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Cybercivics: a novel approach to reaching k-12 students with the social relevance of computer science

Published: 12 March 2008 Publication History

Abstract

This paper describes CyberCivics, a novel approach to computer science outreach that integrates hands-on computing experiences with the study of contemporary social and political issues. We provide details of one such curriculum, focused on electronic voting, that we used with a high school AP Government course in Spring 2007. We describe our experience with this curriculum and how it enabled us to reach a larger, more diverse and more academically prepared group of students than prior outreach efforts targeted directly at computing courses. We also suggest a number of alternative approaches to outreach based on the CyberCivics idea.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      SIGCSE '08: Proceedings of the 39th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
      March 2008
      606 pages
      ISBN:9781595937995
      DOI:10.1145/1352135
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Published: 12 March 2008

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      Author Tags

      1. digital rights management
      2. electronic voting
      3. k-12
      4. outreach
      5. privacy
      6. security

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