BPC-DP: A Planning Grant for Establishing UTeach-CS

University Of Texas At Austin, Austin TX

Investigators

Abstract

The University of Texas, Austin proposes a planning grant to bring its Computer Science Department and UTeach program together with the goal of creating UTeach-CS. UTeach started at The University of Texas as a new way to prepare secondary science, math and computer science teachers. It is a unique collaboration between the Colleges of Natural Sciences and Education, supporting undergraduates who want to teach, college graduates who want to return for certification, new teachers looking for a supportive community, and experienced teachers who want an advanced degree. It has proven to be so effective that it is now being replicated at universities across the United States. Yet few Computer Science students participate. This planning grant will do preliminary work to establish a UTeach-CS program at the UT-Austin and to help replicate it at other universities. In particular, the outcomes include (1) an understanding of how to better market UTeach and the teaching profession to CS students and IT professionals, (2) the development of a UTCS Bachelor?s degree plan that better accommodates the UTeach certificate, (3) an understanding of the prospects and challenges of replicating our UTeach-CS program to replication sites within Texas, (4) the exploration of CS curricula for training math and science students who are not CS majors and for training high school teachers who are not certified to teach CS, and (5) a plan for growing UTeach-CS beyond this first year and for replicating it to other institutions supported by the UTeach Institute. This effort is in alignment with the CISE CS/10K goal of dramatically increasing the number of US high school computer science teachers by the year 2015.