Enhancing K-12 education with engineering outreach

Abstract

Many states throughout the country are greatly in need of improvement of their K-12 STEM educational systems and Alabama generally falls within the 10 lowest performing states with respect to education. According to rankings of smartest states, Alabama's ranking has been consistently falling and last year dropped 2% down to number 45 out of 50 states, with less than 80% of the population have graduated from high school accounting for more than half of the state's income gap, which is a high percentage compared to the rest of the nation1. The current graduation rate in 2006 was 66% graduation rate which is below the national average of 69%. Our program has been supporting the local community for the last 6 years, through engineering and computing outreach programs. These programs have improved students STEM exposure, logical reasoning, reading and problem-solving skills. We accomplish this by infusing specialized computing and educational gaming technology into the classroom and afterschool programs to reinvigorate K-12 students in our local area as a model for student computing engagement. Our research investigates methods to energize students through intrinsic motivation to work harder and to achieve a brighter future and to support the future STEM workforce. We want to build STEM workforce by providing more technology training to students at earlier ages to potentially increase future enrollments. With traditional federal grants it is hard to provide interventions for very young students because outcomes are harder to substantiate. A prominent problem caused by many factors has been falling enrollment rates in STEM (e.g. computing based majors). In 1999 more students than ever were interested in computing degrees after the dot com bust of 2001, Student interest in computer science was falling worldwide and between and reaching an all-time low in 2006 with incoming freshman interest in computer science dropped by 70% in the U.S. and based on information by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA and also publicized by publicized by David Patterson in CACM, Sept. 2005 2. The Taulbee survey found that computer science enrollment at research universities dropped by 50% 3. It also indicated that 84.9% of bachelor's degrees were awarded to men in computer science. As a result, literature was explored to provide tools and ideas to apply to take a step towards providing a solution. This trend is slowly improving, but there are still many issues that create many problems for computing (lack of comprehensive computer science AP, course consistency, in many states there is no certification for teachers that are administering this exam, very little exposure to computing other than keyboarding and class that provide drills and practice with personal productivity software (e.g. Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.). In order to keep attracting the brightest minds in a more diverse context, the computer science community must ensure that new computing-based technologies and curricula meet the diverse needs of the global population and find ways to attract and retain a more diverse student groups. Mentoring and more exposure to computing can increase recruitment and retention. We have found great interest in video games in that all of our K-12 students play games, and we can utilize this interest as motivation for students to create their own video games and animated stories. We will leverage the growing phenomenon of gaming industry, and play in general to draw more students into computing fields. In many cases, this is a great technique for recruiting. In searching for innovative ways to make computer science more appealing to students, educators must think fundamentally about what culturally and socially relevant innovations can be used to enrich computer science and related STEM disciplines. Making changes to the methods of student's first introduction can greatly affect future interests and enrollments. When creating and modifying curricula, we must identify ways to motivate students of both genders and a wider variety of backgrounds. Our recruiting includes traditional populations that are already highly involved in computing, but also sees to recruit beyond traditional populations. Our research has two thrusts of teaching object oriented programming to very young audiences and of increasing student excitement about computing applications with the long-term goal of increasing involvement in technology classes, in the use of computer applications and interest in technology careers. The goal of this work was to provide challenging interactive activities for young students that integrate their courses with computer technology. The authors utilize game development and interactive storytelling as a motivator for introductory programming training. The authors identified that many of our young second through fifth grade students showed much promise and ingenuity in programming when using visual programming environments. Our hypothesis was that our young students would fare as well as introductory college students when completing introductory programming tasks. The environment utilized for this experiment was Alice 3D and our hope was that our youngsters would perform at levels complimentary to those of our college students to illustrate that there is no age limit on ingenuity, when the proper training and tools are provided. This work discusses the outcome of a college introductory assignment that we would give to both elementary school and college students enrolled in an introductory computer science course. © American Society of Engeneering Education, 2013.