AIR@NE
This project has received funding from the NSF CS for All RPP program. It aims at providing professional development to train K-8 teachers to teach CS, developing a support network to support K-12 CS education in Nebraska, and conducting research into effective professional development. The focus of the project is to increase the teaching capacity for K-12 CS across the state of Nebraska, with the research findings disseminated to other states in the US for broader impacts. The project is led by Professor Soh, with Co-PIs Dr. Wendy Smith (Math), Dr. Gwen Nugent (CEHS), Dr. Guy Trainin (TLTE), and Dr. Kent Steen (LPS).
Computational Creativity and IC2Think
This project has received funding from NSF TUES and NSF IUSE programs. It aims at integrating computational thinking and creative thinking to improve student learning and performance in CS for both majors and non-majors. The project is led by Professor Soh, with collaborators Dr. Duane Shell (Educational Psychology), Dr. Liz Ingraham (Art & Art History), and Dr. Brian Moore (Music Education).
Future Directions in Computing Education
Funded initially through NSF, this project invited many leading researchers in CS education research to participate in a series of workshops where we considered what are the important future research questions for CS education to address. While the initial output was a series of technical reports, the CRA contacted us asking us to produce a white paper. Many collaborations between workshop attendees have resulted from the conversations. Initial position papers written by the workshop attendees are available here.
Middle and High School Teacher Professional Development
Funded through NSF's ITEST program, this collaborative project with Susan Rodger at Duke, Madeleine Schep at Columbia College, Wanda Dann at Carnegie Mellon, and RoxAnn Stalvey at the College of Charleston, we have been teaching hundreds of middle and high school teachers how to teach programming. While this project has focused more on outreach and dissemination than research, we have learned a great deal about how to successfully run in-service teacher professional development, and about communities of practice and how best to support teacher communities.
A Chautauqua Program for the 21st Century
Funded through NSF's TUES (now IUSE) program, this project has explored how to best offer faculty professional development. We experimented offering faculty professional development (PD) face-to-face, and with using technologies to enable synchronous online and asynchronous online versions of PD.
Spatial Skills in Introductory Computing
While originally run as a pilot as part of a summer high school outreach program targeting females, we'd like to find a graduate student to study this in greater depth, both with using existing approaches in a wider range of settings as well as developing newer approaches more customized to relating spatial skills development to computing.
Learning Analytics
Extending the work of Piech and others, we have been working on analyzing large data sets containing intermediate versions of CS1 students' programs. There are certainly opportunities for finding interesting information in these data sets!