Collaborative Research: CCRI: New: An Infrastructure for Sustainable Innovation and Research in Computer Science Education

Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University, North Carolina State University, and Virginia Tech collaborate to support the Computer Science Education Hub, social and technical infrastructure to accelerate research on teaching and learning of computing disciplines. The Hub will host community events and provide a web repository for computing education datasets, tools, and common analysis methods.

The Hub facilitates creation and adoption of new tools to support computing educators and students, and new standards to support data collection and data-enabled research. Hub community events help researchers and educators from many learning contexts to develop and improve computing education resources.

The Hub provides a pioneering example of infrastructure to support data-enabled research on education in Computing and beyond. It advances Computing Education Research through: (1) building a community and website that helps instructors adopt evidence-based practices and innovative learning technologies, (2) creating data standards and large, high-quality datasets, (3) developing advanced algorithms using artificial intelligence, statistics, and analytics methods that leverage data to optimize student learning effectiveness, efficiency, and engagement, (4) developing rigorous evaluation methods to demonstrate large, lasting, and replicable impacts on student achievement.

Cross-disciplinary scientific advances are disseminated through the Hub infrastructure community and through scientific publications.

The Hub will have a direct and immediate impact on hundreds of researchers and educators, and tens of thousands of students, during the project phase and beyond. It will reduce barriers to educational innovation and support discoveries in the many scientific communities that contribute to computing education research, where many researchers and educators are currently isolated into separate silos.

Through community development and outreach efforts, this team directly engages with instructors and students from underserved communities in the design and use of the infrastructure. Discoveries and innovations enabled by the Hub will help tens of thousands of students in the strategically important field of computer science.

To distribute project-related information, the website at http://cssplice.org/ is maintained, where all project information including standards, best practices, and resources will be shared. It informs the community about events and opportunities to contribute. The site provides links to project publications, code, data, and learning content hosted in archival repositories such as GitHub and DataShop.

The website will be maintained at least through 2027. The resources contributed to archival repositories will be maintained indefinitely.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.