Background and History
Background and History
Background: Why are we doing this?
Diversity is essential for the future success of CS. Furthermore, there is often a lack of student exposure to CS in elementary and secondary schools. Students are exposed to the physical sciences and mathematics, but less to CS. Thus, students likely have little idea what it means to be a computer scientist, or if they have an interest in being one. With the recent adoption of CS K-12 academic standards in Indiana, this is changing, but some local teachers have little experience covering CS topics. By providing needed resources, CS4MS+ is enabling local teachers to give all students access to high-paying interesting jobs through exposure to CS education.
Becoming more robust each year, CS4MS+ is built on the successes of prior years. The impact has expanded to more schools and age groups, serving an ever-increasing number of Muncie's community members and local students. The CS department has established a new course to facilitate school and community outreach, which was officially taught for the first time during the fall 2021 semester.
History
From 2017-2020, this project had only been available during the Fall semesters, but it has since been made available in the Spring semester as well. From 2017-2022, the CS4MS+ teams, consisting of 82 BSU students (11, 10, 11, 10, 9, 12, 13, 6) and a faculty mentor, researched, developed, and curated instructional resources that incorporate CS experiences, with a focus on supporting the Indiana CS academic standards. CS4MS+ teams developed a teaching resource website to make the curated resources more widely available.
Our community partners, Northside Middle School (NMS), Muncie Central High School (MCHS), and Burris Laboratory School (Burris) have utilized our curated resources and implemented them based on their needs. CS4MS+ teams also spent time in our partners’ classrooms, delivering content to the students and assisting the teachers by answering students’ questions. They also facilitated a field trip for NMS studnets to visit the BSU campus.
"Watching students respond with genuine interest and excitement to something I helped set up and create was an extremely gratifying experience that left me wanting more. The 'a-ha' moment was awesome. One second they were all following what we were teaching (binary numbers/converting to/from decimal), and maybe even reasonably interested, but then we showed them how you could “send” a “picture” to someone by simply giving them a handful of numbers, and the reactions went from “ok, I follow, but where is this going?” to “whoa, that’s cool!" ~Participating student