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Partner and Community Impact

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Local seventh graders on a recent CS4MS+ field trip to BSU.

Partner and Community Impact

Partner involvement

Faculty including the schools' principals and CS teachers met with CS4MS+ teams multiple times to establish each school’s needs, brainstorm ideas, and receive a report of what had been accomplished. Additionally, the schools facilitated our ability to conduct classroom observations, meet with teachers, and implement classroom activities. In most instances, the teachers have been very welcoming and receptive to the services we wish to supply, and the faculty involved frequently provide validation of our progress throughout our time collaborating together. The staff has been very accommodating, and we are excited to continue our partnerships into the next semester.

Partner benefits

By providing well-developed CS resources to our partners, they are better prepared to deliver CS learning opportunities to the youth of our community. In particular, we hope to specifically assist with encouraging underrepresented groups, such as racial/ethnic minorities and female students, to engage in CS curriculum. In doing this, we aspire to promote CS involvement as a lifelong learning process, thus increasing the diversity within the CS field.

Additionally, many middle schools have only recently started exploring how they can meet the Indiana academic standards for CS. The resources curated by CS4MS+ teams will further assist local schools in this process. To keep schools up to date on these standards, CS4MS+ has developed and provided our partners with a document designed to explain the Indiana academic standards for CS, which suggests many alternative activities which can be utilized to teach each standard. As the project continued, the CS4MS+ updated this document to ensure schools had the most recent data, but this information has slowly been adapted and placed into our website for schools to easily access on their own. The principals have reported the resources to be very useful, especially for new teachers. This has allowed our partner schools to implement more CS activities into their curriculum and hopefully help students perform better on standardized testing.

CS4MS+ teams have spent many hours in the schools' classrooms during the project's implementation. This has included preparing and presenting lessons to the students, as well as simply being present to help the teachers answer questions students may have concerning CS. Many of the teachers have reported that they continue to use activities CS4MS+ teams presented.

Community Impact

Through the products and activities supplied by CS4MS+, many hundreds (perhaps even thousands) of Muncie and surrounding area students have been exposed to more CS concepts and activities than before we began this project. In the short term, it should improve the students’ performance on CS-related standardized testing questions. In a long term sense, this could potentially broaden the students’ view of future professions, perhaps opening more doors for underrepresented groups, and helping all students to see CS as a possible area of interest and viable career path.


"Our teacher who participated in this program grew from the expertise of those who worked with her and felt much more comfortable and capable to deliver instruction on middle school computer science topics.~Participating administrator


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