Education Innovation
Our Education Innovation research area includes publications on online learning at scale, educational technology (which is any technology that supports teaching and learning), curriculum and programming tools for computer science education, diversity and broadening participation in computer science the hiring and onboarding process at Google.
Recent Publications
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Motivated by the necessity of guiding and monitoring students' progress in real-time when assembling circuits during in-class activities we propose BlinkBoard, an augmented breadboard to enhance offline as well as online physical computing classes. BlinkBoard uses LEDs placed on each row of the breadboard to guide, via four blinking patterns, how to place and connect components and wires. It also uses a set of Input/Output pins to sense voltage levels at user-specified rows or to generate voltage output. Our hardware uses an open JSON protocol of commands and responses that can be integrated with a graphical application hosted on a computer that ensures bidirectional communication between each of the students' BreadBoard and the instructor's dashboard and slides. The hardware is affordable and simple, partially due to a customized circuit configured via a hardware description language that handles the LEDs' patterns with minimal load on the Arduino micro-controller. Finally, we briefly show how this hardware made its way to a workshop with high-school students and an undergraduate class in a design department.
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Leveraging Virtual Reality to Enhance Diversity and Inclusion training at Google
Karla Brown
Leonie Sanderson
2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM
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Virtual reality (VR) has emerged as a promising educational training method, offering a more engaging and immersive experience than traditional approaches. In this case study, we explore its effectiveness for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training, with a focus on how VR can help participants better understand and appreciate different perspectives. We describe the design and development of a VR training application that aims to raise awareness about unconscious biases and promote more inclusive behaviors in the workplace.
We report initial findings based on the feedback of Google employees who took our training and found that VR appears to be an effective way to enhance DEI training. In particular, participants reported that VR training helped them better recognize biases and how to effectively respond to them. However, our findings also highlight some challenges with VR-based DEI training, which we discuss in terms of future research directions.
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Equitable student persistence in computing research through distributed career mentorship
Audrey Rorrer
Cori Grainger
Proceedings of 54th Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE’23), ACM (2023)
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Google’s CS Research Mentorship Program (CSRMP) cultivates pursuit and persistence in the computing research trajectory for students from historically marginalized groups through virtual career mentorship from industry professionals, a peer community, and just-in-time resources. Since 2018, 287 Google mentors have engaged 1,018 students from 247 institutions in the U.S. and Canada. The program employs socioemotional support and advocacy to navigate systemic barriers by validating students’ intersectional identities in order to improve outcomes in core constructs for students: self-efficacy, sense of belonging, research skills, motivation to pursue graduate school and research careers, and intersectional capital. Evaluation outcomes from 400 matched respondents (68% response rate) indicate that CSRMP affects positive, statistically significant change in those constructs that largely persists across demographic subgroups. 80% aim to pursue computing research careers, and significantly fewer students are undecided about their future career. We were also able to identify disaggregated learnings: Black, Indigenous, and Latinx students are significantly less likely to submit to a research conference, and students from Historically Marginalized Groups (defined within) are significantly less likely to apply to a CS graduate program. We discuss key design elements of the program, how the findings are informing future iterations, and the potential for the model to scale.
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Business Intelligence Career Master Plan
Danny Moncada
Eduardo Chavez
Packt (2023) (to appear)
Growing an Inclusive Community of K-12 CS Education Researchers
Monica McGill
Proceedings of 54th Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE’23), ACM (2023)
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A recent study found that there is a litany of unmet needs that are serving as barriers for the CS education research community to grow in depth and breadth, including ensuring that the community is representative of the teachers and students that are studied. Cultivating a diverse, equitable, inclusive, and accessible CSEd research community requires simultaneous bottom-up and top-down alignment on practice standards, professional development, and wellbeing for all constituents that is rooted in politicized trust and collective impact. For this position paper, we engaged in an expository writing process using a confirmatory and elucidating research design to contextualize quantitative and qualitative data reported from our previous study within related work. Our results indicate that there is a variety of researcher-centered, researcher-adjacent, and research-centered barriers in CS education that affect researchers’ practice, and personal and professional identities. These results were validated by findings from research in other fields, such as education, psychology, and organizational change. These findings highlight the need for intentional changes to be made, both top-down and bottom-up, to sustain and grow the CS education research community in a way that equitably supports the evolving needs of a diverse set of students as well as the diverse set of researchers who study interventions.
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Understanding Immersive Research Experiences that Build Community, Equity, and Inclusion
Audrey Rorrer
Breauna Spencer
Deborah Holmes
Cori Grainger
SIGCSE '21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (2021)
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In this experience report, we describe the rationale and need for immersive research experiences (IREs) in computer science (CS) that are designed to foster an inclusive community that encourages pursuit of graduate education for undergraduate women. Google’s exploreCSR supports institutions across the US to execute IREs in computing throughout the academic year. We describe the program design and framework, the evaluation model, and present outcomes from two years of implementation across 29 institutions, with 1,983 (92% female) student participants collectively. The unique features of the program are that it aligns goals, measurements, and best practices across a national network of hands-on, localized IREs, resulting in peer communities and a sizable sample of undergraduates who identify as women and/or African-American/Black, American Indian/Alaska Native/Native American, Hispanic/Latinx, and/or Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander (AAHN). We discuss recommendations for effective IRE programming based on our evaluation and the features found to be particularly salient for AAHN women. The contribution of this work is in describing how a national initiative for IREs builds community and creates conditions known to support persistence of women in computer science.
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