SIGCSE 2006 – March 3, 2006

1. A case study CSE Volunteers: A Service Learning Program to Provide IT Support to the Hillsborough County School District Ken Christensen Dewey Rundus Graciela Perera Computer Science and Engineering University of South Florida Tampa, FL 33620 {christen, rundus, gpererao}@cse.usf.edu Sharon Zulli Technology Call Center School District of Hillsborough County Tampa, FL 33601 sharon.zulli@sdhc.k12.fl.us SIGCSE 2006 – March 3, 2006 03/01/06

2. Acknowledgement The following students are to be thanked for their contributions to the community through the CSE Volunteers program • Long Ngo • Jennifer Gatza • Kenneth Shelton • Camilo Brand • Oscar Melendez • Priya Pupala • Naveen Jayachandran • Saar Carmel • Bradford Everett • Alex Pinzon • David Kuczynski • Robert Ivey • Diana Arteaga • Nguyen Nguyen • Duong Tien • Hung Tran • Abdullah Aldousari • Anwar Ghadhanfari • Patrick Hyatt • Pat Law • David Ware • James Parker • Scott Grafton • Kanesh Patel • Alan Nelson • Anhtuan Dang • Brandy N. Hall • Adrian Orozco • Thuha Phan • Jason Chang • Paola Gonzalez • Matt Small • Johnny Nguyen • Tim Gould • Jimmy Jean-Louis • James Wilson • John Wiggins • Andy Wells • Jaromir Rivera • Alessandro Buchala • Anthony Mejia • Johnathon Pavan • David Dunn • Brian Norris • Charles Gossage • David Montalvo • William Klerk • Eliezel Tellado • Apostle Barboutis • Melissa Winfield • Dhaval Patel • Tani Abraham • Esteban Francisco • Amanda Carrel • Daniel Lopez • Cesar Baena Over 7% of our students

3. Topics • Introduction • The school district • Program description • Lessons learned • Related work • Conclusions • New since the paper A case study

4. Introduction Service Learning • Service learning = community service + active learning • Students put concepts into practice for the service of community • Students engage their learning process • Has been applied successfully to many universities • Duke University 75% of students involved in community service

5. Introduction continued Our motivations • Opportunity for students to get hands-on experience • Both hard and soft skills • Reach out to the community • It is our responsibility to serve the community • Become familiar with “in the field” computing technology • To improve our teaching

6. Introduction continued Who we are • University of South Florida • Founded in Tampa in 1956 • Have 11 colleges and schools • Enrollment of 42,500 • Department of Computer Science and Engineering • Founded in 1980 • CS and CpE programs are ABET accredited • Enrollment of 255 BS, 88 MS, and 62 PhD students

7. The school district School District of Hillsborough County (SDHC) • Nation’s ninth largest school system • 208 schools and centers • Total annual budget of $2.1 billion • 43,000 workstations, 500 servers, and 3500 switches • Technical support for all schools is a monumental task • Over 37,000 calls for assistance made in 2004 • 50% of schools have full-time technical support staff • Initiatives include upgrades and data migrations • CSE Volunteers serve in schools w/out technology support units • Or, in schools with otherwise great need for additional tech support

8. Program description CSE Volunteers provide IT support to SDHC schools • Goals 1) Provide a community service opportunity to our students 2) Give students meaningful real-world CS-related experience • Requirements • Be a student in good standing • Expected time commitment is four hours per week in a semester • Credit earned • Earn one hour of independent study credit

9. Program description continued Summary statistics of the volunteers Larger percentage of women than in the department

10. Program description continued Organization • Recruiting • Flyers on bulletin boards • Emails to students • Kick-off meeting • All interested students and SDHC staff • Outline expectations • “Sign-up” schools, times, students • Students are assigned in pairs • Maintain a website

11. Program description continued

12. Program description continued Assignments and tasks • Starts with first-day orientation at the school • Introductions to key people • Overview of “IT landscape” • General work is “care and feeding” of Windows computers • Set-up of new machines • Refurbishments of old machines • Installation of new software • Installation of updates • Trouble tickets with printers, viruses, etc. • Increasing focus on image servers • Altiris servers to download images to PCs

13. Program description continued Student performance • Students establish their own schedules • If going to miss a week, must email school and us • Students send status emails every Friday to entire group • Informal and chatty, but helpful • We visit students at their schools • To learn about student performance and school IT needs • We talk to teachers and tech support staff • How are our students doing?

14. Program description continued Student comments • “Overall this has been a great learning experience for Jen and I as we discover where educational knowledge meets real world experience. Perhaps most importantly, we have had the opportunity to work with all kinds of people with different skill levels, backgrounds, and personalities.” • - Long and Jen

15. Program description continued Student comments continued • “In the future, along with the usual tech requests we might tune-up the Clark web homepage or enable more TVs to become computer displays.” • - David and Robert

16. Program description continued Student comments continued • “Also we created 10 presentation carts which each contain a digital camera, a Ken-a-vision Video Flex (which can be used in conjunction with LCD to function as an overhead), an LCD projector, a DVD/VCR player, and a computer. These machines will be shared among the teachers and used to help facilitate material in the classrooms.” • - Kenneth, Camilo, and Oscar

17. Lessons learned Benefits to students • Opportunity to experience a real IT environment • Could feel good about contribution made • Able to add this experience to their resumes

18. Lessons learned continued Benefits to school system • Improved the school environment • Freed-up paid staff for other work

19. Lessons learned continued Future directions • Need a more formal quantitative assessment • Of both learning and service contribution • Use surveys? • Seeking outside financial support to “scale-up” • Hire a part-time staff or TA • Support transportation costs • Purchase IT supplies as needed (e.g., CD-ROM drives) • Expand complexity and duration of projects • Explore use of CSE Volunteers as a recruiting/retention tool • Attract students with a community focus to the major • Pair-up senior students with “newbie” (freshmen?) students

20. Related work We are not the first to experiment with service learning • EPICS in Purdue is the “model program” • Started in 1995 (NSF funded) • Engineering teams support community needs • Has been ported to other universities • Smaller colleges also have service learning and CS • Franklin and Marshall teach CS1 to prisoners • Saint Anselm College teach CS application to citizens • Southwest Missouri State work with social service agencies • All program have different models for credit and evaluation

21. Conclusions A success in the first year… • Met goals of providing a service learning experience • Work was often unchallenging, but was of value to the schools • Students very happy with response they got (liked feeling wanted) • Possible future directions in using service learning for recruitment and retention • School districts throughput the country are under-resourced • Thus, this program can probably port very well • Need funds/time/partners to do the porting

22. New since the paper We now have two more semesters of experience • Our student numbers… In two years have provided 1.8 person years of service

23. New since the paper continued Seeking new challenges and scalability • Now have a special focus on East Tampa • A very poor inner-city neighborhood • Schools see our volunteers as male role models! • Actively seeking external funding • To fund a TA to allow for scale-up • More volunteers and more schools • Idea to use CSE Volunteers for recruiting to the profession • Pairing-up freshmen (non-CSE) with senior CSE students • Broaden scope beyond just our majors • Thinking about how to port this to other universities • Want to experiment with pilot programs elsewhere • Any interest here?