A strategy for collaborative outreach: lessons from the CSbots project

Abstract

Many efforts are being made to improve computer science education in order to address the retention and motivation of students. These efforts rely on the development of educational tools and environments, tools that, when successful, require many years to integrate into the computer science education community. We introduce a strategy that both speeds uptake in the community and improves the chances of the project creating an educationally successful tool. The strategy hinges on creating an initial community of educators before an educational tool is fully mature but at the point at which it becomes usable by teachers. While this is somewhat analogous to the beta-testing communities in software development, our aim is for the community to drive the underlying design in significant ways. Our context is CSbots, a project to develop a robot, software environment, and associated curricula for introductory computer science education. We detail our collaborative outreach effort, which resulted in the concurrent creation of a community of 30 invested educators and a well aligned educational tool ready for broad dissemination.