Engaging Middle School Students in Digital Literacy & Computer Science (DLCS) project is designed to promote digital literacy and computer science for middle school students, with emphasis on girls from underrepresented groups. Phase I - Curriculum Development will be developed in alignment with Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education's (DESE) existing DLCS curriculum and will be implemented as a pilot in 2022. The overarching goal is to engage the students in inquiry-based activities highlighting the connections between science and computer science while also building students’ computational thinking skills. The driving tool of the curriculum is Foldit, a free online citizen science biochemistry computer game. College students will mentor high school students to facilitate the Foldit activities. While college instructors have informally used Foldit in their classrooms, none of the research so far has addressed K-12 students, who will be the focus of this research project. The project aligns with the mission of REBLS by bringing together several academic institutions, including two universities and two high schools. The project is headed by Ray Laoulache (Dean of Academic Affairs, UMass Dartmouth), is instructed by Danielle Bodine (Waltham Public Schools), Deborah Boscombe (Diman Regional Vocational Technical High School), Associate Professor Firas Khatib (Computer and Information Science, UMass Dartmouth), Associate Chair for Teaching Development Neena Thota (UMass Amherst), and is guided by two undergraduate mentors and five high school assistants. This year, this working group was awarded a $9,218.75 seed grant from REBLS to build this program. To learn more about the project, contact the facilitators listed below.
