Micro-Volunteering and Virtual-Volunteering as Pedagogical Tools in Computer Science Instruction

Many universities and students look for opportunities to volunteer and contribute to their communities in a variety of ways. However, a host of factors including time, expense, and duration effect instructor adoption, student commitment and student perception of volunteer tasks. In CS curriculums, volunteer work most often takes the form of projects for local charities through a specific course (e.g., a senior capstone or software engineering course) or work in local elementary schools teaching younger students to program. The purpose of this talk is to stimulate a conversation about low-cost, low-commitment ways to incorporate service learning via micro-volunteering and virtual-volunteering into CS classes as pedagogically relevant assignments. Micro-volunteering refers to volunteer actions which take little time (usually less than 30 minutes) and have no expectation of continued involvement. Virtual-volunteering is defined as volunteering which a person can complete via the Internet from any location. While there exist many opportunities for semester-long, service learning-based projects in upper level courses, there is a lack of practical project ideas and assignments which could be incorporated into courses of all levels on a smaller scale. The goal of this project is to develop concrete assignments and short projects which incorporate micro- and virtual-volunteer opportunities in a variety of core Computer Science courses including introductory and non-major courses.