Our group participates in the NSF-funded Research Experiences for High School Teachers program organized by the Center for Biorenewables Chemicals at ISU. As a part of this engagement, we host school teachers in the summer. The objective is to provide an exposure to the research activities being pursued in the group, and train them to integrate parts of it in their classroom teaching.
This summer, the we hosted Clinton Gadbury, a Des Moines high school teacher. Clinton teaches a course on Software Design at the Central Campus. It is a one year course where students learn to write code through the development of video games. The code learned is a proprietary version of BASIC called DarkBasic. As a part of the training in our lab, Clinton learnt Arduino, a language used to program the micro-controller Arduino module. This was facilitated by introducing Clinton to labs on the Board of Education (BOE) created by graduate students in the lab.
Clinton has already laid the foundations to integrate this knowledge into the high school course as an enrichment activity to further expose high school students to various programming environments and applications. The extensive amount of programming used in video game production and robotics presents a unique experience to extend this learning. The enrichment activity will encompass the use of training tutorials from Parallax which include guided activities as well as open ended design problems. By engaging with Des Moines central campus, our group will have an opportunity to engage with a large number of minority students.
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