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Dr. Christina Gardner
Georgia Institute of Technology
BIO: Dr. Gardner-McCune is a Post-Doctoral Researcher in the Office of Outreach, Enrollment, and Community in the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. She has been involved in designing informal STEM and computing learning environments for middle and high school students as well as undergraduates. Her doctoral research focused on how middle school students participated in and learned scientific practice during Kitchen Science Investigators (KSI), a hands-on cooking and science after-school program. She is currently involved in the design and implementation of the I3 Experience (Imagine, Investigate, and Innovate), a series of after-school programs designed to motivate and support high school students in the creation of personal expressions of computing through hands-on, project-based learning. In addition, she has been designing a Computational Thinking Olympiad for middle school students to learn about computing through a one-day competition where they engage in physically and mentally challenging activities. On the undergraduate level, she is part of the national pilot of the new AP CS Principles course and is currently instructing and designing the GA Tech course. Overall, her goal is to better understand how students learn and apply STEM and computing content in their everyday lives and to design learning environments to support students in making these connections. She holds a B. S. degree in Computer Engineering from Syracuse University, and earned both her masters and doctorate in Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology.
Date: Friday, May 25
Time: 3:00 pm
Location: 118 Academic Success Center (1st floor, take left, last room on left)
Title:
There is a current and projected demand from industry for individuals who have degrees in STEM and Computing related disciplines. However, ensuring that students will be eligible to enroll in these degree programs requires that they take the proper classes during their middle and high school education. Therefore, there is a need to foster students' interest in these fields at an early age so that they are eager to enroll in these courses and prepared for the challenges they present. Unfortunately, few k-12 schools offer students the opportunities to discover the creative and exciting aspects of STEM and Computing and fewer help them connect the content to their everyday lives. Thus, many students are left unaware of the relevance of STEM and Computing to their everyday lives and the opportunities available to them in STEM and Computing Careers. My approach to solving this problem is to design, build, and study learning environments and technology that help students learn computing and STEM content and reasoning in the context of activities in which they are personally interested. I am particularly interested in the iterative design, refinement, and sustainability of curriculum and program development to support computing and STEM learning. My goal is to create more opportunities that spark and sustain students' interest and enrollment into these degree programs. This talk will discuss the innovate approaches I've taken to engage middle school and high school students in science and computing education and the important features of these learning environments and technology in supporting learning.
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