The East Baton Rouge Parish School System, along with four other nearby parishes’ school systems, are rolling out new computer science courses for middle and high school students, thanks to an LSU team of professors and researchers spanning numerous fields. The team designed a curriculum to teach the fundamentals of programming and computational thinking due to the subjects’ increasing importance in the modern world.
LSU Physics and Astronomy Associate Professor Juana Moreno is leading the team as its principal investigator. She said the various courses they are designing will employ several programming languages, including Python, Javascript, R, Haskell and Java. However, she emphasized many courses will focus on conceptual learning rather than proficiency in any one language.
“A design consideration was to make the courses task-oriented rather than language-oriented,” Moreno said. “We are trying to offer something that suits every student and every school in the area.”
The scale of this project was initially limited by a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation, which only allowed it to provide classes to schools in East Baton Rouge Parish. The more recently obtained $4 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education will allow further curriculum designing, expansion of the program in additional parishes and the ability to assess the efficacy of the results.
Over the next five years, the team will study test scores, computer science course registration and graduation rates.
The East Baton Rouge Parish contains thousands of students, and over 75% of them are minorities from economically disadvantaged families. Accordingly, this project aims to emphasize minority outreach in course design and teaching.
“We aim to incorporate culturally relevant pedagogy in the professional development of teachers and to also expand the current curriculum with culturally relevant lessons collaboratively developed by teachers and their students,” Moreno said.
Moreno mentioned course tasks that could highlight Louisiana’s unique history, which featured African, Caribbean, French and English roots.
Much of the funding will be spent instructing and preparing teachers for the new curriculum. Moreno’s team will directly handle this training.
“The core of the teacher training is an intensive 5-week all-day summer institute,” Moreno said. “Training will carry on during the school year with regular Saturday sessions and continuous follow-up of their instruction during the semester.”
These teachers will naturally consist of those who already teach classes in science or math.
The team is also currently seeking to hire four LSU undergraduate students with experience in programming and/or Linux to assist in these projects.
