DOI: 10.5176/978-981-08-8227-3_cgat08-57
Authors: Alan Shaw and Richard Schlesinger
Abstract:
Even though the number of students majoring in computing fields has suffered a decline in recent years, the interest and involvement of students in the phenomena known as social computing has skyrocketed. Young people from all walks of life and backgrounds have embraced online technologies as a means to enhance their communicative, expressive and community building abilities. This includes women and minorities who have historically been underrepresented in careers related to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. With this in mind, we have been investigating the use of online collaborative and distributive educational paradigms and gaming activities as a means to enhance career interest and academic understanding of computing fields.
Gaming and collaborative educational paradigms can appeal to students as an opportunity to help them explore the emerging collaborative technologies that are becoming an increasingly critical element of their world. We also see this approach as an opportunity to develop curricular approaches that 1) emphasize creativity along with skills development, 2) involve engaging competitive activities, 3) focus on interactive, collaborative, and distributive lab projects, and 4) incorporate topics involving virtual reality and robotics. In this paper, we describe curricular approaches along these lines that we have examined in work that we are involved in with middle school and high school students and teachers. We also discuss certain programming environments that are particularly appropriate for these types of curricular approaches, and we address implications for future research and development.
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