TRAILS Research

TRAILS aims to shed light on important research questions at the intersection of educational technology design and higher education. In educational technology design, prior research has indicated that high-quality educational software can result from collaborative design between technologists and educators. However, success stories mainly come from teams of professionals. In higher education, project courses are becoming increasingly popular, but most are developed in an ad hoc fashion. For lack of coordination, the results of student efforts are having limited impact.

The TRAILS hypothesis is that with focused training and centralized resources, multidisciplinary teams consisting of university students can create high-quality designs for learning systems that can have an impact on K-12 education. Furthermore, we posit that such a design experience at the university level can make a significant difference in the preparedness of the next generation of educational software designers and the educators who will use their products.

Our research has three main themes:

1. The design of courses that train multidisciplinary teams to create educational software (and have later impacts on their careers)
2. Tools, mentoring, and other resources for collaborative educational software design
3. Addressing real needs in K-12 education with products from TRAILS project courses

Preliminary Findings

We are currently two years into our four-year project, so we can only report on some preliminary findings and observations from our first course implementations. A few highlights:

• Pilot courses have found surprising difficulty in recruiting preservice teachers. We suspect that heavy course-loads are at least partially responsible.
• Pilot courses are most receptive to centralized supports when they are modular and adaptable to their local contexts.
• Orienting an educational software design course toward educational games is an effective way to appeal to the current generation of undergraduate computer science students.
• Delivering polished products at the end of a term, particularly at the end of a quarter (as at Stanford), is quite ambitious. We need ways to assess products for K-12 "fitness" (closeness to being ready for the classroom) to see if our interventions are making progress towards the goal of finished products. Otherwise, we need plans for how unfinished work can reach completion, perhaps through follow-on courses, summer institutes, or adoption by a Internet publisher.

To read more about project findings, please see our Trails Publications and Reports.

Related Work

Other research efforts around the world that have common threads with our work.

Related course design projects & organizations

• LabVirt at the University of São Paulo, Brazil has high school students specifying educational software they want and need for their classroom. University students then produce the desired tools over the course of several months. LabVirt is developing a standardized training course for these university students, so they can be effective and efficient software designers and work well with their high school clients.
• Virtual Development Center (VDC) is a collaborative network of nine colleges and universities that draws technical and non-technical women, and their supporters, into technology by making the connection between technology creation and social impact. At the University of Colorado at Boulder, for example, there is a VDC-affiliated computer science course called Technology for Community.
• Engineering Projects In Community Service (EPICS) brings community service agencies and undergraduate engineering students together to work on community problems in search of technical solutions. The goal is to address community needs and at the same time give undergraduates important educational experiences.
• UC Irvine's Institute for Software Research has an ITR project investigating ways to support collaboration in software design.
  The NSF-sponsored Innovative Approaches to Computer-Human Interfaces project attempts to take advantage of recent HCI research to design curricula involving undergraduate computer science and education students in creating math/science software.
• Oberlin's music department developed an innovative course called Algorithmic Approaches to Interactive Composition. This course brought computer science students and faculty together with students and faculty from Technology in Music and Related Arts to explore applications of algorithms to musical creativity. The course was supported by an NSF CCLI grant.
• ACM's Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGSCE) features an annual technical symposium, sponsors or co-sponsors annual conferences outside the United States, and publishes the SIGCSE Bulletin quarterly.

Other related work

• End-Users Shaping Effective Software (EUSES) is investigating, among other things, how changing the teaching of technology quality control can become "part of the learning process, not an afterthought."
• InterMath is a professional development effort designed to support teachers in becoming better mathematics educators. It focuses on mathematical investigations that are supported by technology. InterMath includes a workshop component as well as an ongoing support community that includes a lesson plan database and a discussion board.
• The NSF-sponsored Computer Science Courseware Repository is tracking best practices in computer science education.

Related meetings

• The major U.S. meeting that discusses project-based courses in computer science is SIGCSE's annual technical symposium.
• The international equivalent of SIGCSE is Innovation and Technology in CS Education (ITiSCE). The 2003 annual ITiSCE meeting in Greece is captured on their site.
• A meeting that examines training issues for both higher-ed and industry is the Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training. See also http://www.ls.fi.upm.es/cseet03/ for past conferences.