RET Site: Socially Relevant Computing and Analytics

This award creates a new Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) site focused on socially relevant computing and analytics at North Carolina State University. Each summer, in-service and pre-service teachers will be recruited and put into research teams with a computer science (CS) graduate student research mentor and a CS research faculty mentor. In this immersive research experience, teachers will learn software tools, human computer interaction, and rapid prototype development as they work with CS researchers to investigate socially relevant problems concerning health, education, and critical infrastructures.

Participants will synthesize research projects into problem-based computing assignments for students, integrating equitable practices for computing curricula including providing students the opportunity to represent their culture and ideas into the projects. Through immersing educators in socially relevant computing research, they will have a much better understanding of the impacts of computing and will be better able to relay these concepts to their students and through a focus on equitable curriculum design, we can investigate how well their created projects resonate with female, African American/Black, Hispanic/Latinx students.

This Research Experience for Teachers (RET) site at North Carolina State University will focus on socially relevant computing and analytics. In service teachers will be recruited from school districts serving large populations of underrepresented students, and will be placed in teams along with pre-service teachers and computer science graduate students.

This Affinity Research Group model will immerse participants in a vibrant community to contribute to ongoing research in socially relevant computing and analytics. Research projects include serious games, interface design, critical infrastructures, novice programming environments, intelligent tutoring systems, machine learning, and data analytics. The RET Site will also work with participants to develop curricular modules linked to their research experiences including workshops on equitable and culturally relevant CS curricula and intensive workshops with peer feedback for development of modules.

The site’s objective is to create a collaborative culture, promote individual research contributions, and create culturally responsive and inclusive curricular modules. The intended impact on participating teachers is to increase their CS knowledge, efficacy, research and presentation skills; and to increase retention and engagement of their students.

The intended impact on broadening participation of underrepresented groups in CS is to create high levels of student engagement particularly for females, African-Americans/Blacks, Hispanics/Latinx and new knowledge about CS and careers. Plans for academic-year follow-up and outreach activities and dissemination include RET Teams and mentors support teachers in classroom implementation; pre-service teachers observing classes; and two workshops to reinforce pedagogical and research knowledge gained.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.