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A team of researchers from UMass Lowell and SUNY Albany won a three-year, $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to create a computer science curriculum for middle schools in collaboration with school districts in Lowell and Methuen, Mass., and Schenectady, N.Y.

Called , the project aims to build a partnership between researchers and practicing educators to develop inclusive, culturally responsive and sustainable computer science programs at the middle school level.

“Those of us in the universities are the researchers while the three school districts are the practitioners, and that includes teachers and administrators as well as parents,” says  Prof. , who is the principal investigator for UMass Lowell.

“Our goal is to give all middle schoolers in the partner districts a taste of what computer science is about,” says Martin. “It’s really about whetting their appetites to learn more and for them to discover that they have a passion for computer science, which many might not realize. So if they get excited by it, then they can make a choice to pursue it in high school and college and, eventually, in their professional career.”

Martin’s share of the NSF grant is worth more than $573,000. Asst. Prof.  and Ph.D. student Bernardo Feliciano, both from the UML , are spearheading research into students’ computational literacies, and  from the  Dean’s Office serves as project manager.

The grant builds on the work that Martin, his graduate students and community partners did from 2014 to 2017, in which schoolchildren in the  learned programming skills by making mobile apps that had a social impact. Some of the apps created for Android phones were designed to help fellow teens deal with . That project was funded with a three-year, $1.2 million grant from the NSF.

“We reached a total of more than 1,200 kids during our partnership with Medford and Everett,” says Martin. “Our vision was to enable students to use computer science as a way of making the world a better place.”

Martin says they would like to establish CS Pathways as a convention or norm so that it becomes an official part of the middle school curriculum. However, he says the process is challenging, given that the curricula are already full and there’s no mandate to teach computer science. 

“Computer science is a young field overall, especially in the K–12 levels, so institutionalization is a challenge,” says Martin. “In the meantime, we’re working with teachers within the districts and training them to become leaders who will carry the project forward after the grant funding period is over.”