Welcome! We hope that you enjoy learning about Mobile CSP and how engaged students are when learning about Computer Science (CS) through a lens that they are familiar with: Mobile phones! Mobile CSP began, officially, in 2013 with an NSF grant at Trinity College in Hartford, CT. Since then the project is now serving more than 600 teachers and 10,000 students nationwide!

What are your thoughts on using mobile computing to teach CS? 

It's amazing that you have reached so many teachers. Can you describe your professional development model?

What grade range of students have you worked with?

Wow, this is amazing! I love the PD model you described above. It sounds as if this will be very successful. Is the PD free of charge or paid? 

I love that the students are not just learning CS and app development, but are encouraged to build apps that solve local community problems. I would love to see some examples of what the students have come up with. 

This is a very engaging video that I hope you'll use in a lot of different settings!  It gets a lot into the 3 minutes.

 Like Carrie, I really love the emphasis (as one teacher says) on making things that people can actually use. It appeals to kids' ethical as well as intellectual and aesthetic interests. 

The PD program sounds rich and effective — and it seems to me it's a story worth telling on its own.  I hope you have the time and resources to document and analyze that side of this very interesting project. 

One of the things I love about Mobile CSP is the teacher community! This community starts in the intensive summer PD with a cohort of teachers and then continues throughout the academic year when they join all of the teachers who have been teaching Mobile CSP for the last couple years in forums and in monthly webinars. I'm always amazed by how supportive the teachers are of one another in sharing ideas, feedback, problems and solutions. This community also drives changes and updates to the curriculum and PD.  This year we are charging for the PD for the first time (see mobile-csp.org/participate) but we do have scholarships and are continuously looking for more grant funding. The curriculum is free for students and teachers, and it includes a  student site and a teacher site.  The curriculum uses MIT's App Inventor which is great in encouraging beginning programmers to be creative and to produce real-world apps that are socially useful.

Thank you for sharing, Beryl!

Some examples of student apps can be found here in this brief slideshow. Next Tuesday, we will also host our 5th annual Mobile CSP App Expo at Trinity College in Hartford, CT. Students come from across the state to showcase the apps they've made in the class. It's a chance for them to network and communicate with their peers from other schools as well as a chance to celebrate their accomplishments in the course. While it's only a very small subset of students given the location, it gives guests an idea of the work students produce in the course and a feel for how much they are engaged with the material and their projects.

An impressive project and well produced video. Do these students have a chance to work with community members as they develop mobile apps? If so, how do you support this?

Cat

Yes.  One of the annual activities sponsored by the project is the Mobile Apps for Hartford project.  This is a summer employment program supported in part by the City of Hartford whereby students who have taken the Mobile CSP course get summer jobs that involve working with local non-profits or government agencies to build mobile apps that benefit the organization and the community.  Last year's group worked with the Connecticut Science Center to develop Butterfly Spy an app that enables K-12 students to interact with the center's new butterfly room.   

Thanks for your question!

This looks like a terrific project! Thanks for sharing it.

Can you share a bit more about the population of students this program is reaching? By that I mean, do you feel like the program is reaching underserved and underrepresented students? Thanks again!

Here is a brief summary of data from last year's (2017) College Board exam.  For last year's exam our reach among underrepresented students tracked pretty closely to the national averages, which means, of course, that we aspire to better in coming years. 

Thanks for your questions.

Great video of a great project!

I am curious to know about the result from offering online session during the academic year. Was the participation and enthusiasm the same as previous years?

Thank you for sharing!