Description of the Activity:

Like the S.T.A.R. Academies, the Launch-IT Program will be housed in the Office of Academic Outreach and Special Projects under the umbrella of the Provost and Academic Affairs.  We envision the proposed program structure as depicted below.

The staff needed to support three LAUNCH-IT outreach teams include:

  1. Program Director to oversee the after school, Saturday, and Summer Programs

  2. Three faculty from Lehigh’s colleges of Engineering and Education

  3. Three teachers, one from each participating school

  4. Four graduate fellows in the fields of Computer Science and Learning Science and Technology (one graduate student and the P.I. will focus on widening the pipeline to other schools)

  5. Three paid undergraduate majors in engineering and technology for the year round program

  6. Thirty undergraduates in engineering and technology to volunteer in the Saturday program

  7. Administrative Assistant (half-time) to provide support for the year round program

The Office of Academic Outreach and Special Projects under the direction of Co-PI Odi, assisted by a Program Director, will oversee the implementation of the LAUNCH-IT program.  This will entail recruiting the IT teachers and undergraduate mentors, then coordinating a workshop at the beginning of each summer so that mentors and teachers will understand the goals, curriculum and plans for evaluating the LAUNCH-IT program.  Co-PI Columba will plan and teach the workshop, which will among other things review the use of existing instructional materials such as multimedia.  It will also entail coordinating interactions with industrial partners in promoting awareness of real world applications of IT, designing user interface problems and real world programming problems.  Industrial partners that are already involved with LVPTF include Binney and Smith (who donated a Martian Display valued at over $1 million to Harrison-Morton Middle School), Air Products, PPL, Agere, and Suntex (who discounted the price of the web-based version of the First in Math “24” game by half), and more partners will be recruited. Industrial partners provide volunteers and real world curricula and have helped to fund the S.T.A.R. project and will be a key component for the sustainability of LAUNCH-IT beyond the duration of the proposed project.  (The full proposal will address sustainability in more detail.) Teams of graduate, undergraduate and LAUNCH-IT students will work on problems posed by industrial partners and promising LAUNCH-IT students will avail themselves of interviewing and internship opportunities with industrial partners and at Lehigh (e.g., working on multimedia development for this project).  The half-time administrative assistant requested in this proposal will work with the Program Director in the Office of Academic Outreach and Special Projects to coordinate the program.

We are already working with several schools within the Allentown and Bethlehem Area School Districts and have contacted several teachers who have expressed interest in partnering with the LAUNCH-IT program. These schools have large enrollments of low-income under-represented minority students and a history of working with Lehigh University in educational outreach. The targeted schools and their percentage of under-represented minorities and low-income students are as follows:

Broughal Middle School (BASD)            70% minority                 69% low income
Harrison-Morton Middle School (ASD)   60%  minority                70% low income     
Dieruff High School (ASD)                    57% minority                 50% low income
Liberty High School  (BASD)                30% minority                 33% low income

One of the goals of the LAUNCH-IT Program is to develop instructional material for use in the summer sessions and academic year components of the program. PI Blank, co-PI Pottenger and co-PI Columba will each coordinate a team,  where each team will include one teacher, one graduate student teaching fellow, one undergraduate teaching fellow, and ten undergraduate volunteers, giving instruction and hands-on mentoring to 30-50 grades 7-12 students.  They will meet either at an associated public school and/or Lehigh University (e.g., during the summer, the rising 7th and 8th grade team will use the Martian Landscape and Mission Control Center at Harrison-Morton, etc.). 

Curricular materials will be enhanced and supplemented with multimedia courseware and intelligent tutoring system support for use in the LAUNCH-IT Program. At the end of the summer and each semester, IT teachers and graduate and undergraduate mentors will write a report with recommendations for improvements to the curricula and supporting software. Co-PI Columba and a Learning Science and Technology graduate student will summarize these recommendations along with the results of formative evaluation.  PI Blank and co-PI Pottenger and their students will use these recommendations and results to guide incremental improvements to multimedia e-learning materials (Blank 2003), the Martian Landscape and Mission Control Center curriculum, as well as an intelligent tutoring system to support learning object-oriented software development in Java (Blank 2005).