Co-Teaching Computer Science Across Borders
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Session 3 L@S ’20, August 12–14, 2020, Virtual Event, USA Co-Teaching Computer Science Across Borders: Human-Centric Learning at Scale Chris Piech Lisa Yan Lisa Einstein Stanford University Stanford University Stanford University Stanford, CA, USA Stanford, CA, USA Stanford, CA, USA [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Ana Saavedra Baris Bozkurt Eliska Sestakova Stanford University Izmir Demokrasi Universitesi Czech Technical University Stanford, CA, USA Izmir, Turkey Prague, Czech Republic [email protected] [email protected] eliska.sestakova@fit.cvut.cz Ondrej Guth Nick McKeown Czech Technical University Stanford University Prague, Czech Republic Stanford, CA, USA ondrej.guth@fit.cvut.cz [email protected] ABSTRACT CCS Concepts Programming is fast becoming a required skill set for stu- •Social and professional topics ! Computing education; dents in every country. We present CS Bridge, a model for CS1; cross-border co-teaching of CS1, along with a correspond- ing open-source course-in-a-box curriculum made for easy INTRODUCTION localization. In the CS Bridge model, instructors and student- Computer science education has made substantial progress teachers from different countries come together to teach a towards the goal of CS for All in the United States, online, short, stand-alone CS1 course to hundreds of local high school and in some regions of the world. However, there is mounting students. The corresponding open-source curriculum has been evidence of a growing global digital divide, where access to specifically designed to be easily adapted to a wide variety of CS education is heavily dependant on which region you were local teaching practices, languages, and cultures. born in [5]. Despite progress, out of the more than 1.3 billion K-12 students in the world [40], a small fraction will have the Over the past six years, the curriculum has been used to teach opportunity to learn to code. Though online learning gives CS1 material to over 1,000 high school students in Colombia, access to CS, the post-mortem on massive online open-access the Czech Republic, Turkey, and Guinea. A large majority courses (MOOCs) suggests that human teaching remains an of our students continue on to study CS or CS-related fields essential element for a successful education. The CS educa- in university. More importantly, many of our undergraduate tion community is thus faced with a challenge: How can we student-teachers stay involved with teaching beyond the pro- scale high-quality in-person and culturally relevant education gram. Joint teaching creates a positive, high-quality learning more evenly across the globe—for students of all genders, experience for students around the world and a powerful, high- diverse socio-economic backgrounds, and different countries impact professional development experience for the teaching of origin? team—instructors and student-teachers alike. Scaling quality in-person CS education globally has two ma- jor barriers: First, good learning ideas have trouble spread- Author Keywords ing across borders; one teacher’s great classroom idea will Course-in-a-box; co-teaching; CS for All; international experience substantial friction when adapted to other class- education rooms [12]. These challenges are exacerbated across teaching contexts in different countries. As a result, cultural, pedagogic, Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or and organizational know-how may be siloed within countries classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation and institutions. Second, many students live in communi- on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the ties without trained CS teachers, resulting in a “chicken and author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or egg” problem—the lack of teachers with the required content republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]. knowledge prevents students from becoming future teachers L@S ’20, August 12–14, 2020, Virtual Event, USA. [3, 37]. We note that both of these challenges exist in all c 2020 Association for Computing Machinery. ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-7951-9/20/08 ...$15.00. countries—including in the United States [41]. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3386527.3405915 103 Session 3 L@S ’20, August 12–14, 2020, Virtual Event, USA Figure 1. (a) CS Bridge locations. Courses based on CS Bridge; (b) A typical cross-border co-teaching team, comprised of an equal number of local and visiting teachers. With the goal of CS for All Countries, we developed CS Bridge, PRIOR WORK a curriculum designed to support cross-border co-teaching. CS Bridge presents a novel combination of ideas: co-teaching, The course is jointly taught to students in diverse communities how to create inclusive and engaging curricula, and interna- around the world to reinforce and bootstrap local communities tional CS teaching. As such, it builds upon a large body of of CS practice, as well as to reduce the friction preventing the work from several fields of thought in the computer science spread of curricula and pedagogy across borders. We discuss education community. two key contributions in this paper: We provide a course-in- a-box based on a prominent US R1 university’s CS1 course Learning to program for non-English speakers presents sub- that instructors can adapt to a multitude of contexts.1 The stantial challenges [7, 13, 43]. There have been many course is designed to be linguistically simple, to foster cre- projects to teach programming outside the US—the Bermuda ativity through programming, and to be compatible with both project and AddisCoder, among others [2, 23]. App Inventor, high school- and university-level classroom learning. Our Code.org, and Scratch have been three large-scale efforts to second contribution is a course centered around cross-border support multilingual resources in block-based programming co-teaching, where local instructors and student-teachers (i.e., languages for K-12 students around the world [16, 32, 42, 44]. undergraduate teaching assistants, or UTAs) actively partici- In particular, App Inventor’s ability to deploy student code to pate in shaping the course and teaching it to students in their Android phones is a powerful feature. The design and pacing own communities. By combining a high-quality CS1 curricula of the curriculum is then left to local instructors to integrate with a blended group of motivated instructors (Figure 1b), into their courses. Our goal in co-teaching CS1 is to use curric- we aim to boost and sustain interest in studying and teaching ula that local instructors and UTAs could envision in their own computer science. classrooms. Many international universities have introductory courses in languages like Java, C, C++, or Python, and we This paper was written by eight instructors from around the sought to teach a course that local teachers were familiar with, world who were brought together by CS Bridge. Since 2014, where they could actively contribute content and incorporate we have taught CS Bridge ten times in three countries to over ideas back into their classrooms. 1,000 high school students, with a team of over 100 UTAs and lecturers. Our goal is to add one new host country per year— Co-teaching has a rich literature [14] especially with respect as we learn from each other and our students, we adapt the to inclusive education [21, 38]. We believe it could be one curriculum and the way we teach. In this paper, we evaluate way to address the identified issues in diffusion of technology the effectiveness of the curriculum and highlight educational [1, 22, 33]. outcomes for the students and UTAs. One big lesson for us Service-learning—where students travel to other countries for has been the enthusiasm it has fostered among the UTAs, community service projects—is well-practiced as a way to who have built a thriving community of their own, many of enhance social good in computing education [4, 6, 11, 15, whom have returned to teach again, or have gone on to teach 28]. While service-learning can be beneficial for students elsewhere. This last outcome is perhaps the most scalable to learn about social responsibility and empathy, it can have effect of small-group, in-person, cross-border co-teaching. negative impacts on the host community [24]. Cross-border While most of our effort has focused on three university-based co-teaching brings many of the same benefits for the hosts programs in Istanbul, Turkey; Bogota,´ Colombia; and Prague, and guest community. However, CS Bridge is different from a Czech Republic, other teachers have successfully adopted and service project as it is a joint project between colleagues from adapted the CS Bridge curriculum—ranging from Peace Corps different countries; mitigating the costs. Volunteers, to a course in Guinea, to a community college and a large research university. We close our paper with a case MAIN CONTRIBUTIONS study of Koumbia, Guinea, where we adapted CS Bridge to a CS Bridge Course-in-a-Box non-university, rural context. The CS Bridge curriculum is an open-source Java-based course built around the popular ACM Java libraries and informed by decades of shared ideas in the CS education community [34]. The course assumes no prior knowledge and is built so that 1Our course-in-a-box is available at http://course.csbridge.org. all students can—by the end—build the Breakout game from 104 Session 3 L@S ’20, August 12–14, 2020, Virtual Event, USA scratch [26] and make their own creative final project.