Name
Title | ||
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Near-peer Led Workshops on Game Development for Broadening Participation and Diversity in Computing |
Abstract | ||
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The goal of a technology-focused service-learning course at an open access, baccalaureate degree granting institution is to increase the confidence and persistence of students, especially underrepresented students, in computing. An earlier study has shown the positive impact for the students enrolled in the service-learning course. In this paper, we evaluate the service part of the course, outreach activities that aim to let young people get excited about technology. Specifically, we evaluate the effectiveness of the near-peer outreach activities in the form of light-weight workshops for game development.
One major activity conducted by the service-learning students is to develop games and then conduct workshops for lower class students (mostly freshmen) in Introduction to Computing, a general education course. In the workshops, the audience will develop miniature versions of the games that the service-learning students have developed. This makes the workshops fun and light-weight, taking only one-class period and allows our students to reach many classes and a large audience.
In addition to reaching a large audience, data shows that this game-based, light-weight and near-peer led workshops are very effective in attracting diverse early college students into programming. Based on this observation, we make suggestions for future activities in outreach, which we believe are also applicable outside our service-learning course context.
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Year | DOI | Venue |
|---|---|---|
2019 | 10.1145/3299815.3314430 | Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Southeast Conference |
Keywords | Field | DocType |
Broadening participation in computing (BPC), IT workshop, diversity, light-weight workshop, near-peer mentoring | Baccalaureate Degree,Video game development,Computer science,Outreach,Theoretical computer science,Mathematics education,General education,Working class | Conference |
ISBN | Citations | PageRank |
978-1-4503-6251-1 | 0 | 0.34 |
References | Authors | |
0 | 2 | |