amendment Date: July 20, 2018
Award Number: 1346922
Award Instrument: Standard Grant
Program Manager: Janice Cuny
CNS
 Division Of Computer and Network Systems
CSE
 Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering
Start Date: February 1, 2013
End Date: July 31, 2019 (Estimated)
Total Intended Award Amount: $352,831.00
Total Awarded Amount to Date: $1,004,705.00
Funds Obligated to Date: FY 2011 = $352,831.00
FY 2014 = $86,000.00

FY 2016 = $565,874.00
History of Investigator:
  • Tiffany Barnes (Principal Investigator)
    tiffany.barnes@gmail.com
Recipient Sponsored Research Office: North Carolina State University
2601 WOLF VILLAGE WAY
RALEIGH
NC  US  27695-0001
(919)515-2444
Sponsor Congressional District: 02
Primary Place of Performance: North Carolina State University
raleigh
NC  US  27695-8206
Primary Place of Performance
Congressional District:
02
Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): U3NVH931QJJ3
Parent UEI: U3NVH931QJJ3
NSF Program(s): Special Projects - CNS,
Computing Ed for 21st Century
Primary Program Source: 01001112DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
01001415DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT

01001617DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT

01001617RB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
Program Reference Code(s): 023Z, 170E, 7382, 9116
Program Element Code(s): 171400, 738200
Award Agency Code: 4900
Fund Agency Code: 4900
Assistance Listing Number(s): 47.070

ABSTRACT

The University of California, Berkeley and the University of North Carolina, Charlotte propose a collaborative effort?called FRABJOUS?to develop and deploy a proposed, new Advanced Placement (AP) computing course that can successfully achieve outreach ? attracting women and underrepresented minorities ? while having a technically rigorous programming component. The work extends the PIs? previous work on the Berkeley ?Beauty and Joy of Computing? course and the College Board?s CS Principles course to the high school level, addressing the development and study of new instructional materials as well as the impact of teacher professional development on student learning outcomes. The course uses a visually rich programming environment, called Snap, that is based on Scratch. Scratch has had well-documented success in teaching computer programming to 8-14 year olds because of the power of its visual metaphor. Snap extends the metaphor to teach more advanced methods, including recursion, higher order procedures, and object-oriented programming, to 14-19 year olds. Specifically the FRABJOUS project will
? Develop a core group of mentor teachers in the Berkeley and Charlotte areas,
? Conduct and evaluate intensive summer professional development workshops for in-service high school teachers,
? Develop regional partnerships between universities and high schools, creating CSTA chapters and connecting them through the STARS Alliance,
? Study university and high school student learning outcomes,
disaggregating data by race, gender, age, course, and curricular models to
understand the curriculum's effectiveness, ease of use, and impact, particularly
the introduction of advanced concepts (higher order functions, recursion,
distributed computing, concurrency, simulation) at this early level,
? Compare outcomes for students and teaches trained directly by the PIs with those trained by the mentor teachers, and
? Expand the capability of Snap.
The project thus includes tool and materials development, assessments of student learning outcomes, and study of the impact of teacher professional development via workshops and school year support activities, including peer-to-peer and online support.

PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH

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A. Milliken, M. Hill, M. Maniktala, T. Barnes. "Improving computer science teacher professional development from 2016 to 2018." SIGCSE 2019. , 2019
Brian Harvey, Daniel D. Garcia, Tiffany Barnes, Nathaniel Titterton, Omoju Miller, Dan Armendariz, Jon McKinsey, Zachary Machardy, Eugene Lemon, Sean Morris, and Josh Paley. "Snap! (build your own blocks) Workshop." 45th ACM technical symposium on Computer science education (SIGCSE '14). , v.SIGSCE , 2014 , p.749 10.1145/2538862.2539022
Daniel D. Garcia, Brian Harvey, Tiffany Barnes, Dan Armendariz, Jon McKinsey, Zachary MacHardy, Omoju Miller, Barry Peddycord, III, Eugene Lemon, Sean Morris, and Josh Paley. "AP CS principles and the beauty and joy of computing curriculum. 45th ACM technical symposium on Computer science education" 45th ACM technical symposium on Computer science education (SIGCSE '14). , v.SIGCSE , 2014 , p.746 10.1145/2538862.2539026
Milliken, A., Cody, C., Catete, V., & Barnes, T. "Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education" Effective Computer Science Teacher Professional Development: Beauty and Joy of Computing 2018. , 2019 , p.271 10.1145/3304221.3319779
Thomas Price, Jennifer Albert, Veronica Cateté and Tiffany Barnes. "BJC in Action: Comparison of Student Perceptions of a Computer Science Principles Course." Research in the Equity and Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology Conference. (RESPECT 2015) , v.RESPECT , 2016 , p.1 10.1109/RESPECT.2015.7296506
Thomas W. Price, Veronica Cateté, Jennifer Albert, Tiffany Barnes, and Daniel D. Garcia. "Lessons Learned from "BJC" CS Principles Professional Development." Proceedings of the 47th ACM Technical Symposium on Computing Science Education , v.SIGCSE , 2016 , p.467 http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2839509.2844625
Tiffany Barnes, Veronica Catete, Andrew Hicks, and Barry Peddycord. "Workshop: Making games and apps in introductory computer science." 45th ACM technical symposium on Computer science education (SIGCSE '14). , v.SIGCSE , 2014 , p.739 10.1145/2538862.2539000
Veronica Catete, Barry Peddycord, III, and Tiffany Barnes. "Augmenting introductory Computer Science Classes with GameMaker and Mobile Apps." 46th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE '15). , v.SIGCSE , 2015 , p.709 10.1145/2676723.2678307
Veronica Catete, Erin Snider, and Tiffany Barnes. "Developing a Rubic for a Creative CS Principles Lab." ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE). , v.ITiCSE , 2016 , p.290 978-1-4503-4231-5

PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT

Disclaimer

This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.

This FRABJOUS CS project helped build the infrastructure and materials needed to create the   Beauty and Joy of Computing (BJC) Computer Science Principles professional development model and annual workshops for 650 teachers from 2012-2019. The intellectual merit of this project includes the creation of a 5-day teacher professional development model to prepare high school teachers to teach BJC, a train the trainer model and materials that allow the scaling of rigorous computer science professional development. The project conducted an evaluation of the impact of the curriculum and teacher professional development, surveying 484 students and 13 instructors from 14 high schools, showing that students valued the course and planned to continue studying CS, and that the teachers valued the collaborative nature of PD and the creative curricular resources. These results were published at ACM’s 2016 Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE 2016). The project has conducted design-based implementation research to refine the curriculum from a six-week to a one-week model and this work was published at the 2019 ACM conference on Innovations and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE 2019). The broader impacts include the training of 37 BJC Master Teachers who have led regional teacher professional development workshops held from 2012-2019 that have prepared over 650 teachers to teach rigorous computer science courses in high schools, potentially impacting up to 13,000 high school students each year. The project led directly to the foundation of the BJC STARS Corp non-profit established to support computer science education and teacher professional development.


Last Modified: 11/29/2019
Modified by: Tiffany M Barnes

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