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AccessComputing Mini Grants

Project Purpose (Research Question/Problem Statement):  

Students with invisible disabilities are significantly underrepresented in careers within science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. To what extent can interest in STEM be encouraged by providing students hands-on experience in the STEM fields? Landmark College has partnered with the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and Southern Illinois University to offer students an opportunity to actively learn and engage in the type of work conducted within the Computer Science field.  Two workshops will be held at Landmark College to introduce students to Human-Centered Computing (HCC) methods, electronic tablets and computer programming.  Participating in such workshops provides students the opportunity to see themselves as designers or programmers and has the potential to raise their interest levels and their self-efficacy about a future career in a STEM field.

Project Descriptions:

AccessComputing Minigrant 1: Participatory Design for Accessible Apps and Games

Landmark College, in collaboration with the Information Systems Department at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), will hold a one-day workshop on HCC methods and participatory design for Landmark students. Students will have the opportunity to join a participatory design team, interact with applications (“Apps”) prototypes created by UMBC graduate students, contribute their feedback and learn how to make design modifications to meet user requirements. 

AccessComputing Minigrant 2:  Electronic Tablets & Computer Programming Workshop

Electronic tablets offer a variety of accessibility options for diverse audiences, and applications (“Apps”) which have the potential to help struggling students become independent learners. A two-day workshop is proposed at Landmark College, in collaboration with the Computer Science Department at Southern Illinois University (SIU), to provide students at Landmark the opportunity to learn how to develop electronic tablet applications intended to meet their individual learning needs and to become aware of the programming tools used in the computer science field. We will be exploring whether Landmark College’s Master Notebook organizational tool can be replicated in whole or in part by existing or future Apps, and whether Quorum, a programming language developed at SIU will benefit students with invisible disabilities.

Results/Outcomes:

We are currently in the process of collecting and/or analyzing the data from these workshops.

"...funded by grants from the AT&T Foundation and the Alliance for Access to Computing Careers (AccessComputing) which is funded by the National Science Foundation as part of the Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC) program of the Directorate for Computer and Information Sciences and Engineering (CISE) (grant #CNS-0540615, CNS-0837508 and CNS-1042260)."