Reaching Across the Hallway

Broadening rural middle school history students’ participation in meaningful and culturally relevant CS instruction.

Lead Staff:
Debra Bernstein
Project Staff:
Santiago Gasca
Eric Hochberg

Summary

Reaching Across the Hallway is a research project supporting rural, middle school teachers in integrating culturally relevant computer science activities into their social studies classrooms. This project encourages a more inclusive understanding of history by allowing students to explore and bring to life historical and societal concepts through computer science and computational tools. We believe adding these types of interactive activities will engage underrepresented students in computing while also making social studies concepts more tangible.

Impact

  • Broadening access to meaningful CS instruction for students in rural areas across Virginia.
  • Using computational techniques such as modeling and simulation to allow students to explore historical events from multiple lenses.
  • Providing innovative, replicable, and scalable training and resources on culturally relevant teaching techniques to support historical inquiry across rural divisions in Virginia.