Constellations 2023: Advancing Leadership and Advocacy for CS Education

2023 was a transformative year for the College of Computing community. The following is an excerpt from the College's recently published annual report.

Building on a growing reputation for leadership and advocacy, the Constellations Center for Equity in Computing this year undertook several ambitious outreach efforts.

Constellations pushed beyond state lines for the first time in the center’s history by hosting summer camps and professional development workshops in the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI) in summer 2022.

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Much like summer camps hosted by the College in past years, the USVI program provided weeklong camps for middle—and high-school-age students focused on robotics, video, game design, music in computing, and more.

The program used an innovative live instruction/remote participation model, so live facilitators at Georgia Tech could reach students in multiple USVI locations. Onsite teaching assistants provided the campers with hands-on project support and extended learning opportunities, which helped to maximize the program’s impact.

The Constellations team developed the live/remote model following the pandemic. It successfully supported remote summer camps in partnership with the Jefferson County, Georgia, school district and the Mt. Zion Church in Albany, Georgia.

In the USVI, Constellations hosted in-person professional development workshops for more than two dozen educators, teaching them coding for computers, robots, and circuits. The workshops provided participating educators with information and resources to integrate into their lesson plans. These resources included educational robots, circuit kits, and additional instructional and research materials.

The summer camps and professional development workshops are part of Constellations’ collaboration with the University of the Virgin Islands and the USVI Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research.

Closer to home, Constellations welcomed its second BridgeUP STEM cohort in June. The program provides coding training, code tutorials, and robot programming for young women from underrepresented communities. A key goal was to spark an interest in undergraduate research among the 50 high school-aged girls and non-binary students who participated in the program.

“Programs like BridgeUP are important because they make real the promise of a more inclusive future. As society moves toward a reliance on technology, those affected by that technology must be included in its development,” said Constellations Senior Director Tamara Pearson.

Another key Constellations initiative this year was the launch of a peer mentoring program that connects school districts across the state. The mentoring program pairs educators from established K-12 computer science (CS) programs with their peers from school districts setting up new programs.

The mentoring program is part of an ongoing collaboration with the Georgia Department of Education to expand statewide access to CS education. It also supports the state law requiring that computing be part of the K-12 curriculum in all school districts by the start of the 2024-2025 school year.