Welcome to the Interactive Journalism Institute for Middle Schoolers!
IJIMS was an NSF Funded project that ran at The College of New Jersey from Fall 2007 to Spring 2011. It was designed to introduce middle schoolers from underrepresented populations to opportunities in computing by following the shift of journalism onto the Web. Through the institute, middle school students and their teachers create an online magazine to learn computational thinking via digital media, interactive graphics, animation, video and database design in a collaborative setting. They gain confidence in their computational and writing skills and to share their online magazine with family, friends and teachers.
The research was supported through a grant from the National Science Foundation’s Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC) program, NSF Grant Number CNS 0739173. This works reflects the opinions of the researchers, and not necessarily those of NSF. Undergraduate research during the academic year 2009-2010 and summer 2010 will be partially funded through an award from the Collaborative Research Experience for Undergraduates (CREU) program.
The primary publications related to this work are:
Wolz, U., K. Pearson, S.M. Pulimood, M. Stone, M. Switzer “Computational Thinking and Expository Writing in the Middle School: A novel approach to broadening participation in computing”, to appear in the Transactions on Computing Education, anticipated June 2011.
Wolz, U., M. Stone, M. Millazo, Kinesthetic Learning of Computing via Off-beat Activities, To be presented at the 16th Annual Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education, Darmstadt, Germany, 2011
Wolz, U, and M. Stone, S.M. Pulimood, K. Pearson. 2010. Computational Thinking via Interactive Journalism. In Proceedings of the 41st SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, (Milwaukee, WI, March 10-14, 2010), SIGCSE ’10, ACM, New York, NY. 239-243, DOI = http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1734263.1734345
This work also appears in:
Computational Thinking for Everyone: A Workshop Series Workshop 1
February 19, 2009 - February 20, 2009, The National Academies Committee for the Workshops on Computational Thinking; National Research Council, Report on the Scope and Nature of Computational Thinking, The National Academies Press, 2010 http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12840
Videos: Check out former President William Jefferson Clinton's special video greetings to the IJIMS team and watch a video recap of IJIM's summer 2009 in under two minutes.
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