Collaborative Research: CS 10K: AccessCS10K: Including Students with Disabilities in Computing Education for the Twenty-First Century

University Of Nevada Las Vegas, Las Vegas NV

Investigators

Abstract

The University of Washington, in collaboration with the University of Las Vegas Nevada, proposes a project - AccessCS10K - to increase the successful participation of students with disabilities in the new Exploring Computer Science (ECS) and Computer Science Principles (CSP) courses. Both courses are designed to introduce the big ideas in computer science and to inspire students from diverse backgrounds to consider computational competence as part of their career plans. This project focuses on the inclusion of students with disabilities. It has two objectives. The first is to build the capacity of ECS and CSP teachers to serve those students with professional development aimed at the CS 10K PD trainers, curricular units, online tutorials, virtual communities of practice for teachers, and real-time, individual teacher support. The second objective is to create accessible materials, both tools (including iterative refinement and deployment of the Quorum language) and curricular units that ECS and CSP teachers and students can use in their classrooms. The work will be led by teams at the University of Washington and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, building on the prior work of the Principal Investigators and experienced partners. Further, the project leaders will work in partnership with many of the current and future CS10K grantees and with developers of accessible tools and curricula to maximize the impact of their work. All students in ECS and CSP classes, regardless of disability, will benefit from more inclusive teaching strategies practiced by their teachers. This project addresses the need to prepare computing educators for diverse students, including those with disabilities, and the need to create tools and curricula that meet the needs of diverse students including those with disabilities. An external evaluator, with the help on an internal evaluator, will track project activities, outputs, and early outcomes as part of the formative evaluation, and will help establish the impact of the interventions as part of the summative evaluation. The evaluation will assess how well CS 10K trainers able to learn and use the AccessCS10K professional development modules and whether CS 10K teachers able to use teaching strategies, individualized support, curricular units, and accessible technologies in their classrooms.