Engaging students with community organizations by using computer technology

Abstract

The engagement of information technology or computer science students in community affairs is a challenge in all institutions of higher learning. This paper proposes a paradigm for civic engagement through community-based learning.With the pervasiveness of computers throughout society, there is a growing demand for diligent IT/CS education to satisfy the growing needs of a multiplicity of enterprises. This paper describes one approach to teaching computer technology that requires students to develop systems for various community, school, and university organizations. There is a wide range of opportunities for civic engagement through community-based computer technology education. The benefits derived by the students and the clients receiving their services are many. An application of IT/CS based civic engagement is presented in this paper.

Computer Science Capstone Courses Supported By Industry Current Software Tools

“…The author has several years of experience developing and managing the development of systems for many organizations, and can attest to the existence of a certain mindset among CS professionals 7 . Even while teaching software engineering courses, the author has heard comments from students, such as, "users are idiots."…”

“…This discipline is the basis for an engaging mindset. A detailed discussion of this topic may be found in Fernandez 7 . However, one should mention some of the most commonly cited authors in this area: Preece et al 12…”

“…Examples and details of student-led projects which have satisfied community organizations are presented by Fernandez (2004).…”

Comparative Study Of Human Computer Interaction Design And Software Engineering

“…Undergraduate students at Texas A&M University -Corpus Christi must complete a senior capstone course which requires the application of software engineering principles to develop a system for a real community client 4 . Almost all of these capstone projects have had significant interactive components.…”

“…The following projects are examples of capstone projects completed in one-semester courses. All of these projects had significant interactive components 4 In these real-world, but small projects, the major development phases directed by the professor included requirements gathering, analysis, design, coding, testing, implementation, and deployment to the client. One significant difference is that HCI projects incorporated lowfidelity prototyping, while capstone projects only minimally used low-fidelity prototyping.…”