Computational Thinking-Enabled STEM Professionals Workshop

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The Computational Thinking-Enabled STEM Professionals' Workshop (CTSTEM-PW) is a collaboration between Education Development Center (EDC), the New Mexico Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (NM-EPSCoR), Intel Corporation, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the University of New Mexico, and Navajo Technical College. It is a six-month project with two phases: (1) a workshop-planning phase, in which the project team will collaborate with key stakeholders in industry, government and academia, to adapt and apply workforce-development tools for identifying computational-thinking needs in the workplace and for assessing the alignment between those needs and available educational offerings; and (2) a workshop to share the findings from phase 1 with a group of undergraduate students from Tribal Colleges and Hispanic Serving Institutions, and to assist those students in planning for careers as CT-enabled STEM (CTSTEM) professionals. During the workshop, undergraduate students will become familiar with the major job responsibilities and work activities of CTSTEM professionals. They will also identify the courses and work-based learning opportunities available to prepare for those careers, and will develop a career plan laying out CT learning goals, necessary educational activities, and a timeline for achieving targeted objectives.In short, the CTSTEM-PW project will refine and test an innovative workshop format for helping undergraduate students from disadvantaged backgrounds to launch professional careers in the emerging field of computation-enabled science and engineering. The CTSTEM-PW project will engage key stakeholders from academia, government and industry in determining CTSTEM workforce needs, in mapping those needs onto available educational opportunities, and in translating the resulting workforce-development vision into practical career advice for a concrete group of undergraduate students. By situating the pilot workshop in New Mexico, and by partnering simultaneously both with world-class technology leaders and with local Tribal Colleges and Hispanic Serving Institutions, the CTSTEM-PW team hopes to develop a broadly-replicable template for deepening and diversifying the pool of CTSTEM professionals in economically and socially disadvantaged communities across the nation.