Use Community Problem-Solving to Engage All Students in Computational and Statistical Thinking

Guzdial (2022) suggested that one of the reasons computer science courses fail societally marginalized students is because “the curriculum remains disconnected from students’ lives and is not designed to serve them.” How to make learning real to students? There are examples and ways to engage students in their learning including but not limited to hands-on projects, group works, problem solving, and real-world connections. In this paper, I will reflect my experiences in designing and developing a course that utilizes community problem-solving to encourage all students to identify and solve real-world problems that happen in their community. The course framework integrates Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE), which offers all student support unities to engage in research as a part of the structured course. CURE provides an effective approach to engage students into more active learning (Kuh, 2008), and support students to accomplish learning outcomes and persistence (Freeman et al., 2014) in STEM majors. The integration of CURE in the course design can facilitate teaching Computational Thinking (CT) and Statistical Thinking (ST). The paper presentation intends to provide specific topics to add to curricula by the structured and organized course development based on an integrated framework to engage students in learning using meaningful community problem solving. Additionally, I will describe the teaching strategies that are employed to facilitate teaching CT and ST, as well as the challenges and constraints to develop the course framework and implement the course development.