ABOUT COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: CHIPS-UHWO & KAUA‘I CC PARTNERSHIP IN ADVANCING COMPUTATIONAL THINKING (PACT)
Through the proposed project - PACT: Partnership in Advancing Computational Thinking - both University of Hawai‘i West O‘ahu (UHWO) and Kaua‘i Community College (KCC) will study native serving institution’s best approaches in building teaching and research, particularly in response to emerging technological advances like generative Artificial Intelligence, while broadening Native Hawaiian access and Native Hawaiian serving institutions’ offerings of computer science and computational thinking programs.
The project aims to achieve three goals to:
- Increase the number of Native Hawaiian (NH) graduates from UHWO and KCC prepared for either computational/data science jobs or for the next academic level;
- Increase the number of computational thinking pathways from KCC (2yr) to UHWO; and
- Strengthen the pathways from KCC (including Early College (EC)) to UHWO and to post-baccalaureate careers (job or graduate school).
These goals will be achieved by conducting four research activities that will build faculty capacity, build student capacity and success, facilitate collaborations between UHWO and KCC, and increase KCC’s capacity. And through these research activities, the project will explore three main research questions:
- How would NH serving institutions like UHWO and KCC best prepare students and build computational thinking capacity in the face of emerging computational advances like AI?;
- With recent advances in distance learning, and with portability of computational thinking courses, how would UHWO and KCC use the opportunity to increase computational thinking pathways between the two campuses? What type of collaborative structure is necessary to support the academic needs of students across both institutions and collectively build capacity?; and
- With a high demand for EC classes, especially for KCC, how would the institutions strengthen their capacities in computational thinking course offerings (eg. basic programming courses), while also building new and nourishing existing pathways?
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Contact Us
Frankie Harriss
Principal Investigator, Vice Chancellor for Academic affairs
Email: frankieh@hawaii.edu
Telephone: (808) 245-8229
Ryan Girard
Co-Principal Investigator, Professor of Mathematics
Office: 808.245.8353
Email: girardr@hawaii.edu