To address disparity issues in STEM fields, this study implemented a culturally relevant, hands-on learning program tailored for African American high school students from low-income areas in America's Deep South. The program included a one-month summer academy followed by a four-month collaborative app design project using MIT App Inventor. A…

This dissertation presents the results and outcomes of an effort to design educational tools and curriculum to improve student learning in introductory programming courses. The work was conducted at the University of California, Merced (UC Merced), situated in the Central Valley of California, and home to a diverse student population. The findings…

A well-run introductory CS1 course is essential for all students within CS education. CS1 is necessary to keep students in the major and important to attract non-majors to the CS field. Unfortunately, there are many well-known issues that most CS1 courses have in common: high drop rates, low retention, high student stress, student struggle,…

The purpose of the study is to determine the visual and auditory reaction time, perception, attention and memory levels of PE teacher candidates and computer teacher candidates. For this purpose, after giving necessary information to the teacher candidates of the Department of Physical Education and Sports and the candidates of Computer Teaching…

The "doer effect" is the assertion that the amount of interactive practice activity a student engages in is much more predictive of learning than the amount of passive reading or watching video the same student engages in. Although the evidence for a doer effect is now substantial, the evidence for a causal doer effect is not as well…

The major objective of this study was to examine the difference between the mean scores of proficiency in Internet usage of college students with respect to gender, locality, subject, parental monthly income, and internet usage time per day. Three hundred college students from various colleges of Kanyakumari district in India were selected by…

New physics bachelors entering the workforce receive some of the highest starting salaries of any undergraduate majors. Bachelors accepting STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) positions in the private sector had a median starting salary of $55,000. Physics bachelors from 2013 and 2014 were contacted in the winter following the…

This paper describes an interactive museum exhibit featuring an avatar of Alan Turing that informs museum visitors about artificial intelligence and Turing's seminal Turing Test for machine intelligence. The objective of the exhibit is to engage and motivate visiting children in the hope of sparking an interest in them about computer science and…