Building the Northwest Distributed Computer Science Department (Washington State University Vancouver)

PI Details

Scott Wallace wallaces@vancouver.wsu.edu Washington State University Vancouver School of Engineering & Computer Science http://ai.vancouver.wsu.edu/~wallaces/

CO-PIs

Robert Bryant, bryant@gonzaga.edu

Genevieve Orr, gorr@willamette.edu

Description

The Northwest Distributed Computer Science Department (NW-DCSD) Project seeks to develop a unique educational community within the Pacific Northwest region of the United States by uniting educators who are devoted to sharing knowledge, resources, and expertise to transform computing education across the region.

Together, this community will focus on:

• Enabling and fostering innovative change within the Computer Science (CS) curriculum

• Sharing knowledge and resources as innovation takes place

• Enabling heightened outreach to K-12 schools

• Integrating computational thinking into a variety of disciplines

• Enabling heightened ability to evaluate new educational strategies

The community we envision will initially be comprised of faculty from teaching-oriented institutions and will allow us to collectively overcome resource barriers to accomplish together what we cannot accomplish alone.

Audience

CS undergrads

Discipline

Only computer science, computing in/and sciences, computing in/and engr, computing in/and humanities

Success

Regional NWDCSD meetings have reached a community of 40 members representing 26 institutions that include higher education, secondary schools, and Computer Science advocacy groups. Since the beginning of our funding period, we've grown the active participant base from the 3 PIs and 5 Senior Personnel by more than a factor of two.

Pedagogic Approach

Creating and sharing innovative ideas that form the basis of a computing related curriculum

Challenge

My main concern going forward is maintaining momentum with a large, distributed, group of faculty. We have had very good recruiting and attendance results so far. However, as the group grows, it is also likely to get somewhat less cohesive, especially as we continue to recruit non-cs faculty from a variety of disciplines. This presents a challenge both from an organizational and cultural standpoint. At this point its not entirely clear what approach will best facility community growth.

Future Plan

Increase collaborative activities across the community, increase recruiting from non-CS related disciplines