Engagement in practice: Outreach program to introduce computer science to middle school students

Abstract

Research continues to show a consistent decline in the number of students entering the field of Computer Science (CS) (Ali and Shubra, 2010). Studies also indicate that an optimal time to promote interest in CS is during the middle school years (Tai, Liu, Maltese, and Fan, 2006). Yet, most CS courses are only offered as electives, which are not required for graduation (Urness and Manley, 2013). This makes fostering interest in CS at an early age even more challenging. However, some programs, such as the Alice Camps, have successfully encouraged interest in the subject for middle school students (Adams, 2007). Recently, we completed a community outreach program to provide CS classes to local Title I middle school students attending a summer camp. The authors taught hour-long CS classes to four groups of students. The purpose of the classes was to boost interest in CS by teaching students basic computer programming concepts. The students were also educated about careers that require this skill set and were introduced to a programming language called "Processing". We observed that students showed increased enthusiasm towards CS. In addition, we noticed that the group activity component of the classes encouraged sociability and idea synthesis among peers. This CS community outreach program motivated us to extend the effort to teach science concepts using the Processing language. This may potentially promote sociability, creativity, and empowerment in STEM among middle school students. Specifically, we plan to use the Processing programming language to facilitate learning of biological and chemical concepts, since such concepts can be difficult for students to visualize from a textbook. This paper provides details on other researchers' relevant work in this area, the use of the Processing programming language, and our plan for data collection and analysis.