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Computing with a Community Focus: An App Inventor Summer Camp for Middle School Students (Abstract Only)

Published: 17 February 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Recent work has demonstrated the power of providing relevant, meaningful contexts for computer science to broaden participation. In this poster, we present the design and evaluation of a one-week App Inventor summer camp for middle school students with an explicit focus on addressing local community needs. We recruited community partners to present their organization's work to students, and then we supported students in developing apps that would support these organizations' missions. Students successfully developed apps that were designed to address community issues. Students developed apps on topics ranging from local farmers' markets, healthy food and nutrition apps, invasive species, local trees, to providing users with information about recycling. At the end of the workshop, we conducted an in-depth interview study to examine its impact on students' attitudes and perceptions toward computer science, and supplemented this with results from project evaluation. Our results indicate that students had positive experience in learning, creating and sharing real apps for solving community problems. Focusing on local community needs can also help to motivate students' interest not only in creating apps as well as in learning more about computer science. After the camp, students became more confident in creating apps as well as in using apps to solve community problems, and the camps were successful in welcoming a diverse set of students into computing.

References

[1]
Buckley, M., Nordlinger, J. and Subramanian, D. (2008) Socially relevant computing. ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, 40(1), 347--351.
[2]
Sherman, M. and Martin, F. (2015). The assessment of mobile computational thinking. J. Comput. Sci. Coll. 30(6), 53--59.
[3]
Wagner, A., Gray, J., Corley, J., & Wolber, D. (2013). Using App Inventor in a K-12 summer camp. SIGCSE '13, 621--626.
[4]
Wolber, D., Abelson, H. and Friedman, M. (2015). Democratizing computing with App Inventor. GetMobile: Mobile Computing and Communications Review, 18(4), 53--58.

Cited By

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  • (2023)CompSciConnect: A Multi-Year Summer Program to Broaden Participation in ComputingProceedings of the 54th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3545945.3569850(319-325)Online publication date: 2-Mar-2023
  • (2020)Making AppsACM Transactions on Computing Education10.1145/342571020:4(1-23)Online publication date: 12-Nov-2020
  • (2019)Using Informed Design in Informal Computer Science Programs to Increase Youths’ Interest, Self-efficacy, and Perceptions of Parental SupportACM Transactions on Computing Education10.1145/331944519:4(1-24)Online publication date: 2-Aug-2019
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  1. Computing with a Community Focus: An App Inventor Summer Camp for Middle School Students (Abstract Only)

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      SIGCSE '16: Proceedings of the 47th ACM Technical Symposium on Computing Science Education
      February 2016
      768 pages
      ISBN:9781450336857
      DOI:10.1145/2839509
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or 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 on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 17 February 2016

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      Author Tags

      1. app inventor
      2. attitudes towards computing
      3. middle school
      4. socially relevant computing
      5. summer camp

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      SIGCSE '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 105 of 297 submissions, 35%;
      Overall Acceptance Rate 1,595 of 4,542 submissions, 35%

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      View all
      • (2023)CompSciConnect: A Multi-Year Summer Program to Broaden Participation in ComputingProceedings of the 54th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3545945.3569850(319-325)Online publication date: 2-Mar-2023
      • (2020)Making AppsACM Transactions on Computing Education10.1145/342571020:4(1-23)Online publication date: 12-Nov-2020
      • (2019)Using Informed Design in Informal Computer Science Programs to Increase Youths’ Interest, Self-efficacy, and Perceptions of Parental SupportACM Transactions on Computing Education10.1145/331944519:4(1-24)Online publication date: 2-Aug-2019
      • (2019)Trade-Offs in Using Mobile Tools to Promote Scientific Action with Socioscientific IssuesTechTrends10.1007/s11528-019-00408-z63:5(602-610)Online publication date: 17-Jul-2019
      • (2018)Evaluating computer science camp topics in increasing girls' confidence in computer scienceJournal of Computing Sciences in Colleges10.5555/3204979.320499333:5(70-78)Online publication date: 1-May-2018
      • (2018)A Collaborative Course for Learning How to Teach Summer Java Coding CampsProceedings of the 49th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education10.1145/3159450.3159610(515-520)Online publication date: 21-Feb-2018

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