Expanding Access to Computer Science Education through Collaboration and Open Source Thinking

Bass Connections team leader Aria Chernik was a guest on WNCU radio show The Measure of Everyday Life, where she shared her collaborative efforts to bring open source thinking into educational settings.

Chernik is founder and director of Open Source Pedagogy, Research + Innovation (OSPRI), housed in Duke’s Social Science Research Institute. OSPRI is a collaboration between Duke and Red Hat.

“Red Hat is based in Raleigh and a leading provider of open source software, tools and solutions,” Chernik told Brian Southwell, host of The Measure of Everyday Life and director of RTI International’s Science in the Public Sphere Program. “But aside from that, Red Hat has been very committed to thinking about open source across domains, so it’s not about just software development—it really is about [asking], what does open source look like from an organizational perspective, from public policy, government, medicine and so on?”

This year, a Bass Connections project team called OSPRI Lab is scaling up a new program, CSbyUs, to expand access to computer science education for young people. Chernik explained that CSbyUS “was developed by undergraduate students at Duke who came to me and said, ‘We have this idea, and we know we can make it work.’”

She began collaborating with the Duke students. “We saw the potential,” she told Southwell. “There is open access information available in terms of teaching computer science, and we know that there is a deep and real problem with not enough STEM and computer science being taught—everywhere, but particularly among under-resourced schools—and we set out to do something about it.”

The students developed a curriculum and adapted it to meet the needs of their Durham middle school partners for after-school programs. “For the first two weeks, coding is not mentioned,” Chernik said. “It’s about [starting with] empathy and talking to people and [asking], what would be helpful to a community and that students are genuinely interested in?”

What’s essential, she told Southwell, “is that it’s undergraduate students who are doing the teaching. They are the mentors in the classroom doing this work with the middle school students.” The curriculum is expanding to other schools in the Triangle, and as the program scales up, “the idea is to develop a mentoring program,” Chernik said. “We want to be able to share not just our CSbyUs curriculum but also our mentor training with anyone who wants to do this. The real potential in this project is that anywhere there’s a college or university, you can have undergraduate mentors in their local communities using and iterating on this CSbyUs curriculum.”

The episode “Open Source Thinking” aired on WNCU and is available on the program’s website and iTunes. Southwell, an adjunct professor at Duke, is a former Bass Connections team leader himself (Resident Engagement and Energy Behavior Assessment through Mobile Phone Technology; LIT HoMES; and Communicating about Energy in the Triangle).

Learn More

• Read about this project team, Open Source Pedagogy, Research + Innovation (OSPRI) Lab, and see what last year’s team accomplished.
• Check out the Social Science Research Lab, a new hands-on course for undergraduates.
• Browse the Bass Connections 2017-18 Annual Report.

Photo courtesy of Red Hat: Aria Chernik and Duke student Sharon Peng participate in the Red Hat CO.LAB project, which seeks to close the STEM diversity gap and teach middle school girls about the power of collaboration.