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

该项目将推进学生和教师创新技术体验（ITEST）计划的努力，以更好地理解和促进提高学生在科学，技术，工程或数学（STEM）领域追求职业生涯的动机和能力的做法。 该项目将开发和研究讲故事作为一种文化上的回应方式，让美国土著和蒙大拿州农村的中学生学习计算机科学和计算技能。该项目不是创建一个新的课程，而是将计算机科学融入整个课程，这将帮助学生理解计算技能与各个学科相关，并且对劳动力中的各种职业都很重要。该项目将使用Alice，一个基于对象的教育编程环境，通过鼓励讲故事来吸引中学生和其他通常不接触编程的人，该环境已经取得了成功。使用Alice，学生可以通过将对象放置在他们创建的虚拟世界中来讲述故事，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《印第安人全民教育法》的要求，该法是1999年由州立法机构授权的，对许多中学教师来说，这仍然是一项难以纳入课堂的要求。 该项目将为300多名学生提供课程材料试点服务，并将邀请50名教师参加专业发展讲习班，讨论如何使用讲故事的方法将计算机科学和计算思维融入中学课程。该项目将采用文化回应方法，注入讲故事的使用（使用爱丽丝）在课程中，部落批判理论（TribCrit）的指导下，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，将使用研究驱动的迭代方式开发，以在文化上响应所服务的社区。 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是吸引中学生学习计算机科学的有效手段？以及（2）将计算技能整合到核心中学课程中是否增加了这些技能的教学和学生学习？此外，该项目将记录的过程，并评估TribCrit的文化响应的方法在整合计算机科学和计算思维到中学课程的有效性。一个混合的方法将用于研究，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/后措施。 项目成果将通过专业期刊和会议报告传播。 选择学生创建的工件（即，爱丽丝虚拟世界和故事）将在蒙大拿州博物馆展出。

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.