Where Programming Skills Meet the Social Needs

Abstract

This chapter describes Technology Beyond Borders, a service-learning course offered by the Department of Computing. The course, which is open to all students, focuses on using programming skills to meet social needs. In 2016 and 2017, the project centered on the development of computer-aided edutainment products for special education needs children. The projects and the collaborating partners were carefully chosen so as to achieve maximal learning impact for our students while at the same time fulfilling a needed service that is not currently met by the commercial sector. Analyses of our students’ products show that even though all of these are undergraduate students and many of them are not from computer science or engineering, they are able to develop a product that works well and can be deployed in situ for real use and that the design of the course and project helped to address many of the issues with motivation and engagement that were witnessed in previous similar courses.