START UP SJV: STEM Teachers Alliance for Regional Tech thinking through Underrepresented Professional development in the San Joaquin Valley

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The University of California, Merced in collaboration with local school administration officials, teacher preparation program staff, and both in-service and pre-service teachers, will develop a Research Practitioner Partnership focused on High School. The goal of the project is to create a self-sustaining and scalable professional development program, called START UP SJV, to support high school teachers who teach Computer Science. The START UP SJV program will aim to help teachers improve their own computer programming and computational thinking skills, so that they can better teach their students.The START UP SJV project will develop an online and supported educational and engagement platform called Compass to leverage existing tools and curriculum from ECS and TEALS, and set up the materials with accompanying exercises on the online Compass educational platform. The Compass system allows participants to read materials, work on code, and get support all in one place. To provide real-time support on the system, the PIs will recruit advanced Computer Science Engineering undergraduate students from UC Merced, a Hispanic-serving institution, who will sign up for course credit, and serve as support personnel on the system, answering participant's questions and providing overall guidance and support.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.