SBIR Phase I: Democratizing Computer Science Education through a Sustainable Peer Tutoring Community

This SBIR Phase I project seeks to create an effective peer-tutoring platform for Computer Science (CS) education. Currently, the software industry in the United States is suffering from a shortage of 100,000 CS professionals per year. The root can be traced to the lack of CS preparation in K-12 education, where the majority of students do not receive proper CS education at school. While there is an ongoing effort to establish CS education in K-12, the teacher training and certification process is slow and expensive. Receiving mentorship is crucial to learning Computer Science. Online solutions that offer one-on-one tutoring are expensive and therefore not affordable by the majority of students. This project offers an affordable solution: a sustainable, global, online peer tutoring community in which every student can learn CS, programming, and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics)-related content from their peers. By lowering the tutoring costs to a fraction of the price of other existing solutions, majority of students, in particular in underserved communities, will have access to affordable quality CS education. Additionally, with its collaborative nature and social engagement elements, it can prepare students with 21st century skills and broaden participation of women and underrepresented populations in Computer Science. The goal of this Phase I project is to design, develop, and evaluate distributed communication and coordination software and educational content that are required for effective remote peer tutoring. Using a real-time collaborative game design software, peer tutors work virtually yet closely with students to guide them through the creation of a video game, solve computational problems, write programs together, and answer their questions just-in-time. This project features a distributed, shared development environment that allows multiple users to edit the same project at the same time. This real-time collaboration system employs a fast and scalable technology that manages multi-user concurrent editing of a shared project. The theoretical framework for this project is built based on 1) peer tutoring techniques such as Peer-Led Team Learning, which have been used successfully to teach CS, and to increase the participation of underrepresented groups; 2) decades of research and development in collaborative and social software engineering. In this project, an engaging peer tutoring unit for teaching computer science and STEM concepts in the context of collaborative game design will be produced and implemented in after-school settings in a number of schools to evaluate and establish the educational feasibility of the project.