Three awards — two first-place and one second-place — were clinched by project posters of undergraduate students in the FSU School of Library & Information Studies (SLIS) information technology program at the “STARS Celebration 2010” conference in Orlando on August 9.
The students were attending the five-day conference as members of the Florida State University chapter of the STARS (Students and Technology in Academia, Research, and Service) Alliance, a service-learning group charged with addressing the shortage of computer scientists and information technologists in the southeastern United States. The organization is made up of 21 southeastern universities and colleges and funded by the National Science Foundation’s Broadening Participation in Computing grant.
The STARS Alliance seeks to retain current student in the computer science and information technology (IT) fields while increasing enrollment of traditionally underrepresented student populations — such as women, minorities, and people with disabilities. The award-winning poster presentations of FSU STARS student projects exemplified this goal:
- The first-place FSU STARS project poster in the category of community outreach, “Walk This Way,” described the “Pathways Project.” The project provides students in our community with a visual guide of local solutions and resources that can assist them in achieving an IT/computing career. In either print or electronic formats, students can locate themselves along the pathway and find community resources to support them at their point of progress. The FSU STARS students created what they refer to as a “community-wide path” to a computing career by working with middle and high schools, community colleges, local universities, and IT employers.
- In the category of service learning, the first-place winning FSU STARS project poster, “Feed Your Brain,” described the work of SLIS students in creating a series of events to engage and retain information technology students by featuring industry speakers, students, and faculty. The events covered “hot topics” that, because of their timing, had not yet made it into curricula but were of interest to IT students. Forty to sixty students attended each event and rated them in an overwhelmingly positive manner in post-event surveys. The Feed Your Brain series will be extended to non-IT students and high school audiences this fall.
- “Robots Rule the World,” the FSU STARS’ second-place project poster in the service learning category, described a summer “robotics camp” that SLIS students created for sixth and seventh graders at R. Frank Nims Middle School. The goals of the project were to change the way that Nims students thought about robots, math, science, and IT, and to prepare them for the launch of a school technology club in the fall. In order to engage the interest of “at risk” students in this traditionally “low performing school,” FSU STARS members developed a program of slides and coursework, planned exercises with a Lego Mindstorm kit, and built robots and obstacle kits.
The STARS Celebration 2010 was hosted by the University of South Florida Polytechnic . Over 300 faculty members, students, members of industry and government, and community and partnering organizations from throughout the southeast U.S. attended. They worked on planning and evaluating the progress of current projects and exchanged ideas and information. The event also provided opportunities for training and dialogue on topics such as leadership, web development, and community outreach. Workshops addressed the STARS Alliance’s other major initiatives: pair programming, mentoring, culturally situated design tools, and assistive technology.
For more information on STARS Alliance, visit their website: starsalliance.fsu.edu