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Overcoming barriers among Israeli and Palestinian students via computer science

Published: 09 March 2011 Publication History

Abstract

The Middle East Education Through Technology (MEET) program is a non-profit organization based in Jerusalem, that aims to empower future Israeli and Palestinian leaders by teaching them computer science and business. From the perspective of MEET's instructors, this paper describes how MEET uses computer science education to foster professional and personal contact among Israeli and Palestinian high school students, two groups who otherwise would have little or no interaction with each other. MEET's primary method of overcoming the barrier is teamwork: students are divided into groups that include both Israelis and Palestinians and are assigned software engineering tasks. We believe that the techniques used by MEET can serve as examples for other computer science programs that overcome barriers between groups in the United States and other countries.

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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGCSE '11: Proceedings of the 42nd ACM technical symposium on Computer science education
March 2011
754 pages
ISBN:9781450305006
DOI:10.1145/1953163
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Association for Computing Machinery

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Published: 09 March 2011

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Author Tags

  1. Israeli-Palestinian relations
  2. computer science education
  3. ethnic conflict

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SIGCSE '11
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SIGCSE '11 Paper Acceptance Rate 107 of 315 submissions, 34%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 1,595 of 4,542 submissions, 35%

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The 56th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
February 26 - March 1, 2025
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