CAPACiTY - Discovery High School - Gwinnett County, Georgia

Culturally Authentic Practice to Advance Computational Thinking in Youth (CAPACiTY) is a STEM+C project to create, pilot and assess a new curriculum for the Georgia high school Introduction to Digital Technology (IDT) course. The curriculum promotes the development of rigorous computational thinking (CT) skills by engaging students in authentic and culturally relevant projects. 

Using these projects as guides, students draw upon their own experiences, settings, and culture to iteratively and digitally narrate stories to develop awareness and agency. During the two-semester course, students progress from digital literacy to digital research and computational problem solving. They start by creating basic narratives using static documents and slides. They then advance to creating more dynamic, interactive narratives using web pages, mobile applications and computationally generated music using a variety of computational tools such as Powerpoint, EarSketch, and App Inventor.

The research explores how this problem-based, inquiry driven and culturally relevant CS curriculum affects student engagement, motivation, content understanding, and persistence in CS courses, particularly among student traditionally underrepresented in CS. The research will also focus on determining how teacher professional development activities influence classroom practices among participating IDT teachers.

Principal Investigator: 
Dr. Marion Usselman
CEISMC Principal Research Scientist

Co-Principal Investigators: 
Dr. Meltem Alemdar 
CEISMC Senior Research Scientist

Mr. Douglas Edwards
CEISMC Research Associate II

Senior Personnel:
CEISMC staff: 
Dr. Diley Hernandez
Mr. Michael Ryan
Dr. Michael Helms

Partner School Systems:
Gwinnett County Public Schools
Fulton County Schools

Funder: NSF, STEM+Computing program
Award Number: #1639946
Amount Awarded: $2,496,391
Dates: 10-1-2016— 9-30-2019