NCSU STARS

Evaluation Team:

Overview: The goals of the evaluation team is to try to understand the impact that the STARS Alliance has. We try to understand how effective the current projects are at achieving the overall goals of the Alliance.

Impact: The impact o the evaluation team is that how evaluations provide insight to how the Alliances projects and strategies are working toward our goal. Through the evaluation teams the Alliance can make changes to their plans in order to better reach their goals.

This was my first semester of STARS and I've enjoyed working on my projects. I was involved in both the Durham Nativity School Outreach as well as tutoring for CSC116 students.

Working with the Durham Nativity School with SPARCS has been nothing but a great experience for me that I get excited about each Saturday when I participate. The boys are awesome and surprisingly love to learn about Computer Science on a Saturday morning. I feed off of their energy and am so glad that I decided to be part of this particular outreach. They all have a lot going for them and I am eager to see how bright their futures will be. For the first DNS SPARCS session I was in charge of facilitating the activities for that day called CSC Unplugged.

This was my first semester with STARS, and went really well. Both in terms of the quantity of work I was able to put in and the sense of fulfillment it gave me. My primary responsibility was being an Evaluation Assistant. With the new web-based reporting tool in place, STARS activity reporting went quite well. The coordinators have done a great job of keeping track of all the data and entering it into the online form, although I wish we were able to include more reports from the upcoming sessions in the overall Fall 09 report. The other part of Evaluation work was interviewing an SLC student about their thoughts and experiences about computing, which was quite interesting. Transcribing the interview took a lot longer than I expected (even though I and Jimmy split that task), but it was all good.

So far we have had two SPARCS sessions and our third is on this coming Saturday. So far the sessions have been going well. One of the big changes and focuses of work for me this year has been the new SPARCS webpage and this has had mixed results. While it is great to have digitized data right away, the school system doesn't seem to like the page very much and seems to be interfering with submissions. Hopefully we'll get these kinks worked out.

The end of Fall 2009 is nearing! It's a good time to look back at what's gone on. I'll start with the STARS project I'm working with that I haven't mentioned yet: SPARCS. My one and only session for the fall takes place on Saturday, and I'm looking forward to it! With that out of the way, let's talk about where I've been spending the rest of my STARS time...

The work on the STARS website has been moving slowly but surely. As of now, almost all member profiles and project descriptions have been updated. We pioneered the use of Google Forms in collection member and project information this year but were met with mixed results. On the plus side, information collection was centralized and did not involve the usual shuffling about of emails with updated information. Member profiles were then easily generated running the form data through a script. Project descriptions required manual work for correct formatting, however.

I am part of the Stars outreach project. We have been attending Lowe's Grove Middle and we are accomplishing a tremendous amount of our goals. Which are enlightening the children on what being a computer scientist is, what part they can play in the process, show them how everyday technology is used in the world and the many careers that are available. I feel like we are making a great impact on the community because we are taking the next generations and preparing them for the world of technology.

So one of my projects is SPARCS Classic, where we go to CCMS and work with the kids there. I think many of the children really enjoy learning about CSC. I've been told that half our girls & about a third of our minorities dropped out since the first session we had. But I am not sure if this is just a fluke or something that will remain. The goal of our project is to reach out to young children to help promote CSC. Ideally we would be reaching more minorities, women. However, we do have a couple kids with disabilities in our group so that's good.

Being a part of the Durham Nativity School Outreach Program has been a great experience for me thus far. I have always wanted to give back to my community through my passion for technology and STARS has allowed me to do so. The goals of my project was to gather a group of boys from financially challenged (low income) families and engage them in Computer Science related activities. Over the past month or so, they have learned so much from what programming is, how programmers think, and that anyone can be successful in this field.