Abstract
The School of Computer Science at Tel Aviv University, Israel, has initiated and carried out a project titled “Teaching Computer Science in the Community". The project aims to introduce scientific thinking and basic computer science concepts in an informal setting to school children from low socio-economic background. The project is implemented as a single semester undergraduate elective course, in which third year computer science students teach in schools and community centers. Here, we describe the spirit, content, and structure of the course and discuss insight we have gained over the last four years of teaching it.
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References
Bell, T.C., Witten, I.H., Fellows, M.: Computer Science Unplugged ... Off-line activities and games for all ages (1998). http://csunplugged.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/unplugged-book-v1.pdf
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Acknowledgements
We are proud to thank many friends, colleagues, and students, for help and support during the development and operation of this project.
Benny Chor wishes to thank Tim Bell and Mike Fellows, initiators of the Computer Science Unplugged project, for their friendship, support, and many hours of discussions and debates. Many thanks to Shimon Schocken from the Inter Disciplenary Center in Hertzeliya for co-translating CSU material to Hebrew, and running together a similar, initial project during the years 2009 and 2010.
We would like to thank Rachel Warshavsky, Idit Helman, and Nadia Belkind from the Unit of Community Involvement at the Dean of Students Office, Tel-Aviv University, for the fruitful partnership, which substantially improved the quality of our project. Special thanks to Yasmin Denenberg from the Unit of Community Involvement, who was an essential part of the course staff during the three years 2012 to 2014, and provided indispensable knowledge and experience on the pedagogical aspects of this operation. Thanks to Pnina Neria-Barzilay from the School of Computer Science at Tel Aviv University, who helped solving numerous administrative and logistical problems that occurred during our activities, and to the School of Computer Science at Tel Aviv University, whose support made this project possible.
Thanks to Matan Hadadi, our former student, for his KidStartUpDay initiative. Thanks to the many former course students who participated in our intensive training for newer students, shared their experience, and hosted school children groups in visits to high tech companies, where they are employed. Yoav Ram, Noy Rotbart, Amir Rubinstein, Arieh Zaritsky, and Hilla Zaritsky provided helpful comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript. Thanks to Noga Levy-Oron and David Amar, who were the teaching assistants in 2013–2014. Last but not least, we thank the 110+ TAU CS students who took on this challenge (during the years 2011 to 2014) and carried it out remarkably.
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Chor, B., Zaritsky, A. (2016). Teaching Computer Science in the Community. In: Bjørner, N., Prasad, S., Parida, L. (eds) Distributed Computing and Internet Technology. ICDCIT 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9581. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28034-9_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28034-9_1
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