Alaska Tech Learners: A Collaboration to Teach College Courses in Software Engineering to High School Students

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This project is a partnership between Prince William Sound College, nine high schools in seven school districts, and regional employers. The project's long-term goal is to fill needs in Alaska's skilled technical workforce by providing Alaskan high school students with introductory courses in software engineering. To accomplish this goal, this project will prepare teachers in underserved Alaska high schools to teach dual-enrollment courses in the software engineering fields of commercial web design and mobile application development. The courses will use a cooperative model of instruction that combines the content expertise of college faculty with the teaching expertise of certified high school teachers. The courses will meet all five of the Alaska state technology standards, and thus be relevant for high school graduation as well as college credit. This project has the potential to enable more school districts to offer dual enrollment STEM courses. The cooperative teaching model has national significance because it could be used by any state to meet STEM educational needs in underserved rural areas. This project also has the benefit of opening multiple career pathways that currently do not exist for many high school students in Alaska. The project focuses on partnering with rural Alaskan school districts, where students are more likely to be Alaska Natives, and to come from low income families. It is predicted that completing these dual enrollment courses can increase the competitiveness of rural Alaskan students for local, high-skill software technology jobs, helping to close the rural Alaska skills gap in technology. The overall goal of this project is to increase the technological competence of teachers and students in all high schools in Alaska. The immediate goal is to partner with high school teachers from multiple school districts to provide coursework for high school students and prepare students for entry-level work as highly-skilled software technologists. Participating high school teachers will first complete college coursework in a specific software engineering topic, to build their content knowledge, skills, and confidence. Each teacher will then teach a dual enrollment course at their high school. A college faculty member will support the teacher, providing oversight and assessment of student outcomes for these courses. This partnership has the potential to create new, high-quality learning experiences for high school students taking dual enrollment information technology courses. The project expects that these courses will provide a pathway to eventual completion of a certificate or associate, bachelor, or graduate degree in software engineering and related fields.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.