Workshop Event: Programming Languages/Environments for the Educationally Disadvantaged

Oregon State University, Corvallis OR

Investigators

Abstract

This is funding to support a research event for 10-14 promising doctoral students from the United States and abroad, along with distinguished research faculty, which will take place in conjunction with the 2003 IEEE Symposia on Human-Centric Computing Languages and Environments (HCC 2003), to be held October 28-31 in Auckland, New Zealand, and sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society. Many schools in minority and rural areas struggle to provide even the basics of education, let alone technological training, to their students, who become educationally disadvantaged adults; this problem can also exist for certain groups in schools that serve some populations better than others. With little experience or confidence in their ability to deal with technology, educationally disadvantaged people face serious obstacles when trying to cope with software designed by and for "information haves." Whether and how software with the power of programmability can be viable for disadvantaged populations is the subject of this event, which will bring together and build community among young researchers working on different aspects of the research problem, whether their "home" research community is in Computer Science, Sociology, or Education. The workshop will emphasize to attendees (both the graduate students immediately involved and general conference participants) the crosscutting nature of research relevant to this pressing research problem, which has received almost no prior study. Goals of the workshop include building a cohort group of new researchers who will then have a network of colleagues spread out across the world, guiding the work of new researchers by having experts in the research field give them advice, and making it possible for promising new entrants to the field to attend their research conference. Student participants will make formal presentations of their work during the workshop, and will receive feedback from the faculty panel. The feedback is geared to helping students understand and articulate how their work is positioned relative to other human-computer interaction research, whether their topics are adequately focused for thesis research projects, whether their methods are correctly chosen and applied, and whether their results are appropriately analyzed and presented. Extended abstracts of the students' work will be published in the conference proceedings, which has wide print and electronic distribution. The conference steering committee will evaluate the workshop outcome, and the results will be made available to the organizers of possible similar future events. Broader Impacts: The workshop will help shape ongoing and future research projects aimed at alleviating a pressing problem of relevance to a great many people within our society. This event will promote discovery and learning, by encouraging the student researchers to explore a difficult and challenging open problem, through involvement of a panel of well-known researchers whose task is to provide constructive feedback, and through inclusion of other conference participants who will also learn from and provide additional feedback to the students and to each other.