EL PASO, TX – The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) College of Education has been awarded a $1.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to improve the teaching of computer science to elementary and secondary students.
“Computer literacy is increasingly important in the world of work, but we still know very little about it when it comes to educating elementary and secondary students,” said Johannes Strobel, principal investigator on the project and a professor in the Department of Teacher Education.
Strobel said that in K-12 education, the building blocks needed to learn subjects such as math or reading are already established and widely implemented. For example, math students first learn to add and subtract numbers before moving on to fractions and decimals and, later, algebra and calculus.
In the case of computer science, there are no universally agreed upon building blocks for children’s learning. The project aims to determine how best for children to learn the fundamentals of the subject, for teachers to effectively teach the subject, and to determine best practices for curricula.
As part of the three-year grant, Strobel and co-investigators Justice Walker, Elsa Villa and Pei-Ling Hsu, as well as senior staff Katherine Mortimer and Monika Akbar will hire recently graduated doctoral students at UTEP to research best practices for teaching computer science to elementary through high school students.
The postdoctoral fellows will design research projects, collect data through direct observation in schools, and analyze the data to inform educators. The project also aims to recommend policies that will expand access to computer science education, especially for Hispanic students.
Villa directs the Hopper-Dean Center of Excellence, an institute located within the College of Education that was founded in 2021 to promote computer science education in the Paso del Norte region. Villa said recruiting postdoctoral fellows to advance computer science education research will accelerate the mission of the Hopper-Dean Center.
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