Improving the Pipeline for Rural and American Indian Students Entering Computer Science Via Storytelling

该项目将推进“面向学生和教师的创新技术体验”（ITEST）项目的工作，以更好地理解和促进提高学生在科学、技术、工程或数学（STEM）领域追求职业的动机和能力的实践。该项目将开发和研究讲故事作为一种文化响应方式，以吸引中学美国原住民和蒙大拿州农村学生学习计算机科学和计算技能。该项目将在整个课程中注入计算机科学，而不是创建一个新的课程，这将帮助学生了解计算机技能是跨学科相关的，对劳动力中的各种职业都很重要。该项目将使用Alice，这是一个基于对象的教育编程环境，它通过鼓励中学生和其他通常不接触编程的人讲故事而取得了成功。使用爱丽丝，学生们可以通过在他们创造的虚拟世界中放置物体来讲述故事，然后他们可以通过拖放代表逻辑结构的瓦片来编程。通过整合这些计算技能，而不增加要教授的主题数量，该项目将促进对具有计算思维能力的学生所能获得的机会的更多样化和全面的理解。该项目将为教师开发资源，以满足蒙大拿州立法机构于1999年颁布的《印第安人全民教育法》（IEFA）的要求，对许多中学教师来说，将其纳入课堂仍然是一项困难的要求。该项目将为300多名学生提供试点课程材料，并将邀请50名教师参加专业发展研讨会，以讲故事的方式将计算机科学和计算思维整合到中学课程中。在部落批判理论（TribCrit）的指导下，该项目将采用一种文化响应方法，在课程中注入讲故事的方法（使用爱丽丝），该理论认为文化知识和学术知识不是相互排斥的，而是相辅相成的。该项目工具将使中学教师能够在整个课程中整合计算机科学和计算思维，将采用研究驱动的迭代方式开发，以响应所服务社区的文化。项目研究将解决两个互补的研究问题：(1)讲故事和编故事是否成为中学生参与计算机科学的有效手段？(2)将计算机技能纳入中学核心课程是否能提高这些技能的教学和学生学习？此外，该项目将记录过程并评估TribCrit文化响应方法在将计算机科学和计算思维整合到中学课程中的有效性。研究将采用混合方法，包括焦点小组、小组教学诊断、调查和计算思维/计算机科学知识的前后测量。项目成果将通过专业期刊和会议报告传播。选定的学生创造的文物（即，爱丽丝的虚拟世界和故事）将在蒙大拿州的博物馆提出。

This project will advance efforts of the Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) program to better understand and promote practices that increase students' motivations and capacities to pursue careers in fields of science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM). The project will develop and research storytelling as a culturally responsive way to engage middle school Native American and rural Montana students in learning computer science and computing skills. Instead of creating a new curriculum, the project will infuse computer science across the curriculum, which will help students understand that computing skills are relevant across disciplines and are important for a wide variety of professions in the workforce. The project will use Alice, an object-based educational programming environment, that has been successful by encouraging storytelling in engaging middle school students and others who are not normally exposed to programming. Using Alice, students can tell stories by placing objects in virtual worlds they have created, and then they can program by dragging and dropping tiles that represent logical structures. By integrating these computational skills, without multiplying the number of topics to be taught, the project will promote a more diverse and comprehensive understanding of the opportunities available to students with an ability to think computationally. The project will develop resources for teachers to meet the requirements of Montana's Indian Education for All (IEFA) Act, which was mandated by the state legislature in 1999 and remains a difficult requirement for many middle school teachers to incorporate in their classrooms. The project will serve over 300 students when piloting curriculum materials and will engage 50 teachers in professional development workshops on the integration of computer science and computational thinking across middle school curriculum using a storytelling approach.The project will use a culturally responsive approach to infuse the use of storytelling (using Alice) in the curriculum, guided by Tribal Critical Theory (TribCrit), which maintains that cultural knowledge and academic knowledge are not mutually exclusive but complement each other. The project tools, which will enable middle school teachers to integrate computer science and computational thinking throughout the curriculum, will be developed using a research-driven, iterative way to be culturally responsive to the communities served. Project research will address two complementary research questions: (1) Do storytelling and storymaking serve as effective means for engaging middle-school students in computer science?; and (2) Does the integration of computing skills into the core middle-school curriculum increase instruction and student learning of these skills? In addition, the project will document the processes and evaluate the effectiveness of the TribCrit culturally responsive approach taken in integrating computer science and computational thinking into the middle school curriculum. A mixed-method approach will be used in the research, including focus groups, small group instructional diagnosis, surveys, and pre/post measures of computational thinking/computer science knowledge. Project results will be disseminated through professional journals and conference presentations. Selected student-created artifacts (i.e., Alice virtual worlds and stories) will be presented in Montana museums.