SBIR Phase I: A Co-creation, Cross-curricular, Standard Aligned Computer Science, Engineering, and Cybersecurity Education Technology Platform

This SBIR Phase I project provides student access to computer science curriculum and computational thinking skills to better prepare for college and the workforce. Unfortunately, no organized computer science curriculum is offered in majority of schools in the United States and only 1 out of 4 public high schools in the United States offer even one computer science class. Educators and administrators need new platforms of community and technical support to overcome these modern challenges and accomplish these critical goals. This project is aimed at the design and development of a web-based software platform to enable educators to confidently teach computer science, engineering, and cybersecurity education in classrooms and community centers. The resulting software platform would enable rapid growth of after-school clubs, camps, evening classes, in-school field trips, workshops, and educational gaming. This effort further democratizes the teaching of computer science and engineering concepts, thus addressing the talent gap that is leaving the United States behind in cybersecurity and in the world economy. This project has significant revenue and growth potential as it can be of service to approximately 3 million public school teachers and 50.1 million students who attended public elementary and secondary schools in 2015. This project will design and develop a web-based software platform to easily connect, attract, and foster the exchange, co-creation, and delivery of cross-curricular, educational computing literacy resources aligned with national and state educational standards. Analytics and metrics will be applied and developed to gain insight into the support needed for effective instruction. Instructors will be able to develop rich, dynamic, and engaging content, allowing secondary and elementary students to actively participate with the material and to assess their understanding. Students using the platform will also get access to expert mentors for debugging help, code review, and to ask questions. Educators will able to communicate best practices to ensure continuous access to high quality computer literacy resources. As a result, the platform provides superior pedagogy for secondary and elementary school students learning computer science, engineering, and cybersecurity. An initial alpha launch, a pilot study and analytical data gathering will be conducted throughout Phase 1 to study the efficacy of the proposed solution. The goal of this research is to verify the system features, the ease of use and to understand if Phase 1 activities result in a prototype that offers technical feasibility to solve the problem.