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Agile Development in Project-based Curriculum at Scale for Middle and High School Girls (Abstract Only)

Published: 08 March 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Agile software development practices, which focus on iteration and adaptability, are commonly used in software engineering companies. Girls Who Code designed an after-school Clubs curriculum for middle and high school students that gives girls first-hand exposure to these practices. We use agile processes for two reasons. The first is practical: Over the course of a year-long Club, all participants collaboratively create a large project. Agile practices organize this effort. The second is mission-driven: We believe using real-world techniques and terminology will build girls' identities as computer scientists. Girls Who Code recognizes that when teaching 40,000 girls at scale, not every Clubs Facilitator will have had first-hand experience with agile development practices. We have created a curriculum to empower volunteers from any background to teach in an agile manner. Facilitators are given Session Outlines for each Club session that provide activities to structure the Club experience, as well as additional facilitator tips on topics such as finding an audience, researching pre-existing solutions, and developing solutions.
Throughout this year, the Girls Who Code Education team will observe Clubs to evaluate this pedagogical approach. We will follow 10 Clubs closely throughout the year, and visit approximately 40 more. During that time, we will interview facilitators about their experiences teaching our curriculum.
We will share our findings from these field observations and recommendations for integrating agile development practices into curricula. We hope to engage the computer science education community in a conversation about the strengths and challenges of this approach.

References

[1]
Lucas Layman, Travis Cornwell, and Laurie Williams. 2006. Personality types, learning styles, and an agile approach to software engineering education. In Proceedings of the 37th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education (SIGCSE '06). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 428--432.
[2]
Orit Hazzan and Yael Dubinsky. 2007. Why software engineering programs should teach agile software development. SIGSOFT Softw. Eng. Notes 32, 2 (March 2007), 1--3.
[3]
Philip Sadler, Gerhard Sonnert, Zahra Hazari, Robert Tai. 2011. Stability and Volatility of STEM Career Interest in High School: A Gender Study. Science Education, Vol. 96, No. 3, (2012). Wiley Periodicals, Inc, pp. 411--427
[4]
Scrum Alliance. The 2015 State of Scrum Report. Scrum Alliance, 2015, 3.
[5]
Version One. Ninth Annual State of Agile Survey. Version One Inc, 2015, 2.

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
SIGCSE '17: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
March 2017
838 pages
ISBN:9781450346986
DOI:10.1145/3017680
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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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 08 March 2017

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Author Tags

  1. K12
  2. after-school
  3. agile
  4. curriculum
  5. girls

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SIGCSE '17
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SIGCSE '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 105 of 348 submissions, 30%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 1,787 of 5,146 submissions, 35%

Upcoming Conference

SIGCSE TS 2025
The 56th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
February 26 - March 1, 2025
Pittsburgh , PA , USA

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